FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN The 1981 Baldwin Recordings - Ivory Classics

24 Pages·2007·0.43 MB·English

Abbey Simon, Jorge Bolet and Earl Wild c.1979
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
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The 1981 Baldwin Recordings
With the exception of three pieces–the Fantasie, the Ballade, and the
Andante Spianato and Grand Polonaise Brillante–this recording features rel-
atively brief works, some of them remarkably so, demonstrating to a refined
degree the extent to which Frédéric Chopin was a master of the small form.
This may be a function of the fact that, though he performed in public con-
cert halls, Chopin most often performed for friends in intimate salons.
Fantasie in F minor, Op. 49 (1841)
The heroic Fantasie in F minor is one of Chopin’s largest and most epic
works for solo piano. If its scale and scope are unusual for him, so is its form,
being loose, extended, and improvisatory, and having numerous melodies.
Unlike many romantics, Chopin’s music is generally not narrative or
programmatic, and while it is personal, it remains pure art. Nevertheless, a
story has been associated with the Fantasie. The composer and pianist Franz
Liszt relates: The year is 1841 and Chopin is seated at the Pleyel grand
piano in Madame George Sand’s salon in Nohant, France, where they spent
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their summers. A knock is heard at the door and Madame Sand enters. With
her are Liszt, Camille Pleyel, the wife of the piano manufacturer, and one or
two other friends, perhaps the cellist Franchomme and the singer Pauline
Viardot-Garcia. Some quarreling ensues, and then reconciliation.
If Liszt’s tale is correct, this scene led to Chopin’s composition of the
Fantasie. In any case, as Phillip Wilcher notes, “Unmistakably a narrative
unfolds, but unlike the legendary and heroic tales depicted in [his] Ballades,
it appears that here, Chopin is unveiling to us some compelling and climac-
tic episode–an odyssey of cedar-pannelled events from his own life, for there
is within its intrigue and brew a subtle subjectivity.”
After a martial beginning, three groups of themes emerge
(passion–prayer–defiance), each preceded by a kind of refrain made up of
arpeggios rising upward and gradually speeding. James Huneker wrote: “It
parades a formal beauty not disfigured by an excess of violence, either per-
sonal or patriotic, and its melodies, if restless by melancholy, are of surprising
nobility and dramatic grandeur.”
Waltz in D flat, Op. 64, no. 1 (1846-1847)
The Waltz in D flat is the first of the opus 64 Trois Valses, and is known as
the “minute” Waltz. One of Chopin’s biographers, Camille Bourniquel, tells
that Chopin intended to depict a dog chasing its tail and originally named the
piece “Petit chien”–little dog. One would never guess, from its sprightly and
whirling character, that Chopin composed the work while his health was in
decline and his relationship with George Sand was deteriorating. It was his
publisher who coined the nickname “minute waltz,” intending the diminutive
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“minute” to mean “small,” not “sixty seconds.” The charming work remains
undiminished by its use in cartoons, or as the theme song for the BBC radio
show Just a Minute, by an overt reference to it in a song by Barbra Streisand,
or by its use as cell-phone ring tones.
Waltz in A flat, Op. 64, no. 3 (1846-1847)
In the mid-eighteenth century, the waltz appeared in southern Germany
as a triple-meter folk dance “by couples in clogs or hobnailed boots on the
lawn in front of the village inn or in the town square.” But early in the nine-
teenth century it moved into the cities and became popular among Vienna’s
bourgeoisie. A waxed floor and light shoes and dress led to its faster pace
and contributed to its strong beat on “one,” with the remaining long, smooth
steps being lighter.
Gary Lemco points out that the Waltz in A flat begins to expand into a
polonaise, even a sonata-movement; then it turns and relinquishes its explosive
possibilities into sweet dalliance. In the middle section its serpentining melody
appears in the bass under an accompaniment in the right hand. This waltz, like
all of Chopin’s later waltzes, requires a more mature means of expression than
his more youthful waltzes, in order to avoid caricaturing them.
Waltz in C-sharp minor, Op. 64, no. 2 (1846-1847)
James Huneker declared that, of all the waltzes, this is “the most poet-
ic of all. The first theme has never been excelled by Chopin for a species
of veiled melancholy. It is a fascinating, lyrical sorrow.” And Theodor
Kullak has written that “the psychologic motivation of the first theme in
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the curving figure of the second does not relax the spell.”
The waltzes provide the perfect occasion for the pianist to observe
Chopin’s famed approach to rubato. As Liszt pointed out, the bass plays a
steady, strict beat even as the melody enjoys a freedom of expression, with
fluctuations of speed. “Look at these trees!” Liszt said, “The wind plays in the
leaves [and] stirs up life among them, [while] the tree remains the same–that
is chopinesque rubato.”
Waltz in A flat (L’Adieu), Op. 69, no. 1 (1835)
Chopin wrote this waltz in 1835 while courting Marie Wodzinska. He had
fallen in love with the young and beautiful countess and had proposed marriage
to her. As a poor musician, however, Chopin was not considered suitable mar-
riage material by Marie’s parents, and he was rejected. His Waltz in A flat was
given to Marie just before his departure for Paris. Marked Lento, this beautiful
dance poem has often been called “L’Adieu.” The manuscript has the inscription
“Pour Mlle Marie.”Gary Lemco writes, “The marcato in the middle section adds a
nobility of character to the general tenor of ruminative nostalgia.” The work was
published posthumously.
Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52 (1842-1843)
As noted above, Chopin was disinclined to write program music and he gen-
erally adhered to the principle of absolute music. But his ballades–a musical genre
he invented, with apparent reference to the nineteenth-century literary genre of
the same name–have elicited speculation of a link between his music and the
poetry of Adam Mickiewicz.
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As Michael L. Klein has noted, music can narrate only those plots whose
story we have in advance. But absent such a plot, we can nevertheless outline the
“dramatic sequence of emotional events [which] mirrors those emotions evoked
by literary works.” Within its structure of sonata form combined with the varia-
tion form, the Ballade in F minor has its own “narrative” of pastoral and tragic
events. The piece is widely regarded as one of Chopin’s masterpieces, and one of
the masterpieces of the entire nineteenth-century piano repertoire. Alfred Cortot
wrote that in this piece “[Chopin’s] sublime imagination evinced a livelier feeling
for beauty of form.” Though its key is F minor, an introductory section actually
begins in the major.
Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op. Posth.
The first nocturnes–night pieces–were written by the Irish pianist and
composer John Field (1782-1837), from whom Chopin adopted both the
idea and the name for the twenty-one examples he himself composed.
Usually written in a languorous style, nocturnes characteristically have a
simple expressive melody over an arpeggiated accompaniment. Even
Chopin’s more mature and more complex nocturnes retain a certain textur-
al simplicity in their melodies.
The Nocturne in C-sharp minor, marked Lento con gran espressione, was
discovered some time after Chopin’s death and was not published until
1895. But it was written while he was a very young man. It was featured in
the 2002 Roman Polanski film The Pianist, the story of the survival of pianist
Wladyslaw Szpilman during the Second World War. Szpilman performed
the Nocturne on September 23, 1939 live on Warsaw radio as shells explod-
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ed outside. A German bomb hit the station later that day, taking Polish Radio
off the air.
Nocturne in F, Op. 15, no. 1 (1830-1832)
Jeffrey Kallberg has suggested that we should think of nocturnes less as
a class or genre than as a communication between composer and audience.
Indeed, no two of Chopin’s nocturnes are alike, and their rhythms often have
less in common with each other than they do with other genres, such as bar-
caroles, lullabies, marches, or hymns. While it is hard to know exactly what
Chopin’s nocturnes communicated to his audiences, in German lands the
nocturne had a precedent in the serenade, and in France the nocturne,
almost invariably a vocal duet, had become a fixture of the Paris salon, pop-
ularized by composers like Auguste Panséron and Antoine Romagnesi.
This somewhat hesitant nocturne is abruptly interrupted by a furious
middle section that gradually resolves again to the original melody.
Nocturne in F-sharp major, Op. 15, no. 2 (1830-1832)
It has often been noted that Chopin’s later nocturnes have some simi-
larity to Bellini’s cavatinas (such as Casta diva from Norma) as well as to
Rossini’s and Weber’s operatic melodies. Certainly they are among the most
introspective and lyrical of all of Chopin’s works. By the time Chopin moved
to Paris, in 1831, he had already reached full maturity as a composer.
This brief nocturne is a confident and straightforward essay with high-
ly ornamented melodies, and a middle section that ventures only briefly into
a more dramatic realm.
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Nocturne in B, Op. 32, no. 1 (1837)
Chopin is said to have composed this piece while alone and depressed
after the failure of his proposed marriage to Maria Wodzinska. Even so, the
piece is by no means somber or dejected. Each repeat of the melody adds
ornaments and thirds while the characteristic lone note in the bass sets up
the coming cadence. The declamatory final section–a recitative of
sorts–brings the piece to an end in the minor.
Etude in G flat (Black Key), Op. 10, no. 5 (1830)
From the opus 10 set of etudes–twelve in all–this vivacious and saucy
study features the black notes on the keyboard, thus endowing it with a
somewhat pentatonic character. It is remarkable, however, that although the
right hand plays no white notes at all (avoiding even C flat, a white note,
though it lies in the given tonality), throughout measure after measure of
nearly unrelieved sixteenth-note triplets, the left hand ventures onto C, D,
E, F and G naturals, and F flat and B double flat–all white notes.
Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante
in E flat, Op. 22 (1834)
Properly called “Grande Polonaise Brillante, précédée d’un Andante
Spianato,” Chopin performed this piece in 1835 in Paris for an appearance
with the prestigious Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. Thereafter fol-
lowed a period of several years during which he refused invitations to appear
before the wider public.
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The Andante Spianato (spianato: smooth, even), in G major, with its
limpid melodies, is a lovely pastoral work in its own right, and the well-
known Polonaise, in E flat, combines virtuosity with eloquence, delicacy, and
playfulness, at once scintillating and brilliant. The Polonaise (a Polish nation-
al dance of a stately and festive character) was originally composed for piano
and orchestra in 1831 while the Andante (originally for orchestra) was writ-
ten three years later.
In 1995 Mr. Wild performed these two works for his eightieth-birthday
recital at Carnegie Hall. In his review of the program, for the New York Times,
Kenneth Furie wrote that “the Andante…sang innocently, with a purling
sweetness to the left-hand arpeggios that Mr. Wild has improbably been coax-
ing from Baldwin pianos for 50 years. Then the fireworks of the Grande
Polonaise were sensibly organized into a vigorous, forward-moving dance.”
Prelude in C (Reunion), Op. 28, no. 1 (1838-1839)
Chopin composed–or at least completed–the preludes while spending
the winter with his lover George Sand in rooms at an old monastery on the
island of Majorca, off the coast of Spain, during which his health deteriorat-
ed rapidly. As James Huneker has noted, this piece has all the characteristics
of an impromptu, and could have been written by no one but a devout Bach
student. It is feverish, agitated and passionate.
Prelude in A (The Polish dance), Op. 28, no. 7 (1838-1839)
The preludes are considered among Chopin’s most radical conceptions, giv-
ing the genre a new meaning. He had with him in Majorca a copy of Bach’s forty-
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