Fryderyk Chopin (1810 -1849)Complete Piano Music Vol. 2Etudes Opp. 10 and 25 Fryderyk Chopin was born in Zelazowa Wola, near Warsaw, in 1810. His father, Nicolas Chopin, was French by birth, but had been taken to Poland in 1787, at the age of sixteen, working first as a clerk in a tobacco factory, before taking part in the Polish rising against the foreign domination of the country as an officer in the National Guard. After the failure of this attempt, he was able to earn his living as a French tutor in various private families, and in 1806 he married a poor relation of his then employer, Count Skarbek. Chopin was to inherit from his father a fierce sense of loyalty to Poland, a feeling that he fostered largely in self-imposed exile, since the greater part of his career was to be spent in Paris. His early education, however, was in Warsaw, where his father had become a teacher at a newly established school. He was able to develop his already precocious musical abilities with piano lessons from the eccentric Adalbert Zywny, a violinist from Bohemia, who shared Nicolas Chopin's enthusiasm for Poland and was able to inculcate in his pupil a sound respect for the great composers of the eighteenth century. Chopin later took lessons from the director of the Warsaw Conservatory, Jozef Elsher, and entered the Conservatory as a student in 1826. By then he had already developed his own individual style as a pianist and had written, during the previous ten years, a number of pieces for the piano. Warsaw offered a restricted environment for musical achievement, although Chopin was able to hear Hummel there in 1828 and the violinist Paganini in the following year. He had already acquired a considerable local reputation when in 1830 he set out for Vienna, where he was to pass the winter with very little to show for it. An earlier visit to Vienna had aroused interest, but this second visit, undertaken with a more serious purpose, produced nothing, and the following summer he set out for Paris, where he was to spend much of the test of his life. Chopin's attitude to Paris was at first ambivalent. As a provincial he found much to shock him, while, at the same time, there was much to impress in the splendour of the city and in the diversity of music there. He was to create a special place for himself as a teacher to some of the most distinguished families and as a performer in more intimate social gatherings than the theatres and concert-halls where his cruder contemporary Franz Liszt could excel. By 1837 Chopin had embarked on a liaison with the writer George Sand, born Aurore Dupin, the estranged wife of Baron Dudevant, generally spending the summer at her country estate at Nohant. The writer of 1838 was spent with her in Mallorca, where an attempt to battle against a high wind seriously affected his lungs, already weakened by tuberculosis. Thereafter Chopin's relationship with George Sand took a more conventional course, until the jealousies and rivalry of her two children led to a final quarrel in 1847. George Sand and Chopin were never to be reconciled, and he died in Paris in 1849, his health having deteriorated considerably during the course of a visit to England and Scotland the year before, when Paris was undergoing revolution. As a composer Chopin's achievement was remarkable. He perfected his own idiomatic style of performance, in which technical problems seemed not to exist, a style of delicate nuance and elegance. His music, suited to his manner of playing, showed considerable originality in its exploration of harmony and in its expansion of existing forms and creation of new ones, opening a world that later composers were to continue to develop. The Etudes that form Opus 10 were written between 1829 and 1832 and published in the following year with a dedication to Franz Liszt. They combine a serious technical purpose with music, making them very much more than mere pianistic exercises. The third, fourth and seventh of the set were written after Chopin's move to Paris, and the twelfth, the so-called Revolutionary Etude, is popularly supposed to represent the composer's turbulent feelings when the news of the 1831 rising in Warsaw against Russia reached him in Stuttgart, during his journey to Paris. There is no reason to accept the story, and the Etude was probably written a year earlier. The first two Etudes, in C major and A minor, were written in the autumn of 1830, the former a study in extended arpeggios and the latter allowing the right hand to cope with chords and a legato chromatic upper part. This is followed, in the published version, by the E major and C sharp minor Etudes, completed in August, 1832, the first a serene contrast to the second. It is probable that the G flat major and E flat minor Etudes were written in the summer of 1830. The first confines the right hand to the black keys of the piano, and the second presents a darker picture, in sombre chromatic colours. They are followed by an Etude in C major, written in Paris in the spring of 1832, a study involving the repetition of single notes with the thumb and first finger. The next four Etudes, in F major, F minor, A flat and E flat, come from the late autumn of 1829, the brilliance of the first a contrast to the drama of the second, followed by a study in cross-rhythms and a study in arpeggiated chords. The last of the set, in C minor, brings its own well known drama, its technical difficulty lying in the combination of a right-hand melody in octaves against the busy movement of the left hand. The Etudes published in 1837 as Opus 25 were written during the preceding five years and dedicated to the Countess Marie d'Agoult, the mistress of Liszt and a writer, under the pseudonym of Daniel Stern. The first, known as the Aeolian Harp because of its gentle arpeggios, was written in September, 1836, and is followed by an F minor study in cross-rhythms from the previous January and a third Etude in F major from the same year, dealing with problems of ornamentation. The fourth, fifth and sixth Etudes, in A minor, E minor and G sharp minor, were written between 1832 and 1834. The first of these might suggest Paganini, while the second offers figuration that was to assume importance in the Romantic virtuoso piano repertoire, with the G sharp minor Etude a study in right hand thirds. The seventh Etude, in C sharp minor, was written in 1836, a lyrical respite, and is followed by Etudes in D flat, G flat and B minor, written between 1832 and 1834, studies in sixths, in divided octaves and in octaves respectively. The G flat Etude is known to many as the Butterfly, while the eleventh Etude, in A minor, written in 1834, has earned the title The Winter Wind. The set ends with a C minor Etude in arpeggios, an echo of the opening of Opus 10. Interpreting Chopin by Idil Biret Although the romantic era in its music and its performances is not so far from our own time, for various reasons we seem to have distanced ourselves from it. As a consequence, often composers very different from one another like Chopin, Liszt, Schumann and Wagner are brought under the same title of Romantic Composers. In this context it is quite normal to find Chopin and Liszt mentioned together as composers of similar style, while there are no two sound worlds as different from one another as those of Chopin and Liszt. The conception of the piano sound that Chopin created is based on the model of the voice. Liszt, on the other hand, fascinated by the development of the modern piano during his period, challenges the orchestra in an attempt to reproduce on the piano the richness of the orchestral palette. It must be among the fondest wishes of any pianist to be able to have heard Chopin perform his own music. Fortunately there are some recordings providing indirectly some evidence of this way of approaching the piano. One may in particular mention the recordings of Raoul von Koczalski who studied with Chopin's pupil Karol Mikuli. It is also enlightening to listen to the recordings of Cortot, a pupil of Decombes who received precious counsel from Chopin. Further, Friedman, de Pachmann and Paderewski who were not direct descendants of Chopin were still close enough to his aesthetic conceptions to be able to convey the spontaneity Chopin is said to have brought to his playing as well as the polyphonic and rhythmic richness which are so apparent in Chopin's conception of the piano. In spite of the inferior quality of the recordings from the earlier part of this century, a considerable number of common points are audible in the performances of these pianists. Notably, a very fine legato, a piano sound that never loses its roundness since intensity replaces force, the exact feeling of rubato, recognition of the importance of inner voices and consequently a remarkable sense of polyphony. Contrary to the popular image of the romantic virtuoso, simplicity and naturalness remain exemplary in the way these great Chopin interpreters approach music. It is interesting to note also the evidence left by musicians, contemporaries of Chopin, and Chopin's pupils about his interpretations. A perfect legato drawing its inspiration from bel canto and unimaginable richness in tone-colour were the product of subtle variations in a sound full of charm and a purity that lost none of its fullness even in its forte passages. Chopin could not sound aggressive, especially on the pianos of that period.