Piano-Forte - Chopin and Liszt
Take out the reference to the belfries of Stutgart, and one could easily mistake that passage for something straight out of Ecclesiastes. His depressive temperament was a constant lietmotif throughout his life. The crushing of the Polish Revolution devastated him. An early engagement ended in sorrow. The breakup of his relationship with George Sand and the failure of the revolutions of 1848 left him a broken man. Undoubtedly, depression contributed to his ailing health, and he died not long after in 1849, having seemingly giving up on living.
New research by Cecelia and Jens Jorgensen indicates the likelihood of an affair with soprano Jenny Lind (Chopin and the Swedish Nightingale)in his final days. But Lind was compelled to flee both a cholera epidemic and political turmoil in Paris, leaving a dying Chopin to his own devices.
Yet his compositions are associated with long happy summers at Nohant, George Sand's country house in the south of France. It was here the composer seemingly came to life and gave expression to the endlessly rich musical inventions that took shape in the depths of his conscious. The styles of piano pieces he wrote have many names - mazurkas, waltzes, ballades, etudes, preludes, nocturnes, polonaises, and fantasias - and we'll leave it to the music experts to distinguish one from the other. Suffice to say, such is the deeply personal nature of his work that he is recognizable by the first few notes, if not the first note.
It was as if the piano were that great black monolith that appears in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Chopin were the first person in history to give it meaning, to exploit its hidden secrets and draw forth harmonic nuances that eluded all the others. Yes, there had been great masters of the keyboard before him, from Bach to Mozart to Beethoven to Schumann, but in them the individual notes formed part of a greater pattern, like an aural mosaic. In Chopin, even though we know something as obvious as a mazurka or a waltz is being played, the pattern is somehow subservient to the individual note. Such is the power of a Chopin moment, one could easily break off a piece in mid-measure, before the music has a chance to resolve itself, and just savor the
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