Happy heavenly birthday, Chopin, born on this day in 1810! (1820-1849)

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Arthur Rubinstein said that Chopin was the most national composer and, at the same time, the most understood and admired worldwide. It is still curious, but it is perfectly explainable because the meaning of the national is deeply rooted in each of us; So much, that when it expresses vehemence, love and sincerity, it reaches everywhere.

A life outside your homeland

Chopin is born in Zelazowa Wola, near Warsaw, on March 1, 1810 in a family of a certain cultural level because his father, Nicolás, was a professor at the Lyceum. Compared to Mozart and used as a prodigy child in the aristocratic halls of the Polish capital, his musical education basically received it from Josef Elsner, who knew how to channel his particular melodic inventiveness, his ease of improvising and his special harmonic talent. After his studies in 1829, this teacher wrote: «Federico Chopin. Third year student. Strange capacity, musical genius ».

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Chopin travels to Berlin and Vienna looking for fame and contacts with European musical life. Success in Vienna is clamorous although criticism reproaches her “small sound volume.” During a second trip to the Austrian capital, in which he does not obtain the expected success, he knows the Russian invasion of Poland. His friend Tito Woyciechkowsky returns to Warsovia to join the Poles Patriots and Chopin – almost forced – is left alone in Vienna. He is 20 years old. From here nostalgia will gain ground in your heart. A concentrated and intense nostalgia that will only reveal its closest friends. A deep nostalgia that, however, will not use for its own benefit: Chopin will never perform as a victim of anything.

Vienna is not safe (there is some hostility towards the Poles) and travels to Paris via Munich, a city where he knows the fall of Warsaw in Russian hands. In his diary he cries out to heaven with words as hard as desperate. In Paris, Chopin finds numerous exile compatriots that will be a decisive support for their battered spirit (Ju niemcewicz, A. Mickiewicz, J. Slowacki, S. Witwicki, Prince Adam Czartory and J. Fontana). Together with these intellectuals, the pianist helps the Polish cause giving some concerts for the benefit of less favored emigrants.

Federico’s reputation grows rapidly. Friendship with Liszt, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Hiller, Franchome and Kalkbrenner. His presentation concert in the Pleyel room (1832) is an event. Despite this success since his works begin to be published, Chopin lives on the particular lessons given to people of money but with little or little musical talent. Chopin likes the public little.

In 1836 the first symptoms of the disease appear that would end his life. In the summer of the following year he travels to London, a city that does not awake in him enthusiastically and begins his relationship with George Sand. In her, despite her well -gained fame as dominator and with several lovers behind her, the musician will find what she missed since she left Warsaw: affection and attention. It is curious that two different characters have been able to live without friction or problems for a few years. The posterior break will be motivated by jealousy and disagreements between George Sand and their children.

The well -known couple’s stay in Mallorca, during the winter of 1838/39, should not have been as bad as we have been believed. It is true that at that time tourists should not be seen with the complacency with which we see them today and try, but surely the fears of the Mallorcan people and the animosity of their people to the unknown and the strange thing were not greater than those that could be found in other European areas. Because if everything was so serious, dramatic and hostile as they paint it, it does not seem likely that the “family” could work as it did: George Sand writing, Maurice, his son, painting the landscapes close to the Cartuja of Valldemosa and Chopin writing music (here ended the preludes, op. That the Episode of Mallorca was not idyllic, true, but we must not take things to the extreme.

Back to France, Chopin will spend a long season in Nohant with George Sand. This is the most fruitful era of the composer, but the manifest hostility of the writer’s son ends up causing a devastating effect on the physical and mental state of the musician. Practically stop writing and not even the care and pampering of their Scottish student Jane Stirling, they are able to raise their vital tone a bit.

His last concert gives it on November 16, 1848 for the emigrants of Poles and the following summer his sister Ludwika comes from Warsaw to take care of him. On October 17, 1849 he dies of a pulmonary tuberculosis in Paris. According to his will, his heart was taken to Warsaw.

The piano: always the piano

The Chopinian catalog is wide and, with the exception of the two concerts and some approach to camera music, is dedicated to piano. Within this production, it is worth highlighting the free forms, and many times of short duration, in which Chopin concentrates all his romanticism, all his nationalism and all the poetry that he carries inside, because he is not Chopin man interested in classical forms or in building music in the style of his time and environment. The great concerts with soloist do not attract him; The musical theater either; That is, what gives money and prestige at the time does not interest him too much.

Its four scherzos, extraordinarily sensitive, like the four ballads, are instrumental epic poems, and although there are other precedents, they could be considered their own “invention.”

The two concerts for piano and orchestra, follow the style of Kalkbrenner and Hummel’s and do not have too much relevance in the specialty. The orchestra, has always denounced – has very scarce entity. He is a mere companion.

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In studies2, two series of twelve, Chopin is incredibly modern for his time. Although they can think of them as one thinks about Clementi studies, they are deeply musical works in which the work of a specific technical and mechanical part, with being present, is totally hidden under a waste of energy, delicacy, musicality and artistic value. Something similar could be written of the preludes, small sketches that reflect moods. Intimate, tormented, dense, delicate, are the reflection of a great creative concentration. It has been said that Chopin could spend hours before a compass, before concluding it.

Night and waltz, they are typically Chopinian works. The first, following the model of John Field, are full of difficulties and technical innovations, although melodic delicacy hides it. The waltzes, which have nothing to do with those of the Strauss, could be an example of the music, say “courtesan” of the Polish author.

The great form, the piano sonata, has its greatest exponent in the one known as the funeral march, a work that can be placed at the level of the large Central European romantic sounds.

We have already said that Chopin was a nostalgic of his homeland, his friends, and his family throughout his short life. Therefore, Polyronases and Mazurcas are his most popular works. In the poloneases, heroic songs and warriors that extol the Polish nobility and pride, a large, upright and strong Poland portrays Chopin. In the Mazurcas, more delicate and sensitive, it reflects lyrical moments of another Poland, more felt than lived. These little works are sublimation, distillation, the artistic synthesis of the popular dances of his beloved Poland.

Chopin’s character is very curious because his way of being and presenting himself to others does not match the characteristic topics of the romantic artist. Federico is exquisite: everything that is disorder, extremism and vulgarity disgusts him and in all the orders of his life – from his personal toilet, to the decoration of his house and the simplest details – he presents himself as a reflexive and serene person. In his work he was conscientious and demanding to extreme limits; More than inspiration, his work is due to elaboration. Educated, polite and elegant in the manners, he had an enormous capacity for self -control and was a perfectionist.

His patriotism was more intimate than active. He never got involved in alarradas, manifestations or violent movement, because he did not feel integrated between the dough, although he considered the protests of his compatriots justified. It does not seem very clear why Chopin did not intervene directly in the fight against the Russians despite the fact that his circle of friends was the most patriot. Different arguments have been used that are not clear enough. There are those who maintain, for example, that Chopin was convinced that Warsaw left because from outside, with his music, he could do better service to the patriotic cause. Maybe over time, but at that time, a couple of concerts and half a dozen Mazurcas could do little – from Paris – against the Russian military boot.

He has also speculated a lot with his illness. This presenting ourselves to the uprooted musician, almost without homeland, and also sick, fits very well with the idea of ​​the romantic artist, an idea that has reached us thanks to phrases such as Berlioz (“Chopin was dying all his life”) and other opinions like that. This vision must be cleaned from all the romantic leaflet. Reading any serious biography of the musician it is easy to realize that Chopin was a man of broad social life and that he worked a lot. This idea of ​​the patient does not fit much with the activity he carried out.

The world of relationships with female sex will be forbidden. Names such as Constanza Gladkowska, Delfina Potocka and María Wodzinska appear in their biography as recipients of an unrequited love. Apart chapter deserves its relationship with Aurore Dupint, Baroness of Dudevant, better known for posterity as George Sand. This woman, controversial and criticized in her time for both her ideas and her behavior, was for Chopin a friend at the beginning, a mother at many times, and a nurse in many others. It is also worth mentioning Jane Sterling, a Scottish in love with Chopin’s music to incredible extremes that first led her to help her financially, anonymously, and then to have her as a real royal guest in her castle in Scotland. But Chopin did not correspond to this love, and even, he did not stand too well the constant details and concerns of his island admirer. For Chopin, love was nothing but a source of worries.

The latter was a constant in the life of the Polish composer. Away from his, rarely he felt happiness. And the tisis that made him suffer greatly and that took him to the grave at age 39, was also in charge of adding physical suffering to moral suffering that he never left him since he was twenty years old to his goodbye to his native Poland. At his death and according to his own wishes, his heart was transferred to Warsaw. His body was in Paris. But nobody knows what was from that silver box in which he kept a handful of Polish land and always carried with him.

Seymour Bernstein teaches Chopin‘s Prelude in E minor.

Moments in this video:

0:00 Seymour has a surprise for you 1:34 Performance of Chopin E minor Prelude 4:16 Finding your own interpretive ideas 5:24 Chopin knew he was dying 6:33 Preliminary swing stroke 8:40 How to play two-note slurs 10:21 “All piano playing is a series of illusions” 12:05 Controlling repeated chords 14:58 ‘Alla breve’ does not mean ‘faster’ 16:25 How not to play the Moonlight Sonata

18:44 Romantic hairpins are not what you think 21:16 How to play hairpins in a Brahms Intermezzo 22:40 More proof from Fanny Mendelssohn 24:36 Irrefutable evidence from Chopin’s G minor Ballade 26:36 “Rob Peter, but don’t pay Paul.” 28:35 Crescendo means ‘get softer’! 31:47 What Chopin learned from Bach 33:44 How to voice chords on the piano 38:08 How does a piano produce dynamics? 39:34 How not to bang out a crescendo 41:58 The most profound chord in the E minor Prelude 43:32 How practicing music translates to life

Join Seymour Bernstein as he re-introduces you to one of Chopin’s most popular and tragic works, the E Minor Prelude, Op. 28 No. 4. In this in-depth lesson, Bernstein not only demonstrates the physical mechanics necessary to realize your expressive intentions in this work, he reveals how the Prelude contains information crucial to your general development as a pianist and a person.

List of compositions by Frédéric Chopin by genre (on Wikipedia)

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