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Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann and the Phenomenon of the Piano
Thursday, 18 March 2010
The story of piano music that now covers more than two hundred years – from Bach’s Preludes and Fugues to Prokofiev’s Fleeting Visions – glitters with colours and hues, none of which can be ignored. This story, then, cannot exist without Mozart’s concertos and Schubert’s Moments musicaux, Schumann’s Carneval and Brahms’s Capriccios, without Liszt’s Consolations and Debussy’s Preludes.
But any pianist will tell you that, above all, the piano would never have existed without the 32 Sonatas for piano by Ludwig van Beethoven and the 24 Études by Fryderyk Chopina. The 14th Easter Festival will revolve around these two giants of piano music.
Beethoven’s piano music seems to foreshadow, in its lyrical parts, the appearance of Chopin’s oeuvre. Chopin himself both admired and wondered at Beethoven’s music. He played “Moonlight” and “Appassionata,” he prescribed concertos and variations to his pupils, he never missed a single occasion to listen once again to Symphony No. 9. The Beethoven Festival of 2010 – the year of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Fryderyk Chopin – will combine into an imitable whole the work of two men who “gave life to the piano.”
It is Fate that the Year of Chopin has also become the Year of Schumann. The genius of the Romantic song was Chopin’s contemporary, his junior by no more than three months. Although the author of Piano Concerto in F minor was proclaimed a first-rate star by Maurycy Mochnacki while still in Warsaw, it was only the voice of Robert Schumann – and his famous “Hats off, gentlemen: a genius!” – that was heard throughout Europe.
And later, for a dozen or so years, the author of Carneval reviewed each of Chopin’s pieces diligently and fairly as they were published: ballades and nocturnes, études and scherzos, polonaises and mazurkas. This he did until the bewildering “strangeness” of the finale to the Sonata in B minor went beyond his vision of beauty and made him exclaim the later oft-quoted “This is no longer music!” He was being honest; it is true that Chopin’s music touched there the limits of the what could then be imagined as “musical.” This was yet another way of confirming his earlier judgement on the author of the Études Op. 10 and 25: “he is and always will be the proudest and most poetic spirit of his time.” Interestingly, Schumann was convinced that it was from Beethoven that Chopin had inherited his “boldness of spirit.”
And although the boldness in Chopin was inherited first and foremost from his country and from a generation that treasured freedom above all else, there is a truth in Schumann’s claim. What is more, the image of Chopin receiving a gift of boldness from the hands of Beethoven is of great beauty. And it makes one wonder.
Mieczysław Tomaszewski, Beethoven Magazine
But any pianist will tell you that, above all, the piano would never have existed without the 32 Sonatas for piano by Ludwig van Beethoven and the 24 Études by Fryderyk Chopina. The 14th Easter Festival will revolve around these two giants of piano music.
Beethoven’s piano music seems to foreshadow, in its lyrical parts, the appearance of Chopin’s oeuvre. Chopin himself both admired and wondered at Beethoven’s music. He played “Moonlight” and “Appassionata,” he prescribed concertos and variations to his pupils, he never missed a single occasion to listen once again to Symphony No. 9. The Beethoven Festival of 2010 – the year of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Fryderyk Chopin – will combine into an imitable whole the work of two men who “gave life to the piano.”
It is Fate that the Year of Chopin has also become the Year of Schumann. The genius of the Romantic song was Chopin’s contemporary, his junior by no more than three months. Although the author of Piano Concerto in F minor was proclaimed a first-rate star by Maurycy Mochnacki while still in Warsaw, it was only the voice of Robert Schumann – and his famous “Hats off, gentlemen: a genius!” – that was heard throughout Europe.
And later, for a dozen or so years, the author of Carneval reviewed each of Chopin’s pieces diligently and fairly as they were published: ballades and nocturnes, études and scherzos, polonaises and mazurkas. This he did until the bewildering “strangeness” of the finale to the Sonata in B minor went beyond his vision of beauty and made him exclaim the later oft-quoted “This is no longer music!” He was being honest; it is true that Chopin’s music touched there the limits of the what could then be imagined as “musical.” This was yet another way of confirming his earlier judgement on the author of the Études Op. 10 and 25: “he is and always will be the proudest and most poetic spirit of his time.” Interestingly, Schumann was convinced that it was from Beethoven that Chopin had inherited his “boldness of spirit.”
And although the boldness in Chopin was inherited first and foremost from his country and from a generation that treasured freedom above all else, there is a truth in Schumann’s claim. What is more, the image of Chopin receiving a gift of boldness from the hands of Beethoven is of great beauty. And it makes one wonder.
Mieczysław Tomaszewski, Beethoven Magazine
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