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| "Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art." |
| Chopin, Fryderyk (1810-1849) |
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Childhood
Fryderyk Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola, some fifty kilometers west of Warsaw in Sochaczew County, in what was then part of the Duchy of Warsaw. His father, Mikołaj Chopin, originally a Frenchman from Lorraine, had emigrated to Poland in 1787 at the age of 16, and had served in Poland's National Guard during the Kościuszko Uprising. The elder Chopin subsequently worked in Żelazowa Wola as a tutor to the aristocracy, which included the Skarbeks (one of whose poorer relations, Tekla Justyna Krzyżanowska, he married).
According to family records, the couple's second child, Fryderyk (Frédéric) Chopin, was born on March 1, 1810. There is no known birth certificate. His baptismal certificate gives the birthdate as February 22, 1810.
In October 1810, when Fryderyk was seven months old, the family moved to Warsaw, where his father took a position as French-language teacher at a school in the Saxon Palace. The Chopin family lived on the palace grounds.
In 1817 Mikołaj Chopin began work, still teaching French, at the Warsaw Lyceum at Warsaw University's Kazimierz Palace. The family lived in a spacious second-floor apartment in an adjacent building. Later, Fryderyk himself would attend the Warsaw Lyceum from 1823 to 1826.
In spite of Mikołaj Chopin's occupation, Polish spirit, culture and language pervaded the Chopins' home, and as a result Fryderyk would never, even in Paris, perfectly master the French language. All the family had artistic leanings. Chopin's father played the flute and violin; Chopin's mother played piano, and gave lessons to boys in the boarding house that the Chopins operated. Thus Fryderyk early became conversant with music in its various forms. By six, he was already trying to reproduce what he heard or to make up new melodies. He received his earliest piano lessons not from his mother, but from his older sister, Ludwika (in English, "Louise").
Chopin's first professional piano tutor, from 1816 to 1822, was the respected, elderly Wojciech Żywny. Although the youngster's skills soon surpassed those of his teacher, Chopin later spoke highly of him. Seven-year-old "Little Chopin" began to give public concerts that soon prompted comparison with Mozart as a child, and with Chopin's contemporary, Beethoven. That same year, Chopin composed two polonaises, in G minor and B-flat major. The first was published in the engraving workshop of Father Izydor Józef Cybulski (composer, engraver, director of an organists' school, and one of the few music publishers in Poland); the second survives as a manuscript prepared by Mikołaj Chopin. These small works were said to rival not only the popular polonaises of leading Warsaw composers, but the famous polonaises of Michał Kleofas Ogiński. A substantial development of melodic and harmonic invention, and of piano technique, was shown in Chopin's next known polonaise (in A-flat major), which the young artist offered, in 1821, as a name-day present to Żywny.
About this time, at the age of eleven, Chopin performed in the presence of Russian Tsar Alexander I, who was in Warsaw, opening the Sejm (Polish parliament).
As a child, Chopin showed an intelligence that was said to absorb everything and make use of everything for its development. He early showed remarkable abilities in observation and sketching, a keen wit and sense of humor, and an uncommon talent for mimicry. A story from his school years recounts a teacher being pleasantly surprised by a superb portrait that Chopin had drawn of him in class. In those years, Chopin was sometimes invited to the Belweder Palace as playmate to the son of Russian Poland's ruler, Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich, and charmed the irascible duke with his piano-playing. Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz attested to "Little Chopin's" popularity in his dramatic eclogue, Nasze Verkehry (Our Intercourse, 1818), in which the eight-year-old Chopin features as a motif in the dialogues.
Chopin memorial at SzafarniaDuring vacations spent in his mid-teens at the Mazowsze village of Szafarnia (where he was a guest of Prince Antoni Radziwiłł), Chopin was exposed to folk melodies that he would later transmute into original compositions; his letters home from Szafarnia (the famous "Szafarnia Courier" letters) amused his family with their spoofing of the Warsaw newspapers and demonstrated the youngster's literary talent.
An anecdote describes how Chopin helped quiet rowdy children by first improvising a story and then lulling them to sleep with a berceuse (lullaby) — after which he woke everyone with an ear-piercing chord.
Early education
Chopin, tutored at home until he was 13, enrolled in the Warsaw Lyceum in 1823, but continued studying piano under Żywny's direction. In 1825, in a performance of the work of Ignaz Moscheles, he entranced the audience with his free improvisation, and was acclaimed the "best pianist in Warsaw."
In the autumn of 1826, Chopin began a three-year course of studies with the composer Józef Elsner at the Warsaw Conservatory, which was affiliated with Warsaw University (hence Chopin is counted among that university's alumni). Chopin's first contact with the Polish composer may have been as early as 1822; it is certain that Elsner was giving Chopin informal guidance by 1823, and in 1826 Chopin officially commenced the study of music theory, figured bass, and composition with Elsner. In year-end evaluations, Elsner noted Chopin's "remarkable talent" and "musical genius." As had Żywny, Elsner observed, rather than influenced or directed, the development of Chopin's blossoming talent. Elsner's teaching style was based on his reluctance to "constrain" Chopin with "narrow, academic, outdated" rules, and to allow the young artist to mature "according to the laws of his own nature."
In 1827, the family moved to lodgings just across the street, in the Krasiński Palace at Krakowskie Przedmieście 5, in what is now the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Chopin would live there until he left Warsaw in 1830.
In 1829, Polish portraitist Ambroży Mieroszewski executed a set of five portraits of Chopin family members (the youngest daughter, Emilia, had died in 1827): Chopin's parents, his elder sister Ludwika, younger sister Izabela, and, in the first known portrait of him, Fryderyk himself. In 1913, historian Édouard Ganche would write that this painting of the precocious composer showed "a youth threatened by tuberculosis. His skin is very white, he has a prominent Adam's apple and sunken cheeks, even his ears show a form characteristic of consumptives." Chopin's younger sister Emilia had already died of tuberculosis at the age of fourteen, and their father would succumb to the same disease in 1844.
According to musicologist and Chopin biographer Zdzisław Jachimecki, comparison of the juvenile Chopin with any earlier composer is difficult because of the originality of the works that Chopin was composing already in the first half of his life. At a comparable age, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven had still been apprentices, while Chopin was perceived by peers and audiences to be already a master who was pointing the path of the coming age.
Chopin himself never gave thematic titles to his instrumental works, but identified them simply by genre and number. His compositions were, however, often inspired by emotional and sensual experiences in his own life. One of his first such inspirations was a beautiful young singing student at the Warsaw Conservatory and later a singer at the Warsaw Opera, Konstancja Gładkowska. In letters to his friend Tytus Woyciechowski, Chopin indicated which of his works, and even which of their passages, were influenced by his erotic transports. His artist's soul was also enriched by friendships with such leading lights of Warsaw's artistic and intellectual world as Maurycy Mochnacki, Józef Bohdan Zaleski and Julian Fontana.
The young man
In September of 1828, Chopin struck out for the wider world in the company of family friend, zoologist Feliks Jarocki, who planned to attend a scientific convention in Berlin. There Chopin enjoyed several unfamiliar operas directed by Gaspare Spontini, went to several concerts, and saw Carl Friedrich Zelter, Felix Mendelssohn and other celebrities. On his return trip, he was the guest of Prince Antoni Radziwiłł, governor of the Grand Duchy of Poznań — himself an accomplished composer and cellist. For his host, Chopin composed his Polonaise for Cello and Piano Op. 3.
Back in Warsaw, in 1829, Chopin heard Niccolò Paganini play, and met the German pianist and composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel. In August of the same year, and three weeks after completing his studies at the Warsaw Conservatory, Chopin made a brilliant début in Vienna. He gave two piano concerts and received many favorable reviews — in addition to some that criticized the "small tone" that he drew from the piano. This was followed by a concert, in December 1829, at the Warsaw Merchants' Club, where Chopin premièred his Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, and by his first performance, on March 17, 1830, at the National Theater, of his Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor. He also began writing his first études (1829–32) in this period.
Chopin's successes as a performer and composer opened the professional door for him to western Europe, and on November 2, 1830, seen off by friends and admirers, with a ring from Konstancja Gładkowska on his finger and carrying with him a silver cup containing soil from his native land, Chopin set out, writes Jachimecki, "into the wide world, with no very clearly defined aim, forever."
Later that month, in Warsaw, the November Uprising broke out, and Chopin's friend and traveling companion, Tytus Woyciechowski, returned to Poland to enlist. Chopin, now alone in Vienna, writes Jachimecki, "afflicted by nostalgia, disappointed in his hopes of giving concerts and publishing, matured and acquired spiritual depth. From a romantic... poet... he grew into an inspired national bard who intuited the past, present and future of his country. Only now, at this distance, did he see all of Poland from the proper perspective, and understand what was great and truly beautiful in her, the tragedy and heroism of her vicissitudes." When in September 1831 Chopin learned, while traveling from Vienna to Paris, that the uprising had been crushed, he poured "profanities and blasphemies" in his native Polish language into the pages of a little journal that he kept secret to the end of his life. These outcries of a tormented heart found musical expression in his Scherzo in B Minor, Op. 20, and his Revolutionary Étude.
Chopin arrived in Paris in late September 1831, still uncertain whether he would settle there for good. With a view to easing his entry into the Parisian musical community, he began taking lessons from the prominent pianist Friedrich Kalkbrenner. In February 1832 Chopin gave a concert that garnered universal admiration. The influential musicologist and critic François-Joseph Fétis wrote in Revue musicale: "Here is a young man who, taking nothing as a model, has found, if not a complete renewal of piano music, then in any case part of what has long been sought in vain, namely, an extravagance of original ideas that are unexampled anywhere..." Only three months earlier, in December of 1831, Robert Schumann, in reviewing Chopin's Variations on "La ci darem la mano," Op. 2 (from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni), had written: "Hats off, gentlemen! A genius."
After his Paris concert début in February 1832, Chopin realized that his light-handed keyboard technique was not optimal for large concert spaces. However, later that year he was introduced to the wealthy Rothschild banking family, whose patronage opened doors for him to other private salons.
In Paris, Chopin found artists and other distinguished company, as well as opportunities to exercise his talents and achieve celebrity, and before long he was earning a handsome income teaching piano to affluent students from all over Europe. Chopin formed friendships with Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, Vincenzo Bellini, Ferdinand Hiller, Felix Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Eugène Delacroix, as well as with Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, French writer Alfred de Vigny, and composer Charles-Valentin Alkan.
However, Chopin seldom performed publicly in Paris. In later years he would generally give only a single annual concert at the Salle Pleyel, a venue that could seat an audience of three hundred. He played more frequently at salons — social gatherings of the aristocracy and artistic and literary elite of the period — but preferred to play, in his own home, for small circles of friends. His precarious health prevented his touring extensively as a traveling virtuoso, and beyond playing once in Rouen, he seldom ventured out of the capital. His high income from teaching and composing freed him from the strains of concert-giving, to which he had an innate repugnance. Arthur Hedley has observed that "As a pianist Chopin was unique in acquiring a reputation of the highest order on the basis of a minimum of public appearances—few more than 30 in the course of his lifetime."
In 1835, Chopin went to Carlsbad, where, for the last time in his life, he met with his parents. En route through Saxony on his way back to Paris, he met old friends from Warsaw, the Wodzińskis. He had met their daughter Maria, now sixteen, in Poland five years earlier, and fell in love with the charming, artistically talented, intelligent young woman. The following year, in September 1836, upon returning to Dresden after having vacationed with the Wodzińskis at Marienbad, Chopin proposed marriage to Maria. She accepted, and her mother approved in principle, but Maria's tender age and Chopin's tenuous health (in the winter of 1835–36 he had been so ill that word had circulated in Warsaw that he had died) forced an indefinite postponement of the wedding. The engagement remained a secret to the world and never led to the altar. Chopin finally placed the letters from Maria and her mother in a large envelope, on which he wrote the Polish words "Moja bieda" ("My sorrow").
Chopin's feelings for Maria left their traces in his "Valse in A-flat major, 'L'Adieu,'" ("The Farewell Waltz"), written on the morning of his September departure from Dresden. On his return to Paris, he composed the "Étude in F minor," the second in the Op. 25 cycle, which he referred to as "a portrait of Maria's soul." Along with this, he sent Maria seven songs that he had set to the words of Polish Romantic poets Stefan Witwicki, Józef Zaleski and Adam Mickiewicz.
After Chopin's matrimonial plans ended, Polish countess Delfina Potocka appeared episodically in Chopin's life as muse and romantic interest. For her he composed his "Waltz in D flat major," Op. 64 — the famous "Minute Waltz."
Final years
Chopin's public popularity as a virtuoso waned, as did the number of his pupils. In February 1848 he gave his last Paris concert. In April he left for London, where he performed at several concerts and at numerous receptions in great houses. Toward the end of the summer he went to Scotland, staying at the castle of his great admirer Jane Stirling and her sister, Mrs. Erskine. Miss Stirling proposed marriage to him; but Chopin, sensing that he was not long for this world, set greater store by his freedom than by the prospect of living on the generosity of a wife.
In late October 1848 in Edinburgh, at the home of Dr. Adam Łyszczyński, Chopin wrote out his last will and testament — "a kind of disposition to be made of my stuff in the future, if I should drop dead somewhere," he wrote his friend Wojciech Grzymała. In his thoughts he was now constantly with his mother and sisters, and conjured up for himself scenes of his native land by playing his adaptations of its folk music on cool Scottish evenings at Miss Stirling's castle.
Chopin made his last public appearance on a concert platform at London's Guildhall on November 16, 1848, when, in a final patriotic gesture, he played for the benefit of Polish refugees. Then at the end of the month he returned to Paris.
Chopin passed the winter in unremitting illness, but in spite of it he continued seeing friends and visited the ailing Adam Mickiewicz, soothing the Polish poet's nerves with his playing. He no longer had the strength to give lessons, but he was still keen to compose. He lacked money for the most essential expenses and for his physicians. He had to sell off his more valuable furnishings and belongings.
Feeling ever more poorly, Chopin desired to have one of his family with him. In June 1849 his sister Ludwika Jędrzejewicz, who had given him his first piano lessons, agreed to come to Paris. He had lately taken up residence in a very beautiful, sunny apartment at Place Vendôme 12. It was there, in the small hours of October 17, 1849, that Chopin died.
Music
Chopin, according to Arthur Hedley, "had the rare gift of a very personal melody, expressive of heart-felt emotion, and his music is penetrated by a poetic feeling that has an almost universal appeal.... Present-day evaluation places him among the immortals of music by reason of his insight into the secret places of the heart and because of his awareness of the magical new sonorities to be drawn from the piano."
Chopin, unlike such composers as Mozart and Schubert, did not compose in a facile manner. He created barely 80 opuses, which all involve the piano. Only a few of them ranged beyond solo piano music, as chamber music or concertos for piano and orchestra. He composed two concertos for piano and orchestra, Op. 11 and 21; three piano sonatas, Op. 4, 35 and 58; a sonata for cello and piano, Op. 65 (Chopin's last composition published in his lifetime); 17 polonaises (one with orchestral accompaniment, and one for cello with accompanying piano); 21 nocturnes; 27 etudes (12 in the Op. 10 cycle, 12 in the Op. 25 cycle, and three in a collection without an opus number); 58 mazureks (several treated sketchily, as occasional pieces); 17 waltzes, 26 preludes, 4 ballades, 4 scherzos, 5 rondos, 4 sets of variations, 4 impromptus, one krakowiak for piano and orchestra, one fantasia on themes from Polish songs with accompanying orchestra, one fantasia for piano, three Scottish dances, a barcarolle, a bolero, a tarantella, an allegro de concert, a berceuse, a contredanse, a fugue, a Grand Duo on themes from Giacomo Meyerbeer's opera Robert le diable for cello and piano; a cantabile, a lento, a Funeral March, a Souvenir de Paganini, an Andante spianato before the polonaise in E-flat major, Op. 22; a Feuille d'album, 19 Polish songs for solo voice with accompanying piano.
It is very difficult to briefly characterize Chopin's oeuvre. Robert Schumann, speaking of Chopin's Sonata in b-flat minor, wrote that "he alone begins and ends a work like this: with dissonances, through dissonances, and in dissonances," and in Chopin's music he discerned "cannon concealed amid blossoms." Franz Liszt, in the opening of his biography about Chopin, termed him a "gentle, harmonious genius." Thus disparate have been the views on Chopin's music. The first systematic, if imperfect, study of Chopin's style came in F.P. Laurencin's 1861 Die Harmonik der Neuzeit. Laurencin concluded that "Chopin is one of the most brilliant exceptional natures that have ever stridden onto the stage of history and life, he is one who can never be exhausted nor stand before a void. Chopin is the musical progone of all progones until now."
Chopin's music for the piano combined a unique rhythmic sense (particularly his use of rubato), frequent use of chromaticism, and counterpoint. This mixture produces a particularly fragile sound in the melody and the harmony, which are nonetheless underpinned by solid and interesting harmonic techniques. He took the new salon genre of the nocturne, invented by Irish composer John Field, to a deeper level of sophistication. Three of Chopin's twenty-one nocturnes were only published after his death in 1849, contrary to his wishes. He also endowed popular dance forms, such as the Polish mazurek and the Viennese waltz, with a greater range of melody and expression. Chopin was the first to write ballades and scherzi as individual pieces. He also took the example of Bach's preludes and fugues, transforming the genre in his own preludes.
Chopin reinvented the étude, expanding on the idea and making it into a gorgeous, eloquent and emotional showpiece. He also used his études to teach his own revolutionary style, for instance playing with the weak fingers (3, 4, and 5) in fast figures (Op. 10, no. 2) and playing black keys with the thumb (Op. 10, no. 5).
Several of Chopin's pieces have become very well known—for instance the Revolutionary Étude (Op. 10, No. 12), the Minute Waltz (Op. 64, No. 1), and the third movement of his Funeral March sonata (Op. 35), which is often used as an iconic representation of grief. Chopin himself never named an instrumental work beyond genre and number, leaving all potential extra-musical associations to the listener; the names by which we know many of the pieces were invented by others. The Revolutionary Étude was not written with the failed Polish uprising against Russia in mind; it merely appeared at that time. The Funeral March was written before the rest of the sonata within which it is contained, but the exact occasion is not known; it appears not to have been inspired by any specific personal bereavement. Other melodies have been used as the basis of popular songs, such as the slow section of the Fantaisie-Impromptu (Op. posth. 66) and the first section of the Étude Op. 10 No. 3. These pieces often rely on an intense and personalised chromaticism, as well as a melodic curve that resembles the operas of Chopin's day — the operas of Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and especially Vincenzo Bellini. Chopin used the piano to re-create the gracefulness of the singing voice, and talked and wrote constantly about singers.
Chopin's style and gifts became increasingly influential. Robert Schumann was a huge admirer of Chopin's music, and he used melodies from Chopin and even named a piece from his suite Carnaval after Chopin. This admiration was not reciprocated.
Franz Liszt was another admirer and personal friend of the composer, and he transcribed for piano six of Chopin's Polish songs. However Liszt denied that he wrote Funérailles (subtitled "October 1849", the seventh movement of his piano suite Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses of 1853) in memory of Chopin. Though the middle section seems to be modeled on the famous octave trio section of Chopin's Polonaise in A flat major, Op. 53, Liszt said the piece had been inspired by the deaths of three of his Hungarian compatriots in the same month.
Brahms and the younger Russian composers, too, found inspiration in Chopin's examples.
Chopin's technical innovations also became influential. His Préludes (Op. 28) and Études (Op. 10 and Op. 25) rapidly became standard works, and inspired both Liszt's Transcendental Études and Schumann's Symphonic Études. Alexander Scriabin was also strongly influenced by Chopin; for example, his 24 Preludes, Op. 11, are inspired by Chopin's Op. 28.
Style
Although Chopin lived in the 1800s, he was educated in the tradition of Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Clementi; he used Clementi's piano method with his own students. He was also influenced by Hummel's development of virtuoso, yet Mozartian, piano technique.
The series of seven polonaises published in his lifetime (another nine were published posthumously), beginning with the Op. 26 pair, set a new standard for music in the form, and were rooted in Chopin's desire to write something to celebrate Polish culture after the country had fallen back into Russian control. The A major polonaise Op. 40 No. 1, the "Military," and the polonaise in A-flat major Op. 53, the "Heroic," are among Chopin's best-loved and most-often-played works.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Fryderyk Chopin".
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