The slow movement is unmistakably a funeral march and the pianist Arthur Rubinstein famously described the skittering, mainly pianissimo finale with the hands in stark unison as ‘the whistling wind over the graves’.Analysis of the Melody in Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor, Op. A 19th-century writer could easily have read into the first movement the galloping of the consumption in Chopin’s lungs, or into the scherzo and trio delirious visions of an easeful death. But Chopin treats all that as a starting point, just as he does the mazurka, polonaise or waltz, filling the sonata with an elemental power that’s taut, fearsome and more dramatic than most operas. On the surface, it’s classically constructed: first movement in sonata form, second movement a scherzo and trio, slow movement in ternary form, presto finale. The Four Ballades, the F minor Fantasie, the Polonaise-Fantasie, the Four Scherzos and even the Berceuse and Barcarolle all find Chopin taking off into imaginative wonders that far transcend the plain generic titles, but perhaps the apex of Chopin’s fusion of sensibilities is his Sonata No. In Chopin’s hands, Bachian counterpoint, Bellini-esque melody and the sense of improvisation fuse to unlikely perfection. The extended, much-decorated melodies that abound in Chopin’s nocturnes his fondness for writing for two ‘voices’ in thirds and sixths the dramatic ‘recitative’ passage over tremolando in the slow movement of his Second Piano Concerto – all these originate not in the practice room but in the opera house. Fans of Schenkerian analysis, exploring Chopin’s music in terms of foreground, middle-ground and background, find it works consistently: Chopin’s construction is meticulous, the proportions near perfect, the magical enharmonic shifts part and parcel of the musical intellect.Īdd to this a very different language, the world of bel canto opera, especially Donizetti, Rossini and Bellini (as a student, Chopin fell in love with a young singer, Konstancja Gladkowska and frequented the Warsaw opera house to hear her). His two greatest influences were JS Bach and Mozart. On to the next paradox: underpinning Chopin’s moments of freedom is a fixation with Classicism and the Baroque.
He was never more his true self than in improvisation, and in those parts of his works where he evokes it: the passage in the Fourth Ballade in which he extends and distorts the timing of its most sensual melody over a shimmering wash of notes, for example, or the reverie in the Barcarolle before the return of the main theme, when the harmonies side-step downwards before the pianist’s right hand flies away into filigree arabesques. But let Chopin sit down at a piano and he was in his element.
He was fragile, fussy and precious he was oversensitive about his large nose and he had a nasty streak of anti-Semitism. He is frightened of so many things that I have suggested to him that he should play without candles or audience on a dumb piano.’ ‘He does not want anyone to talk about it. When he performed in Paris in 1841, his lover, the novelist George Sand, wrote to their friend, the singer Pauline Viardot, about his attitude: ‘He does not want any poster, he does not want any programmes, he does not want a large audience,’ she grumbled. During the course of his short, blighted life, he gave only around 30 formal concerts. He was in his element not in the concert hall playing preordained concertos for mass audiences, but in the salon (see Henryk Siemiradzki’s 1887 painting of Chopin performing for the Radziwiłłs family in 1829, below), improvising for his friends, or alone. Paradox number one: Chopin was a musician who didn’t like performing.
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