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THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW
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The First of a Series of Articles Which Will Appear in The Review on the
Interpretation of Chopin By Means of the Player-Piano, Which Will Prove
of Much Interest to Those Player-Pianists Who Are Followers of Chopin
"There have been people," says Liszt in his
Life of Chopin, "among whom, in order to pre-
serve the memory of their great men or the sig-
nal events of their history, it was the custom
to form pyramids composed of the stones which
each passerby was expected to bring to the
pile, which gradually increased to an unlooked-
for height from the anonymous contributions of
all." During the seventy years that have lapsed
since the death of the man concerning whom
these words were written, the monument which
has been raised to his memory by the anony-
mous- contributions of millions of humble music-
loving hearts, now reaches incredible heights
and lifts its head far out of sight among the
clouds. The music of Frederic Chopin is an
imperishable record of the aspirations of a great
soul, which has told in tone the whole history
of a nation and the whole thought of an age.
At the present moment, the fact is clearly estab-
lished that if every pianist in the world were to
refuse to play aught but the etudes*, preludes,
mazurkas, polonaises, ballades and nocturnes of
Chopin, neither the audiences nor the art of
piano playing would suffer irreparably. More
of Chopin's music is sold each year in the United
States than was sold all over Europe during all
his life. Even the player-piano is Chopinized,
and literally hundreds of arrangements of his
works exist in music roll form. When to the
ordinary straight-cut arrangements we add the
many records almost daily being made by pian-
ists of varying style and conception, the influ-
.ence of this man's work upon the art of music
need scarcely be insisted on here; nor need we
doubt that the player-piano has had an enor-
mous effect upon that work in the direction
of making the public more completely ac-
quainted therewith.
The writer possesses some seventy-five rolls
of music bearing the name of Chopin as com- .
poser, and from time to time acquires more, so
that, in due course, he hopes to have every pub-
lished composition of the Polish master.
He
has sixteen etudes, out of twenty-four, all the
preludes but three, about half the nocturnes, all
the ballades, most of the polonaises, one of the
two sonatas, both the concertos; and a number
of scattering pieces like the F minor Fantasie,
the F sharp major Impromptu, the Berceuse,
etc. As very nearly all Chopin's works have
already been arranged in various editions of
rolls, and the few remaining will in due time be
included in the catalogs, the chances are bright
for acquiring a complete Chopin library. But
all this would be useless if the player-pianist
were to find himself, with the instrument at his
command, incapable of entering into the spirit
of Chopin's music or of reproducing this in a
manner approximately satisfactory.
It is no
secret to say that thousands of Chopin rolls
have been sold that have never been played sat-
isfactorily by their owners. Yet, the moment
one hears an expressive interpretation of a noc-
turne, an etude or a prelude, not to mention
the greater works, every one who has the least
musical feeling is enthralled. The writer knows
that his own labors in studying the interpreta-
tion 6i Chopin by means of an ordinary player-
piano without the advantage which the player-
pianist gets from the hand-played roll, have
resulted in most interesting and satisfactory re-
sults; and he knows that all who have worked
at their Chopin rightly have had similar expe-
riences. It would seem, however, that some
directions for the ambitious player-pianist who
loves his Chopin and would penetrate his mys-
terious charm, will not be out of place. Let it
be said at the outset that nothing of what fol-
lows is to be considered theoretical or academic.
All is practical, worked out from the writer's
personal experience at the player-piano.
Chopin the Poet
Chopin is a poet. Poetry is the expression
of the most noble thought in the most exalted
language. A musician is thought to be poetic
when he speaks in a tonal language which avoids
the stilted and the formal, and so far as is pos-
sible, handles the musical material with a view
to expression of ideas and not of form. It is
this free expression of fresh and beautiful ideas
in music natural to the spirit which creates
them, which constitutes what is called poetic
music. In this realm Chopin is King.
Furthermore Chopin is not only poet, but pre-
eminently poet of the piano. He made this
instrument his own from the very start, and to
the end of his life confined his efforts to com-
position for it. With the exception of an early
trio for violin and 'cello with piano, a sonata
for piano and 'cello and the orchestral parts of
his two piano concertos, Chopin made no at-
tempt to write for other instruments; and there
is no doubt that his peculiar genius adapted
itself to the piano in a way so completely
unique that no mixture with other instrumental
means of musical expression would have been
possible or desirable. Chopin remains King
of the piano; for which let us be most heartily
thankful.
Poland
Now Frederic Chopin was a Pole, born near
his country's capital, and owed his educative
influences wholly to Polish sources. His an-
cestry was French on the father's side and
Polish on the mother's; while Polish schools
(his father was professor at the Warsaw Ly-
ceum) and Polish musicians formed his early
ways; and formed them very well, apparently.
The Polish people, among the nations of
Europe, are quite unique. Their past history is
as glorious as their recent condition has been
deplorable. The brutal and conscienceless par-
tition of Poland, instigated by a Prussian King
and shared by an Austrian Empress, was un-
fortunately also participated in by Russia, and
the city of Warsaw was in fact the chief city
of Russian Poland. After the Napoleonic wars
were over and the Russian Government re-es-
tablished in 1814, there was peace till 1831, when
a revolution broke out which, for a time, seemed
likely to succeed.
Chopin, then twenty-one
years of age, was in Paris when Warsaw was
captured by the Russian army and the revolu-
tion died under its walls. He never returned
to Poland.
Polish history is the history of past glories
contrasted with present misery. A republic in
which there were two classes, a nobility of
which each male member had an equal chance of
election to the kingship, and a peasantry which
had no rights at all, was breeding within itself
from earliest days the seeds of its own disso-
lution. But the weakness of Poland was also,
in a measure, its glory. The valor, courtliness
and chivalry of its men, the beauty and passion
of its women, the poetic subtlety of its language
and the wonderful charm of its traditional dance
rhythms and ballads, all combined to leave to
modern days an imperishable monument of the
past.
Polish poetry, Polish music and Polish history
furnished for a spirit like that of Chopin mate-
rials of inexhaustible quantity and amazing fer-
tility for the development of his musical genius.
The Polonaise
For Chopin is a poet in music and a Polish
poet. His music is not only Polish music, but
is Poland herself, noble in her wretchedness,
noble in her heroism, noble in her imperishable
past. The Polonaise is but the music to one
of those long, half-processional dances, which
would weave its tortuous way through the halls
and gardens of some noble palace, couple suc-
ceeding couple to an hundred or more, following
the leader of the dance through series of charm-
ing rhythmic evolutions in which art, beauty
and grace were inextricably mingled.
The
Polonaise is, of course, Poland's national dance;
and it is a dance for men, martial, knightly and
vigorous, of which the music is that of trumpets
and drums.
Small wonder that Chopin was able to pro-
duce, in such works as the Polonaise in A flat
(op. 58) and the Military Polonaise, the tramp
of armed men, the clatter of horses' hoofs and
the pomp and pageanty of knighthood, while
throwing over all the glamour of that courtly
tenderness and frank admiration of their beau-
tiful women which have always been elements
in Polish character. But you cannot render a
Chopin Polonaise till you know some of these
things.
The Mazurkas
The Mazurkas, charming dances in miniature,
are representatives of another national dance
rhythm, which Chopin has transformed in the
alembic of his genius and made gloriously alive.
They must be known, played, and always thought
of as what they are, however; the woman's
dance, as the Polonaise is the man's. To quote
Liszt again, "The cavalier, always chosen by the
lady, seizes her as a conquest of which he is
proud, striving to exhibit her loveliness to the
admiration of his rivals before he whirls her off
in an entrancing and ardent embrace, through
the tenderness of which the defiant expression
of the victor still gleams, mingled with the
blushing yet gratified vanity of the prize, whose
beauty forms the glory-of his triumph." The
expression "haughty tenderness" aptly charac-
terizes, the Mazurka.
Chopin has gloriously
made these national dances part of the immortal
literature of piano music.
The Etudes
In his Etudes, Chopin opened up quite a new
world of piano playing. Himself a remarkable
pianist, with a touch, and a power of producing
the singing tone, which was the admiration and
despair of his contemporaries, he wrote these
two books of studies principally for the benefit
of his own advanced pupils. Each of them sets
forth some definite problem in the technique of
piano playing; yet not one is in the slightest de-
gree dry; from the threatening and brilliantly
flashing arpeggios in tenths of op. 10 No 1 to
the incessant rise and fall of the shimmering
double notes in the last but one of the second
book. They are, one and all, poems of passion,
some tender, some gay, some passionate, some
ballad-like; but all fascinating.
Hardly a re-
cital program of to-day fails to include at least
one Chopin Etude, and the artist's resources are
tested to the utmost in the attempt to exhaust
their possibilities. Moreover, the player-pianist,
too, will find in each and all of these wonderful
little pieces definite problems in tone, touch, ac-
cent and phrasing worthy of all his efforts and
of all his powers. It shall be our task to dis-
cuss some of these a little further on in these
articles.
(To be continued)