It's not you, It's us

I may have been a little hard on Fred Chopin a couple of years ago. I shared a little waltz of his, which has since become a Valentine's Day staple around here, and suggested that he had written it in order to break up with his girlfriend--actually, to break off their engagement. It seemed better than a text message, but still.

I'm not sure now where I got the information that led me to that conclusion, but a Chopin biography I read more recently says that in fact Chopin very much wanted to marry the young woman, but her parents didn't think Chopin was marriage material, and they made her break it off. It was a distraught Chopin, then, that wrote that little waltz, not an irresponsible one.

When you are dealing with human motivations and behaviors you have to be careful. It is easy to deify persons of genius, and to think they can do no wrong. Scholars today general do not fall into that trap as they did in centuries past, and will often remind us, as Malcolm MacDonald did in his biography of Brahms, that regarding Brahms's emotional life "like most of us, he tended to make a mess of it." They are human, after all.

But it isn't all about individual choice, either. There are always powerful prejudices over which we have no control. One of them was that for centuries anytime a girl's parents saw a musician coming they presumed he was no good. Artists in general don't tend to swim in money, at least not their own. Some of our greatest have made piles of the stuff for subsequent generations: Mozart has spawned an entire industry and created who knows how many jobs by now, but it took awhile to take off: this was paying it forward two centuries before dot coms were not expected to turn a profit for a decade.

Chopin himself seems to have made a decent living by the end of his short life, mostly be selling his compositions (his unique brand of piano playing didn't fit the contemporary fad so his performing career was not very successful). That seems hard to believe given that there could not have been many who could actually play them, but it worked, apparently.

Still, in a capitalist economy, the people who create things can never really compete with the people who distribute them. Better to marry a merchant, a man of business. Or at least a musician who, like Clementi, went into business manufacturing piano so he could play them on the side.

Chopin spent most of his adult life in exile in Paris, away from his native Poland, and apparently without his early flame. The scholar who wrote the article for the New Grove dictionary thinks he barely even missed Poland, perhaps in order to counter  earlier writers' descriptions of an eternally homesick composer who turned out native dances as a source of ethnic pride and grief management.

The image of a composer seems to change with every generation. New evidence emerges, new writers see themselves or their era in their subject, reputations have to be made challenging the status quo, so that the more one reads the less sure one can be that they've gotten it right. And this is all before the era of fake news and bots.

But I'd like to apologize to Mr. Chopin. I think there is a very good chances that he was dealt with unjustly in this case. He may not always have been the easiest fellow to deal with, and his subsequent relationship with George Sand was stormy enough, but I'll let him and his frustrations rest in peace and not assume he had any more control over his destiny than most of us.

And in any case, he left us a very nice waltz.

Waltz  #9 in Ab, op. 69 n.1

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see what I got you for Valentine's Day on www.pianonoise.com

Through a Glass darkly

A couple of weeks ago I introduced you to a set of children's pieces by Sergei Prokoffiev.  On that occasion I posted the first four and today I thought I'd reserve the blog for only one of the pieces which deserves some special comment. The entire set has 12 pieces in it.

Today's selection is the sixth one in the set and the only piece I played as a child: the rest came about when I was sorting through music in my home a month or so ago and noticed the little thin green volume lying there and had the sort of inclination I sometimes have to complete the puzzle. I used to know one of the pieces, why not learn the remaining 11? And as an adult with quite a lot more ability than I had some three decades ago, that didn't turn out to take very long. Longer than I thought it would, actually (even Prokofiev's easiest pieces are still harder than mid-level pieces by other pianists) but nevertheless, within a week I had the full recording that you can hear at your leisure over at the archives of pianonoise.

That little waltz I played at 10? 12? was also a window into the past. I mentioned last time that I didn't know anything about Prokofiev as a human being back then. I had also not encountered his music before. It was a strange sort of introduction. If you listen to it it comes across as a nice little waltz tune with some rough edges. For one reason or another the composer turns some interesting corners harmonically, and causes a sequence of musical events that are quite original to him alone. You really can't listen to anything by Prokofiev and not know it.

I didn't know anything about "wrong note" technique as practiced by Soviet-era composers (particularly Shostakovich) to suggest, subtly (survivably) that there really was something wrong with Stalin's paradise (towing the party line with a smile but letting those in the know know there was something else underneath). I also would have been completely unaware of how the 20th century looked back on other musical periods of seeming innocence with nostalgia and then ironic critique as teenagers do when they make the discovery that life is a lot more rotten in many ways than their childhood bubbles of innocence permitted them to find out. In other words, this Waltz seems to (in Prokoffiev's own phrase he used to describe some of his compositional tendencies) "step on the throat of its own song."

Why would Prokofiev do something like that in a piece for children? Besides, he wasn't living in the Soviet Union at that point; he was still in France. Was it because that hard won compositional originality was hard to put down (there are plenty of people who do put it down but think how difficult it is to be noticed in this or any era and realize how valuable a skill it is to be recognized by your own imprint)? Was it because he couldn't help making an adultly ironic commentary in the margins, not to be perceived by the kids but only their worldly wise parents? Or maybe he just was really bad at writing for children? After all, he didn't have any, and up until that point in his life he had been living an artistic life of concerts and composition, forever on tour and in the papers, dealing with impresarios and agents and adoring fans, and critics.

Far from all of that, my first, boyhood impression as that the piece was just sort of weird.

How many of us approach art like that? We don't really get it; maybe we don't have the tools to understand it. And we never proceed beyond that point. In a tragedy I've seen played out several times as an adult, the adults in charge don't really understand it either, or they don't take the time to explain it. So the puzzled youngsters are just left to make whatever they can of their experience of the products of great minds of very different times and places and circumstances and compositional techniques--adult minds. How would you expect someone young to grapple with all that?

Generally what we end up with is a little like the Roman circus. We like it or we don't. Thumbs up or down. And if we don't like it....our experience ends there.

Mine didn't, of course. I can hear a lot more in that little waltz than I used to, and I appreciate the "oddness" of it for a lot of reasons, for the familiarity of Prokofiev's voice to being grateful that he avoided so much cliche in a genre that is home to so many. It glitters, it shines, and it disturbs a little.

I can hear it now.

Prokofiev: Waltz from Music for Children

The Dresden Connection

A couple of days ago I finally made the acquaintance of the little Chopin waltz you are going to hear. It's rather popular, at least on the sorts of UNpopular radio stations that play that sort of thing; and I think you can hear it bouncing around the walls of your local music school, too. Strange that my fingers had not gotten to know it before.

The first problem I noticed was that my edition had a choice between two different versions of the same waltz, so off I went to the interwebs to find out why. Then I found out that, like many popular pieces of unpopular music, this too had a nickname. It was called the "Farewell Waltz." What was that about, I wondered? Was Chopin saying farewell to his friends, farewell to the piano, farewell to life? All sorts of pleasantly Romantic tragedy seemed forthcoming.

It turns out that the second version of our little waltz was based on a manuscript which originated when Chopin was in Dresden, Germany. The first version came from a friend of Chopin's who published it after Chopin's death and isn't based on any known source from the composer which means I don't trust it farther than I can throw it. So I learned the second version.

Now, it so happens that my wife is in Dresden at the moment, doing dissertation research, while I am home in Illinois. So, if you are reading this, sweetie, consider this a sonic present from me to you. Also, don't read the next paragraph.

Apparently our friend Fred was engaged to a young lady in Dresden and decided he couldn't go through with it. So he gave her a waltz instead. Terribly Romantic. Nowadays people break up over the phone, or through email, or text messaging, but with Fred Chopin it was, "I can't marry you--here's a nice waltz. Bye." At least, that's what the Wikipedia had to say about it. Musical anecdotes are notoriously unreliable.

In any case, whatever mess another young artist may have made of his love life, we have a nice waltz to listen to now. And it probably won't take any longer to listen to than it did to read the foregoing. Enjoy!

Chopin: Waltz in Ab, op, 69 no. 1, "farewell"

Oh, one more thing. I have a little gig coming up to help raise money for the local symphony on Valentine's Day. I could play this Waltz and tell this little story. What do you think? Good idea, or very bad idea? I mean, break ups are a part of romance, too, aren't they? Or is that too much of a downer?

Maybe I should stick with Rachmaninoff.