Poles throw bicentennial bash for Chopin
By VANESSA GERA
The Associated Press
Friday, February 19, 2010; 11:39 AM
WARSAW, Poland -- The stirring strains of Frederic Chopin's music are reverberating across the world as music lovers celebrate the composer's 200th birthday this year - from the chateau of his French lover to Egypt's pyramids and even into space.
But nowhere do celebrations carry the powerful sense of national feeling that they do in Poland, the land of his birth, where his heroic, tragic piano compositions are credited with capturing the essence of the country's soul.
Poland is going all out to display its best "product," as officials bluntly put it, staging bicentennial concerts and other events in and around Warsaw, the city where the composer - known here as Fryderyk Chopin - spent the first half of his life.
"Fryderyk Chopin is a Polish icon," said Andrzej Sulek, director of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw. "In Polish culture there is no other figure who is as well-known in the world and who represents Polish culture so well."
Perhaps nothing better conveys Chopin's importance - literally - than his heart. It is preserved like a relic in an urn of alcohol in a Warsaw church, encased within a pillar with the Biblical inscription: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
Just before his death at 39 from what was probably tuberculosis, a coughing and choking Chopin, fearful of being buried alive, asked that his heart be separated from his body and returned to his beloved homeland. His body is buried at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where Chopin spent the second half of his life.
Finding it unseemly, Polish authorities have repeatedly rebuffed scientists wanting to run DNA tests on Chopin's heart to explore a suspicion that he actually succumbed to cystic fibrosis, a disease not yet discovered in his day.
Sulek said Poland might one day agree but would rather have the world focus on the genius's life, not his death, during this bicentennial year.
Chopin was born in 1810 at a country estate in Zelazowa Wola, near Warsaw, to a Polish mother and French emigre father. Historical sources suggest two possible dates of birth - either Feb. 22, as noted in church records, or March 1, which was mentioned in letters between him and his mother and is considered the more probable date.
Since no one is sure, Poland is marking both. A series of concerts in Warsaw and Zelazowa Wola will take place over those eight days featuring such world-class musicians as Daniel Barenboim, Evgeny Kissin, Garrick Ohlsson, Martha Argerich and Krystian Zimerman.
Then, a refurbished museum opens in Warsaw on March 1 displaying Chopin's personal letters and musical manuscripts along with a multimedia narration of his life.
Celebrations span the globe, from music-loving Austria to concerts at Cairo's pyramids and across Asia, where his following is huge.
The astronauts who blasted into orbit on the Endeavor space shuttle Feb. 8 carried with them a CD of Chopin's music and a copy of a manuscript of his Prelude Opus 28, No. 7 - gifts from the Polish government.
The Endeavor commander, George Zamka, who has Polish roots, told the Polish news agency PAP ahead of his trip to the International Space Station that listening to Chopin in space would enhance the majesty of the cosmos.
"Chopin is universal," said Mariusz Brymora, a Foreign Ministry official who helped put Chopin's music in space. "We are convinced that Chopin is Poland's best brand, Poland's best product. There is nothing else like him."
In France, Chopin is valued as "the composer who ushered in the age of great French music," according to Adam Zamoyski, historian and author of the new biography "Chopin: Prince of the Romantics."
Chopin's entire musical output, about 15 hours worth all together, will be played by some 60 pianists at the end of February in the central French city of Chateauroux and in Paris in an event entitled "Happy Birthday Mr. Chopin." The program will be filmed and later shown on French television.
And the small chateau in Nohant of Chopin's famous companion for eight years, feminist writer Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin - best known by her nom de plume George Sand - has been fixed up and will host three weeks of concerts in June. Chopin wrote some of his masterpieces at that inspirational spot in central France.
Poland's parliament has formally declared 2010 to be the "Year of Chopin," and officials in Warsaw feel his Polishness must be stressed because many non-Poles still associate him primarily with France.
Chopin always had a strong Polish identity. He surrounded himself with Poles in France whenever he could and never felt fully comfortable with the French language.
The matter touches a nerve in Poland, which has more often than not been controlled by foreign powers over the past two centuries - most recently during the decades of Moscow-imposed communist rule thrown off in 1989. Poles don't want to lose credit for Chopin, a genius whose universal appeal is even greater than that of Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa - at least according to Brymora.
In Chopin's day, Poland was partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria and did not exist as a state. In 1830, soon after Chopin embarked on a tour of Europe, an uprising broke out in Warsaw against its Russian rulers. It was put down with brutality, and a period of Russian repression followed that sent many other Polish artists into exile.
Chopin never returned mainly because it would have been "regarded as a betrayal of the others who were in exile," Zamoyski said. "Many of them couldn't return without facing prison - or worse, death."
Poles hear in his music a deep nostalgia for his homeland, and stress the Polish elements in his oeuvre - particularly in his Polonaises and Mazurkas, styles rooted in Polish folk music.
Halina Goldberg, author of "Music in Chopin's Warsaw," said that even before Chopin's death in 1849, Poles turned to his art to preserve a sense of their nationhood.
But others have also claimed him - Germans have said his music falls into the tradition of German Romanticism; Russians call him a Slavic genius.
"There is always a question of how much Polishness is in his music," Goldberg, a music professor at Indiana University, said. "Much of it is in the ear of the beholder."
Certainly Nazi Germany, which occupied Poland during World War II, heard something subversive and banned it. The Nazis were clearly aware of what German composer Robert Schumann, also born in 1810, called Chopin's "cannons hidden beneath flowers."
"As Chopin was one of the rallying points of Polish identity, it was just one more thing that needed to be forbidden and destroyed," Zamoyski said.
After his death, Chopin was eulogized movingly by the Polish poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid, who wrote that: "In the crystal of his own harmony he gathered the tears of the Polish people strewn over the fields, and placed them as the diamond of beauty in the diadem of humanity."
Now that Poland is again independent, it can savor that beauty without the tears.
-----
Associated Press Writer Deborah Seward in Paris contributed to this report.
+++
After 200 years, classical composer Chopin's music still holds mysteries
By Anne Midgette
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 21, 2010; E04
Tuesday, Feb. 22, is Frédéric Chopin's 200th birthday. That is, it's Fryderyk Chopin's birthday; the Polish-born, Paris-dwelling composer's name is more commonly spelled these days with Ys. And that's his birth date according to a baptismal certificate; the composer said he was born on March 1. Even 200 years after his birth, things that appear simple about Chopin are actually more complicated than they seem.
Including, and above all, his music. Chopin's piano pieces -- all of his pieces involve the piano: no symphonies or operas here -- are lyrical and lovely, poetic and, therefore, seen as accessible. Yet they can also be harmonically intricate, technically challenging.
His 24 Op. 10 and Op. 25 Etudes, far from being simple "studies" for students, are so difficult that the great pianist and Chopin specialist Artur Rubinstein avoided playing some of them. And they can be elliptical to the point of impenetrability (take the final movement of the Second Sonata: a whirling cloud of sound less than two minutes long). Taken together, Chopin's pieces represent a towering hurdle, the benchmark against which a classical pianist is measured -- in part because of the difficulty of finding a way to plumb the music's depths while sounding simple.
* * *
"Proper" Chopin style is at once a seal of approval and the subject of endless debate. It involves lightness and clarity of touch, something evinced by one of the latest crop of Chopinistes, Rafal Blechacz, in his new CD of two rather conventional piano concertos. It requires a singing legato: the illusion that the pianist is creating an unbroken line of sound, like a human voice. This is particularly true in the Nocturnes, which are incessantly compared to the operas of Chopin's friend Vincenzo Bellini.
But Chopin style can also evoke the kind of stormy outbursts the young Martha Argerich gives in her just-released CD, a collection of previously unreleased radio recordings from 1959 and 1967.
Most important, and most elusive, Chopin style involves rubato -- changing tempo or rhythm for expressive purposes. The question of rubato dogs Chopin performance. The composer was said to be quite free as a pianist, but it's not clear what this meant: There are indications that he kept a fairly steady left-hand beat at all times.
Still, generations of performers, following the misguided notion that a piece of music is a canvas upon which they are to express themselves, take Chopin's advocacy of rubato as license to slow down and speed up almost at will. Hearing a lot of Chopin -- even in some cases very good Chopin -- can leave me seasick from listening to too many phrases being stretched out as if going slowly uphill, then tumbling helter-skelter down again.
Chopin's music has sometimes been branded effeminate, or "salon music": not quite serious, not quite healthy, not quite German, since it departs from the structural conventions of the great Viennese classical school. Even the two powerful sonatas are unconventional, playing fast and loose with the structural conventions upheld by Mozart and Beethoven.
Indeed, some of Chopin's ardent defenders have implicitly bought into the idea that the music is weak and needs defending, trying to emphasize its seriousness (and manliness) by playing the works in sets -- all 24 preludes, or the 24 etudes of Op. 10 and 25 -- and thus casting them as long, weighty pieces rather than salon entertainments measuring three or four minutes long.
* * *
The view of the work as fragile and sickly is also linked to the pervasive idea of Chopin as a prototypical Romantic genius: pale and dapper, doomed to a tragically short life (he had tuberculosis), needing the care of a strong mother figure (his lover, best known by her literary pseudonym, George Sand), receiving the divine flash of inspiration at the keyboard (though a brilliant improviser, he labored over his compositions).
The work isn't fragile, though. Although Chopin himself was said to shrink away from too-loud playing, there's plenty in it that thunders and plenty that's assertive. It's also strikingly original. Chopin, unlike many composers of his day, wasn't under the sway of Beethoven. He abhorred, for instance, the start of the last movement of the Fifth Symphony; his primary influences were earlier, particularly Johann Sebastian Bach.
Like Bach, he wrote music in sets: for instance, the 24 Preludes, a set of short pieces in every key like "The Well-Tempered Clavier." And pre-Classical keyboard music was an influence in some of the forms he particularly developed -- even the Nocturnes, that quintessentially Romantic expression.
Chopin pioneered other forms, as well, like the Four Ballades: long dramatic monologues without words, at the intersection of tone poems and sonatas. Particularly his own were the polonaises and mazurkas, based on the idea of Polish folk dances, that are perennially held up as an example of the expatriate composer's patriotism. Chopin took his Polish nationalism seriously, but he was also capitalizing on a perennial interest in local folk color that turns up in Mozart's "Turkish" concerto or Brahms's Hungarian dances. There's certainly nothing sissy about the A-flat Polonaise.
* * *
There's a hint of the pragmatic in Chopin's 19 waltzes, as well. When Chopin went to Vienna as a young man, before settling in Paris, he disdained waltzes as the epitome of popular bad taste and complained that it was impossible for a composer to publish anything that wasn't a waltz. He may have looked down on them, but he was practical enough to start writing waltzes -- not, certainly, waltzes that one could actually dance to, but pieces that evoked the ballroom atmosphere, the whirl of gowns.
The waltzes seem to be getting particular attention this anniversary year. New recordings have recently come out by Alice Sara Ott and Ingrid Fliter, two pianists worth knowing about, and Dinu Lipatti's classic set from 1950 is going to be rereleased yet again at the end of March.
Listening to all the waltzes at one go is like eating a box of chocolates, leaving you feeling ever so slightly bilious; yet each of these recordings has its strengths. Fliter has a gorgeous, light, easy touch that appeals to me instinctively, but she gets a little carried away with the rubato, tugging at and prodding every phrase. Ott, too, sometimes sounds willful, but she has a wholesome directness. With a big sound that feels reined in, she embodies, in the Grande Valse Brillante in E-flat, the slightly coltish exuberance of a young girl at her first dance. In comparison, French pianist Alexandre Tharaud, who recorded the waltzes a few years ago, offers a drier, cooler approach: The playing is admirably clean and slightly distant, and very much a tonic after too much emoting.
The waltzes epitomize one of the hardest things about playing Chopin: walking the fine line between emotion and sentiment, between feeling something and looking back, fondly, on the way it felt. Chopin presages Ravel's "La Valse" in his expression of slightly ironic nostalgia. The dance forms Chopin used had particular connotations; his works were a kind of social commentary. Today, the nostalgia threatens to trump everything. One big secret of playing Chopin may simply be to remember that it's not as pretty as it sounds.
- posted on 02/21/2010
我说最近是肖邦什么日了,昨天还在林肯中心看了一场肖邦钢琴的舞蹈,多是
圆舞曲,还有一分钟圆舞曲(小狗咬尾?),一个小时的舞蹈,精彩无比。
查了一下维基,肖邦生于1 March 1810,是年生的还有舒曼8 June 1810.
李斯特只晚他俩一年,那时正始浪漫派的风云!
Dances at a Gathering(Jerome Robbins):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQyZKGKJ3ik&NR=1
PNB Premiere May 28-June 7
最近林肯中心搞Spanish Music回顾,编舞Jerome Robbins,让我这新鲜西班
牙迷大饱眼福耳福。同看了一场West Side Story Suit,伯恩斯坦的戏,Jerome
编舞。
一分钟圆舞曲《小狗》:
Chopin Waltz Op.64 No.1 "Minute Waltz", Daniel Barenboim
- Re: 萧邦两百大寿posted on 02/22/2010
今晚让小女弹弹《G小调波罗乃兹》,也算誌念。感谢他给了后人,给了我无数愉悦。书架上的萧邦音乐全集,也算是我和他的connection。
古今中外牛逼无数,何人理会?只有那给人类悄悄留下永远礼物的,才能让人默念。 - Re: 萧邦两百大寿posted on 02/22/2010
touche wrote:
今晚让小女弹弹《G小调波罗乃兹》,也算誌念。感谢他给了后人,给了我无数愉悦。书架上的萧邦音乐全集,也算是我和他的connection。
Cheer to you!
http://www.mayacafe.com/forum/topic1sp.php3?tkey=1051196856
古今中外牛逼无数,何人理会?只有那给人类悄悄留下永远礼物的,才能让人默念。 - posted on 02/23/2010
老图,给你这个- What do we know about Chopin?
--------------
Le point sur Chopin
Par Bertrand Dermoncourt
Le compositeur sera plus que jamais à l'honneur en 2010, à l'occasion du bicentenaire de sa naissance. Un hommage qui débute en fanfare avec La Folle Journée de Nantes. Le moment de faire le point sur un artiste aussi célèbre que méconnu.
Ce que l'on sait:
Frédéric Chopin est polonais. Né Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin le 1er mars 1810, à Zelazowa Wola. Jeune prodige du piano, il passe son enfance à Varsovie et apprend la musique avec sa mère, avant de se perfectionner au conservatoire. En troisième année, il est déjà qualifié de "génie musical". Il débute la composition à 6 ans, puis écrit, notamment, une Fantaisie sur des airs polonais, des Mazurkas ou des Polonaises inspirées par les danses de son pays. En 1830, il quitte la Pologne pour un voyage d'étude à Paris. Il ne reverra jamais sa terre natale.
Il est devenu français. Adopté par sa seconde patrie, il mène grand train à Paris, joue salle Pleyel, donne des cours aux jeunes filles de la bonne société et engage des amours tumultueuses avec George Sand. La fin de sa courte vie est assombrie par la maladie. Chopin meurt en 1849 à son domicile parisien, place Vendôme, à seulement 39 ans.
Il fut très populaire. A la mort de son ami, Franz Liszt écrivait : "Quelle que soit la popularité d'une partie de ses productions, il est néanmoins à présumer que la postérité aura pour ses ouvrages une estime moins frivole que celle qui leur est encore accordée." Aujourd'hui encore, quelques Préludes, Valses ou Etudes assurent seuls la popularité du compositeur, comme la fameuse étude Tristesse, reprise par Gainsbourg dans Lemon Incest- les auditeurs de Radio Classique viennent de la désigner comme leur morceau préféré aux Elections du piano. Mais l'ensemble du corpus de Chopin, de niveau très égal, est à redécouvrir, des grands chefs-d'oeuvre, comme les Ballades, à sa musique de chambre, tels la Sonate pour violoncelle ou le Trio.
Ce que l'on sait moins:
Chopin est un classique. Dans l'imaginaire collectif, il symbolise le romantisme. Son existence y a grandement contribué : un patriotisme contrarié par les soubresauts de l'Histoire, une nature discrète et insatisfaite, une souffrance due à la tuberculose et aux blessures de l'âme... Tout y est. Comme compositeur cependant, Chopin vénérait les anciens, Bach et Mozart, plutôt que ses contemporains Beethoven ou Schubert. Par bien des aspects, son art était plus classique que romantique.
Il fut un pianiste révolutionnaire. Chopin, musicien mièvre pour jeunes filles en fleur ? Un cliché tenace que seuls de mauvais interprètes ont pu perpétuer. Plus qu'un improvisateur ténébreux, Chopin était avant tout le champion de l'exactitude, auteur de partitions extrêmement précises. Ses contemporains célébraient également la richesse expressive de son jeu au piano. Il faut dire que ses oeuvres inaugurent un nouveau rapport avec l'instrument : avec Chopin, le piano lui-même devient la principale source d'inspiration.
Il pourrait entrer au Panthéon. Les funérailles de Chopin ont été célébrées à Paris, en l'église de la Madeleine, et son corps inhumé au cimetière du Père-Lachaise. Selon les désirs du défunt, son coeur repose à Varsovie, en l'église de la Sainte-Croix. Alain Duault, commissaire général du bicentenaire Chopin, propose de faire entrer le musicien au Panthéon. Car s'il est bien le symbole de "l'âme polonaise", il est en partie d'origine française (sa mère est polonaise, mais son père est français). Romantique ou classique ? Polonais ou Français ? Européen avant tout !
- Re: 萧邦两百大寿posted on 02/24/2010
妙兮,鹿希。
昨晚打开15碟的萧邦全集。一曲一曲细听,要花多少时间啊。可见世界上值得用来杀时间的还是有的。萧邦是小曲作家,感觉像是明代小品,manageable。
叙事曲,是萧邦较为厚实的东西。G小调第一,更是菲佛睿特。那天在you tube上依次看了霍洛维茨,李赫特,鲁宾斯坦,齐默曼和吉辛的演奏。还是更喜欢李赫特的。
波兰斯基的《钢琴家》中,钢琴家从华沙的废墟中爬出来,在德军上尉的命令下抖抖索索地弹的,就是这个曲子。余音绕废墟,印象很深。“零落成泥碾作尘,只有音如故”啊。 - posted on 02/24/2010
图老这么发感慨的时候,很感慨。说的很好。
touche wrote:
妙兮,鹿希。
昨晚打开15碟的萧邦全集。一曲一曲细听,要花多少时间啊。可见世界上值得用来杀时间的还是有的。萧邦是小曲作家,感觉像是明代小品,manageable。
叙事曲,是萧邦较为厚实的东西。G小调第一,更是菲佛睿特。那天在you tube上依次看了霍洛维茨,李赫特,鲁宾斯坦,齐默曼和吉辛的演奏。还是更喜欢李赫特的。
波兰斯基的《钢琴家》中,钢琴家从华沙的废墟中爬出来,在德军上尉的命令下抖抖索索地弹的,就是这个曲子。余音绕废墟,印象很深。“零落成泥碾作尘,只有音如故”啊。 - Re: 萧邦两百大寿posted on 02/26/2010
touche的两篇文章,鹿希的法文贴,都不错。
出奇的是,鹿希的法文贴头一回看得那么分明,看来咱学西班牙还提高了法语。
我说拉丁语系都互携互益,书上说,懂法语的人学植物拉丁,两个礼拜的事。如果
懂西班牙或意大利,一个礼拜的事。何乐而不为?
不好意思,在肖邦一线下挟带些别的讨论:) - posted on 03/02/2010
今天是肖邦的大寿. 下午4点15左右我正在开车, 听了这一段。 很有趣啊
What's a lesson from Chopin cost?
An etching of Polish composer Frederick Chopin
Taking a lesson from classic pianist Frederic Chopin would have cost 20 francs back in the 19th century. For their series, "Radio Chopin," classical station WDAV looked into how much that adds up to. Jennifer Foster reports.
An etching showing Polish romantic composer Frederick Chopin (1810-1849). (AFP/AFP/Getty Images)
TEXT OF STORY
Tess Vigeland: Get out the cake and candles for today marks the 200th birthday of someone near and dear to my heart as a classical pianist: Frederick Chopin. To think -- if I had lived in 19th century France I might've been able to take a lesson from him. But it would have cost me 20 francs to be exact, a pretty penny in its day.
Our friends at the classical station WDAV in Davidson, N.C., looked into it for their series "Radio Chopin," We'll call it "Chopinomics." Jennifer Foster reports.
JENNIFER FOSTER: "I'm a revolutionary, money means nothing to me." -- a famous quote by Chopin.
So, just how much was a franc worth in Chopin's day? Debatable, but estimates range from $2.50 up to $4.80. That would put the price tag on a piano lesson with Chopin between $50 and $96. Sound reasonable for a piano lesson with the man about whom Robert Schumann shouted, "Hats off, gentlemen -- a genius!"? Hats off is right. Dinner's off, too, considering the average daily wage for an unskilled laborer in Paris in 1823 was one franc. That's three weeks' wages to pay for one lesson if you don't eat.
In 1982 Chopin and the first two bars of this Polonaise in F Minor appeared on the Polish 5000 zloty bill. This year, The National Bank of Poland is adding their two cents' worth with a release of special, collectible Chopin banknote valued at 20 zloty -- about $6.77. Fourteen of the new notes if you want a lesson from the old poet of the piano!
From Davidson, N.C., I'm Jennifer Foster for Marketplace.
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