[BretLudwig]

((This might be a little too on-topic for r.a.o, but I'll chance it anyway.
Bret.))



The poet of the piano in the Romantic age of Nationalism



"As it did with Beethoven and Bach, so BBC Radio 3 is dedicating a
period of unbroken play-time to the greatest of piano composers,
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849). The Chopin Experience will last be
broadcast over 17-18 May 2008. It will include all his compositional
output, about which a fellow genius wrote:-

He did not task himself, nor study to be a national musician. Like all
truly national poets he sang spontaneously without premeditated design or
preconceived choice all that inspiration dictated to him, as we hear it
gushing forth in his songs without labor, almost without effort. He
repeated in the most idealized form the emotions which had animated and
embellished his youth; under the magic delicacy of his pen he displayed
the Ideal, which is, if we may be permitted so to speak, the Real among
his people; an Ideal really in existence among them, which every one in
general and each one in particular approaches by the one or the other of
its many sides. Without assuming to do so, he collected in luminous
sheaves the impressions felt everywhere throughout his country - vaguely
felt it is true, yet in fragments pervading all hearts. Is it not by this
power of reproducing in a poetic formula, enchanting to the imagination of
all nations, the indefinite shades of feeling widely scattered but
frequently met among their compatriots, that the artists truly national
are distinguished?

... Chopin must be ranked among the first musicians thus
individualizing in themselves the poetic sense of an entire nation, not
because he adopted the rhythm of POLONAISES, MAZOURKAS, and CRACOVIENNES,
and called many of his works by such names, for in so doing he would have
limited himself to the multiplication of such works alone, and would
always have given us the same mode, the remembrance of the same thing; a
reproduction which would soon have grown wearisome, serving but to
multiply compositions of similar form, which must have soon grown more or
less monotonous. It is because he filled these forms with the feelings
peculiar to his country, because the expression of the national heart may
be found under all the modes in which he has written, that he is entitled
to be considered a poet essentially Polish. His PRELUDES, his NOCTURNES,
his SCHERZOS, his CONCERTOS, his shortest as well as his longest
compositions, are all filled with the national sensibility, expressed
indeed in different degrees, modified and varied in a thousand ways, but
always bearing the same character.

From Franz Liszts Life of Chopin.

The Chopin Experience can be appreciated on-line, of course, and for 7
days after broadcast. "

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/...natio nalism/

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