United States or Malawi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Dreary stuff," said the composer, whose critical sense did not fail him even in so personal a question. What Chopin thought of his youthful music may be discovered in his scanty correspondence. To suppose that the young Chopin sprang into the arena a fully equipped warrior is one of those nonsensical notions which gains currency among persons unfamiliar with the law of musical evolution.
Her sons were going to sing their songs in other lands, but Mickiewiz and Sienkiewicz and Chopin are Polish, not Russian. The alliance of the three sovereigns engaged in this dismemberment was about as friendly as is that of three dogs who have run down a hare and are engaged in picking nice morsels from its bones.
There is a persistency in repetition that foreshadows the Chopin of the later, sadder years. The figure in the left hand is the first in which a prominent part is given to that member. Not as noble and sonorous a figure as the one in the C minor study, it is a distinct forerunner of the bass of the D minor Prelude. In this F minor study the stretch is the technical object.
Of another of Chopin's private performances in the spring of 1848 we read in the Supplement du Dictionnaire de la Conversation, where Fiorentino writes: We were at most ten or twelve in a homely, comfortable little salon, equally propitious to conversation and contemplation. Chopin took the place of Madame Viardot at the piano, and plunged us into ineffable raptures.
The few sonatas which Chopin wrote do not deviate essentially from the orthodox structure, but one feels constantly that he was hampered in his movements by the artificial structure. Though they are full of genius, like everything he composed, he did not write them con amore. Concentration is one of Chopin's principal characteristics, and the sonata favors diffuseness.
The man was a Polish musician, of delicate constitution, who seemed to leave a portion of his existence in each one of his works, and who felt himself dying at twenty-nine years of age. He was called Frederic François Chopin. The children belonged to the novelist, who was about thirty-five.
Southey not only blushed red but blushed blue as if the life were going out of him; and in Chopin and Correggio at least we feel that they could not have been what they were without it. Napoleon, whose nerves were like steel wires, suffered nevertheless from a peculiar kind of physical sensitiveness.
Both admired each other sincerely as musicians. If Chopin did not care much for Liszt's compositions, he had the highest opinion of him as a pianist. We have seen in the letter of June 20, 1833, addressed to Hiller and conjointly written by Chopin and Liszt, how delighted Chopin was with Liszt's manner of playing his studies, and how he wished to be able to rob him of it.
Perhaps that is the cause of the silence, just as Wagner's dislike for Meyerbeer was the result of his obligations to the composer of "Les Huguenots." He heard Aloys Schmitt play, and uttered the very Heinesque witticism that "he is already over forty years old, and composes eighty years old music." This in a letter to Elsner. Our Chopin could be amazingly sarcastic on occasion.
I began to talk about my idol Chopin, and I explained to Diaz my esoteric interpretation of the Fantasia. He was sitting down now, but I still stood by the fire. 'Yes, he said, 'that is very interesting. 'What does the Fantasia mean to you? I asked him. 'Nothing, he said. 'Nothing! 'Nothing, in the sense you wish to convey. Everything, in another sense.
Word Of The Day