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Updated: May 10, 2025
Mikuli holds that an appeal to Chopin's manuscripts is of no use as they are full of slips of the pen wrong notes and values, wrong accidentals and clefs, wrong slurs and 8va markings, and omissions of dots and chord-intervals. The original French, German, and English editions he regards likewise as unreliable.
They smash it, they bang it, and, adding insult to cruelty, they finish it with three chords, mounting an octave each time, thus giving a conventional character to the close the very thing the composer avoids. Much distorted phrasing is also indulged in. Mikuli, Von Bulow and Kullak place the legato bow over the first three notes of the group.
Mikuli, another pupil of Chopin's, explains his master's tempo rubato thus: "While the singing hand, either irresolutely lingering or as in passionate speech eagerly anticipating with a certain impatient vehemence, freed the truth of the musical expression from all rhythmical fetters, the other, the accompanying hand, continued to play strictly in time."
For study, playing the entire composition with a wrist stroke is advisable. It will secure clear articulation, staccato and finger-memory. Von Bulow phrases the study in groups of two, Kullak in sixes, Klindworth and Mikuli the same, while Riemann in alternate twos, fours and sixes. One sees his logic rather than hears it.
In his notes to the F major study Theodor Kullak expatiates at length upon his favorite idea that Chopin must not be played according to his metronomic markings. The original autograph gives 96 to the half, the Tellefsen edition 88, Klindworth 80, Von Bulow 89, Mikuli 88, and Riemann the same.
If Fontana, Wolff, Gutmann, Mikuli and Tellefsen, who copied from the original Chopin manuscripts under the supervision of the composer, cannot agree, then upon what foundation are reared the structures of the modern critical editions? The early French, German and Polish editions are faulty, indeed useless, because of misprints and errata of all kinds.
As for fingering, Mikuli, Von Bulow, Kullak, Riemann and Klindworth all differ, and from them must most pianists differ. Your own grasp, individual sense of fingering and tact will dictate the management of technics. Von Bulow gives a very sensible pattern to work from, and Kullak is still more explicit.
This, then, is what I learned from Gutmann. In parenthesis, as it were, I may ask: Is it not strange that no pupil, with the exception of Mikuli, mentions the name of Mozart, the composer whom Chopin is said to have so much admired?
"It was difficult to say," remarks Mikuli, "which of the two he loved most." Chopin not only, as has already been mentioned, had works of Bach on his writing-table at Valdemosa, corrected the Parisian edition for his own use, and prepared himself for his concerts by playing Bach, but also set his pupils to study the immortal cantor's suites, partitas, and preludes and fugues.
Karasowski gives the date of the first complete edition of the Chopin works as 1846, with Gebethner & Wolff, Warsaw, as publishers. Then, according to Niecks, followed Tellefsen, Klindworth Bote & Bock Scholtz Peters Breitkopf & Hartel, Mikuli, Schuberth, Kahnt, Steingraber better known as Mertke's and Schlesinger, edited by the great pedagogue Theodor Kullak.
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