Formative influences.

Chopin's earliest compositions, especially his polonaises, variation sets and rondos, clearly register the influence of the ‘brilliant style’ of public pianism associated with composers such as Hummel, Weber, Moscheles and Kalkbrenner, among others. The keyboard polonaise reigned supreme in the salons of early 19th-century Poland, and it was usual for young composers to cut their teeth on it. Chopin's early ‘brilliant’ polonaises, which have little in common with the later ‘heroic’ works composed in Paris (the only ones the composer himself chose to publish), indicate that in a very short time he managed to assimilate many of the standard materials of bravura pianism. Essentially they are essays in virtuoso figuration and exuberant right-hand ornamentation, complete with hand crossings, wide leaps, trills and double trills, arpeggio-based passage-work, and other stock-in-trade devices of the pianist-composer. Excluding the two earliest, written in his eighth year, there are seven solo polonaises of this kind composed in Warsaw, and we may add the Polonaise brillante op.3 for cello and piano. They are pieces of considerable accomplishment. But they are hardly ‘Chopinesque’, and they give the lie to any notion that Chopin's unique sound world was somehow present from the start, that it appeared from nowhere, fully formed. The idiomatic figuration in these works was in fact closely modelled on an extensive repertory of post-Classical concert music, and it reached its zenith in the Grande polonaise brillante op.22 for piano and orchestra, which must rate as one of the peaks of the ‘brilliant style’.

The variation sets, beginning with the Introduction and Variations on a German Air (‘Der Schweizerbub’), belong to the same world, and again they include orchestral concert pieces, the ‘Là ci darem’ Variations op.2 and the Fantasy on Polish Airs op.13, in both of which we can hear pre-echoes of the mature Chopin. (The four-hand Variations on a Theme of Moore, and the Souvenir de Paganini are of disputed authenticity.) The final essay in this genre, the Variations brillantes op.12 on a theme of Hé rold, was composed in Paris in 1832, but its conception and execution is very much in line with the Warsaw pieces, underlining that for Chopin the genre was inseparably linked to the virtuoso style. And this was also true of his involvement with the independent rondo. Following the Rondo op.1 he composed the Rondo à la mazur op.5 in 1826–7, the Rondo op.73a (later arranged for two pianos) in 1828, and the Rondo à la krakowiak op.14 for piano and orchestra in the same year. Again there was one final essay in the genre (op.16), composed in Paris in 1832 and belonging stylistically with the Warsaw-period music. In all these pieces, including the polonaises, we witness a young musician preparing himself for a career as a pianist-composer, with the expectation of parading his wares in the salons and on the concert platforms of Europe's cultural capitals. Bravura figuration and ornamental melody, together with a formal process which squares the one off against the other, lie at the heart of this musical style. These were the essential ingredients of the post-Classical repertory, and they represent the starting-point for Chopin's musical thought.

His debt to post-Classical pianist-composers in these early years represents a level of influence which might be characterized as ‘direct emulation’, a modelling process which is common enough in the formative stages of any composer's creative evolution. A rather different level of influence is invoked by Italian opera and Polish folk music, both of which were much loved by Chopin during the Warsaw period and beyond. Here the influence was indirect, in that it involved a transference of stylistic features from one medium to another, and thus a greater element of interpretation. Chopin was steeped in Italian (and to a lesser extent French) opera from an early age and, like many pianist-composers, saw a vital link between vocal bel canto and piano lyricism. Much of his ornamentation was transparently vocal in origin, stylizing the portamentos, fioriture and cadenzas which were part of the singer's art. Likewise his tendency to sweeten the melody with parallel 3rds and 6ths is strongly reminiscent of operatic duet textures. Such features were already prominent in the music of the Warsaw period, culminating in the first of the nocturnes (the E minor, published posthumously as op.72 no.1). Admittedly the operatic influence was partly mediated through existing keyboard repertories, especially that of John Field. But at a deeper level it left its mark on Chopin's whole approach to melody and melodic development. Characteristically he favoured the decoration, elaboration and variation of melodic ‘arias’ rather than thematic dissection and reintegration on the German model.

In his early mazurkas (and also in several of the little-known songs) Chopin turned to yet another musical background, the folk music of the Mazovian plains of central Poland, and especially to the rhythmic and modal patterns, the characteristic melodic intonations and the duda drones of the mazur, kujawiak and oberek. Here again the influence was both direct and indirect. Chopin had some personal contact with Polish folk music, but mostly it would have been mediated through salon dance pieces and songs im Volkston which would have been familiar to him from his earliest years in Warsaw. Either way the early mazurkas clearly evoke the world of the traditional folk ensemble of central Poland, where a melody instrument (violin or fujarka, a high-pitched shepherd's pipe) would often be accompanied by a drone (duda or gagda, a Polish bagpipe) and/or a rhythmic pulse (basetla or basy, a string bass). At a very early stage, Chopin made this genre his own. Even in youthful pieces, such as the ‘improvised’ mazurkas (the B major and G major C[homiń ski and] T[urł o] 100, 101), whose first versions were published in 1826, the unmistakable character of the mature mazurka is discernible. It is all the more marked in the three mazurkas later collected by Julian Fontana as op.68 nos.1–3, and especially in no.2, with its characteristic Lydian 4th, bourdon 5th pedal and iconoclastic harmonies (in the closing section of the trio).

There is a further level of influence, already apparent in the Warsaw-period compositions. This involved a radical reworking of forms, procedures and materials drawn from earlier masters, and especially from the Viennese Classical composers and Bach. Chopin's training at the Warsaw Conservatory involved studies in 18th-century counterpoint (Albrechtsberger and Kirnberger) as well as in the practice of sonata composition. Elsner liked to start his pupils off with polonaises and then to move through independent rondos and variation sets to sonatas, which they would usually begin at the end of the first year. Hence the Sonata op.4, completed in 1828 and dedicated to Elsner. The sonata's monothematic first movement, with its unusual (possibly Reicha-inspired) formal and tonal organization – the exposition is monotonal – is entirely characteristic of Elsner and his students. Significantly we find an equally unorthodox tonal scheme in the Piano Trio op.8 (1828–9), again a monotonal exposition and a reprise in which the second group modulates to the dominant minor. In other words, the weight of tonal activity is transferred from the early to the later stages of a work. In due course Chopin carried Elsner's formal and tonal principles through into his mature music, where it changed in radical ways the function of the reprise, and therefore the underlying shape, or ‘plot’, of sonatas and sonata-influenced works such as ballades. There is already a suggestion of this in the first movements of the two major works of the late Warsaw period, the piano concertos, the first extended compositions of Chopin to have an established place in the repertory. (A third concerto was left incomplete and later found its way into the Allegro de concert op.46.)

Although these are ‘brilliant’ concertos in the mould of Hummel, Field and Weber, they also represent something of a reworking of an earlier Mozartian model. Schumann went so far as to claim that ‘if a genius such as Mozart were to appear today, he would write Chopin concertos rather than Mozart ones’. The concertos, in other words, mediate between the Classical and the post-Classical, between Mozart and the brilliant style. This is apparent in the formal organization of the F minor Concerto op.21, the first to be written. The relation between solo and accompaniment is closer to Hummel than to Mozart. So too is the duality of lyrical and configurative elements (poetry and display) within each tonal region, already at some remove from Mozart's delicate equilibrium between a ritornello-concertante principle and a developmental-symphonic principle. Yet right from the opening prelude, which embeds its procession of contrasted materials within an apparently seamless flow, this movement owes something to Mozart directly as well as something to Mozart by way of Hummel. And much the same is true of the slow movement. This has been described as Chopin's first ‘nocturne’, but the essential point is that, in its internal phrase and sentence structures, it is at least as much a transformation of Mozart as a continuation of Field.

Chopin himself paid tribute to Mozart in a famous comparison with Beethoven: ‘Where [Beethoven] is obscure and seems lacking in unity … the reason is that he turns his back on eternal principles; Mozart never’. Elsewhere he made it plain that these eternal principles included strict counterpoint, and in this respect his teacher was Bach. The influence of Bach, already apparent in the contrapuntal surface of several of the very early works, including the Sonata op.4, came to the fore in two pieces composed right at the end of Chopin's Warsaw period, the first and second of the op.10 Etudes. Already in the moto perpetuo figuration of these pieces, where linear elements emerge discreetly through the surface pattern without disturbing the underlying harmonic purpose, we see indications of how Chopin would in due course reformulate Bach's legacy. Moreover in their formal organization – a unitary process of intensification and resolution (achieved through harmony and line) rather than dialectic of tonal contrast and resolution – the é tudes reach back across the Classical era to Baroque antecedents. In the music of his full maturity this debt to Bach gained even greater significance as a direct motivator of Chopin's creativity, and it will be necessary to return to it shortly.

Chopin, Fryderyk Franciszek