Reception.

The afterlife of Chopin's music well illustrates the many different ways in which musical works – the products of singular creative acts – can achieve a social existence in the world. By revealing the constantly changing reception of his music, we light up the ideology concealed in the corners of music history, and in the process we expose some of the vested interests at work in the promotion, dissemination, influence and evaluation of musical works. By the late 19th century it was clear that there were several different images of Chopin, as his music responded to the particular needs of particular cultural communities. Different modes of reception serve to focus these images. Thus French critics highlighted the notion of expression. Chopin was the poet of the piano, ‘disclosing his suffering’ through music. Moreover his preference for intimate performance contexts, for an art of nuance, sophistication and refinement was viewed as a model to be followed, a bulwark against encroaching German influence. Chopin, in short, was portrayed as a kind of vital missing link connecting the clavecinistes to the great pianist-composers of the fin - de - siè cle, Fauré, Debussy and Ravel. German publishers told a different story. The publication of the Breitkopf & Hä rtel collected edition (1875–80) was a landmark in Chopin reception, and not just because it enabled a wider dissemination of the music. The Breitkopf complete editions of the late 19th century played a large part in the formation of a musical canon, an exercise with strong nationalist overtones. By admitting Chopin to this (largely German) pantheon, they helped translate his music from salon compositions to ‘classical music’ within the German world, and that status was secured by major biographies (Weissmann and Scharlitt) and by a remarkable analytical study from Hugo Leichtentritt, subjecting virtually every work of the published music to a detailed scrutiny.

Conflicting images of Chopin were also registered through compositional influence – itself a mode of reception – in the late 19th century. Russian composers proved especially susceptible, and from Balakirev onwards their inclination was to view Chopin as a Slavonic composer first and foremost. For Balakirev, Chopin presented a fusion of nationalism and modernism, and it was just such a fusion that he himself tried to promote at the Free School of Music in St Petersburg. Not surprisingly, then, Chopin's stylistic influence on progressive tendencies in Russian music was a decisive one. But it should be noted that Russian composers selected carefully from the fused whole of Chopin's musical style, favouring those elements which appeared to offer an alternative to the forms and methods of an already established Austro-German tradition. In contrast, Chopin was largely domesticated in England. Victorian composers were happy to purloin the external features of his nocturnes and mazurkas, reducing his closely woven textures and delicately shaped phrases to a handful of easy gestures. And in due course his own music was lumped together with this progeny. We find the nocturnes published in collections called ‘drawing-room trifles’, the preludes described as ‘pearls’ and the é tudes paraded as ‘tuneful gems’. We even encounter publications of simplified and shortened versions of some of the tougher, more technically demanding works, including the G minor Ballade. Chopin's unique features, in short, were smoothed out by association with surrounding lowlands of mediocrity

In the late 19th century, then, Chopin's music was an intimate communication, an icon, an agent of cultural and even political propaganda, and a commodity. And in this respect it held a mirror to the conflicting ideologies attending a critical period in music history, right on the cusp between classical and modernist notions of art. In the 20th century there was something of a closure of meaning in Chopin reception, and this stands in a polarized relation to the perceptions of his own era. Present-day views of Chopin have been marked above all by a separation of performance and text. These had been inextricably tied together during Chopin's lifetime, and their later separation can be traced through performance histories, editions and of course a tradition of music criticism which swerved abruptly into analysis in the early years of the century. It was common practice for Chopin's contemporaries to relate his music to real or imagined contexts. The work was understood to mediate larger realities, and of several kinds: it expressed an emotion; it told a story; it exemplified a genre; it articulated a style; it confirmed an institution. In contrast, the 20th century sought to de-contextualize the music, which became rather a world in and to itself, claiming an ideal relationship of part to whole. The work became a structure, and in that lay its value.

It is worth trying to make concrete this contrast between an ‘active present’ and a ‘recovered past’. In the reprise of the fourth Ballade we may hear a triumphant synthesis of strict canon and ornamental bel canto, Bach and Italian opera. Chopin's world might have related this sequence to a conventional succession of contemporary improvisation, and it might even have heard in the bravura coda a distant echo of the applause-seeking perorations of popular concert pieces. In the second Ballade we may hear a dramatic confrontation of contrasted materials, heightened by a two-key scheme. Chopin's world might have related this to the classic formal ingredients of the brilliant style – bravura figuration squared off against popular melody, é tude against siciliano. In the introduction to the F minor Fantasy we may hear a multi-sectional upbeat to the first tonal and thematic cycle. Chopin's world might rather have heard the stylization of an operatic scena, slow march, recitative, grand chorus. Likewise, we signally fail to notice those generic features which would have struck Chopin's contemporaries: those gestures in the A minor Prelude which signal a funeral march; those features of the G minor Ballade which identify it as a lament; and of course the waltzes and barcarolles which infuse extended works such as the scherzos and ballades. It goes without saying that Chopin's music will not be confined by the vagaries and fashions of scholarship. It will always remain larger than any of our attempts to describe it. But that will not stop us trying.

Chopin, Fryderyk Franciszek

WORKS

Edition: F.F. Chopin: Dziela wszystkie [Complete works], ed. I.J. Paderewski (Warsaw and Krakó w, 1949–61) [P]Catalogues: M.J.E. Brown: Chopin: an Index of his Works in Chronological Order (London, 1960, rev. 2/1972) [B]J.M. Chomiń ski and T.D. Turł o: Katalog dzieł Fryderyka Chopina (Warsaw, 1990) [CT]K. Kobylań ska: Rę kopisy utworó w Chopina: Katalog (Krakó w, 1977; Ger. trans., 1979) [KK]A. Koptiajew: ‘Najdiennyji sbornik junoszeskich proizwiedienij Szopiena’ [Newly discovered collection of Chopin’s early works], Birż ewje Wiedomosti, no. 12320 (St Petersburg, 1911) [Koptiajew]

Collections of photographs of MSS are in the Chopin Institute, Warsaw, and A-Wn. The number in the German translation of Kobylań ska’s catalogue (KK), with a roman-numeral prefix, is given for works without opus number.

piano solo

piano four hands

two pianos

chamber

piano with orchestra

solo songs

arrangements, transcriptions

other works

Chopin, Fryderyk Franciszek: Works