Water Profile: Frédéric Chopin "The Poet of the Piano"

Frédéric Chopin | Portrait Credit: Eugène Delacroix

Romantic Era composer, Frédéric Chopin, known as "the poet of the piano" became famous in Paris, first for his private piano performances at the musical soirees of the aristocracy and social elite. Even though his keyboard style was uniquely individual, highly stylized and often technically demanding, his piano performances were noted for their nuance and sensitivity. During his short lifetime, despite giving only 30 public performances Chopin was regarded as the greatest piano virtuoso of his time.

There is something fundamentally personal and at the same time so very masterly in his playing that he may be called a really perfect virtuoso.

~ Felix Mendelssohn

Chopin supported himself by teaching piano and selling his compositions. He wrote etudes to teach his own piano technique, like playing double thirds (Op. 25, No. 6), playing in octaves (Op. 25, No. 10), and playing repeated notes (Op. 10, No. 7). When speaking of his etudes, Chopin said, “I have written a big technical exercise in my own special manner.” Etude Op. 25 No. 12, known simply as "Ocean" beautifully demonstrates the arpeggio technique while dramatically depicting the rolling of the great deep and the crashing of the waves on the high sea.

Chopin is the pianist's pianist. All of the surviving 230 compositions include the piano, the majority of which are for solo piano. Chopin also wrote two piano concertos, a few chamber pieces and some songs to Polish lyrics. His major piano works include sonatas, mazurkas, waltzes, nocturnes, polonaises, etudes, impromptus, scherzos and preludes, some of which were published posthumously after his death at the age of 39 of tuberculosis. When he performed his musical compositions at intimate gatherings in private homes, he would often wait to play until late at night. The privileged auditors were treated to Chopin's nocturnes, a new genre he developed to a high level of sophistication, at midnight. The following clip in which Chopin plays one of his nocturnes, is from the 1945 movie entitled, A Song to Remember.

A particularly productive time was spent with feminist novelist, George Sand on the remote island of Majorca in the Mediterranean Sea. The stormy lovers spent a miserable four months on the island where Chopin wrote many compositions for the piano. Etude Op. 25 No. 11 was inspired by the cold and wet weather on the island during the winter of 1838-1839. In another scene from A Song to Remember, Chopin, plays the etude nicknamed "Winter Wind".

Sand writes a first hand account of Chopin's excruciating writing process:

His music was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without seeking it, without previous intimation of it. It came upon his piano sudden, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he was impatient to hear it himself with the help of the instrument. But then began the most desperate labor that I have ever witnessed. It was a succession of efforts, hesitations and moments of impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he could hear; what he had conceived as one piece, he analyzed too much in trying to write it down, and his dismay at his inability to rediscover it in what he thought was its original purity threw him into a kind of despair. He would lock himself up in his room for whole days, weeping, pacing back and forth, breaking his pens, repeating or changing one bar a hundred times, writing and erasing it as many times, and beginning again the next day with an infinite and desperate perseverance. He sometimes spent six weeks on one page, only in the end to write it exactly as he had sketched at the first draft.

~ George Sand

During his brief stay on the island, Chopin finished a collection of 24 preludes, establishing a new genre of his own. Chopin's preludes, Op. 28, are a set of short pieces for the piano, one in each of the twenty-four keys, each conveying a specific idea or emotion. Some of the preludes included "The Storm", "Snow" and "Raindrop". The following is George Sand's account of the night Chopin wrote the longest of the preludes, which has come to be known as the "Raindrop Prelude".

There is one that came to him through an evening of dismal rain—it casts the soul into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had left him in good health one morning to go shopping in Palma for things we needed at our "encampment." The rain came in overflowing torrents. We made three leagues in six hours, only to return in the middle of a flood. We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful prelude. Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, "Ah, I was sure that you were dead." When he recovered his spirits and saw the state we were in, he was ill, picturing the dangers we had been through, but he confessed to me that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguishing the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy. While playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself, he saw himself drown in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should interpret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might—and he was right to—against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky.

~ George Sand

Besides the "Raindrop Prelude", many of Chopin's other compositions for the piano were given a nickname. Op. 28, Prelude No. 4, known simply as "Suffocation", has been featured in the film, The Notebook and the book, Fifty Shades of Grey. Other descriptive titles, invented by listeners, are the "Minute Waltz", the "Military Polonaise" and "The Funeral March" from the Piano Sonata No. 2 which was played at Chopin's gravesite in Paris in 1849. A live performance of the "Revolutionary" Etude played by Evgeny Kissin is worth a listen.

The life and work of Chopin highlights aspects of the Water personal element.

Wanderlust: Travel, Expatriatism & Immigration

A child prodigy growing up in Warsaw, Chopin knew what he wanted to do with his life from an early age. His mother was his first piano teacher and by the age of seven he was already composing his own music. After completing his musical education, he left Poland and traveled to Austria on an educational expedition. Four weeks later, political unrest broke out in Poland and his European trip left him in exile. Chopin stayed in Vienna for eight months giving concerts before going to Paris. He never returned to Poland, becoming one of the many expatriates of the Polish Great Immigration. In 1835, he received his French citizenship, but despite his father's French ancestry, Chopin never considered himself French. He was a Pole at heart and to honor his dying wish, although his body was buried in Paris, his heart, preserved in alcohol, was taken back to Warsaw.

Life Center: Career & Life Path

Chopin pursued a career in music as a solo pianist, piano teacher and piano composer. When Chopin first arrived in Paris at the age of 21, he couldn't get the music publishers to purchase his musical compositions. Influential acquaintances, who later became dear friends invited him to perform at small gatherings of the rich and famous in the intimate settings of their grand homes. Within a year he became a celebrity and frequent guest at French salons. His compositions became popular and he became a well sought after piano teacher. Teaching piano allowed Chopin to afford to give up the concert circuit that he despised and abandon the great halls that did not lend themselves well to his intricately styled and intimate performance technique. Soon he was able to focus more of his time and energy on writing music than performing it.

Chopin loved to play his music, but not for large audiences. Of  being a concert pianist, Chopin said, "They want me to give another concert but I have no desire to do so. You cannot imagine what a torture the three days before a public appearance are to me."

La France Musicale wrote, "Chopin is a pianist of conviction. He composes for himself, plays for himself and everyone listens with interest, with delight, with infinite pleasure. Listen how he dreams, how he weeps, with what sweetness, tenderness and melancholy he sings, how perfectly he expresses the gentlest and loftiest feelings."

Chopin enjoyed a quiet life of creativity, self-expression and travel. He had many admirers, benefactors and famous friends, many of whom were artistic and literary geniuses of the Romantic Era. They would gather in small informal groups at his Paris apartment where he spent his most of his time teaching, composing, collaborating with other artists and entertaining his guests.

Chopin spent a lot of time alone with his thoughts and expressed his feelings through his music. He said, "I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness. And yet I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them...Sometimes I can only groan, suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano!" In a letter, he wrote, "It is dreadful when something weighs on your mind, not to have a soul to unburden yourself to. You know what I mean. I tell my piano the things I used to tell you."  Infused with feelings of loss and longing, much of his music sounds like an private internal dialogue; musings that put the listener into a contemplative state and send them into an out of body experience.

Chopin was a very quiet, serious and private man. He did not discuss or give any literal explanation of his compositions. His music spoke for itself, leaving others to answer their own inquiries and imagine and interpret its meaning for themselves.

Chopin has written two wonderful mazurkas which are worth more than forty novels and are more eloquent than the entire century's literature.

~ George Sand

Chopin's music was greatly influenced by his love of opera. He channeled the grandeur and drama of operatic narratives into his larger works; his ballades, fantasies and sonatas. He especially loved the bel canto Italian style of classical singing and the purity and exquisite quality of the classically trained female voice. His first love was a Polish opera singer by the name of Constanze whom he met at the Warsaw Conservatory and accompanied for her recitals. In Paris, he met a great many vocalists, many of whom inspired him to emulate the singing qualities of intonation, legato, vibrato and trilling in his piano music and cantabile style of piano playing. Among these great ladies of song were prima donnas: Delphina Potocka, composer and mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot, superb vocal technician soprano Laure Cinti-Damoreau and the "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind.

Music was his language, the divine tongue through which he expressed a whole realm of sentiments that only the select few can appreciate... The muse of his homeland dictates his songs, and the anguished cries of Poland lend to his art a mysterious, indefinable poetry which, for all those who have truly experienced it, cannot be compared to anything else... The piano alone was not sufficient to reveal all that lies within him. In short he is a most remarkable individual who commands our highest degree of devotion.

~ Franz Liszt

In the words of George Sand, Chopin was “a revolution in the language of music and with only one instrument.” Chopin's melodic compositions and technique could make the piano sing with an aura of sound that clothed each note in a symphony of overtones, a coat of many colors. He is the creator of ornamental fioritura, a coloratura type of "singing with the fingers" technique, produced through schromaticism, harmonic languaging, the extended scope and imaginative use of the left hand, and pedal work that included half and quarter pedaling for nuance of dimension and fluidity of lyrical line. His own unique piano technique and teaching methodology introduced a freer posture at the piano, novel hand coordination and a delicate but precise stroke of the keys that looked like a well choreographed work of performance art.

It was an unforgettable picture to see Chopin sitting at the piano like a clairvoyant, lost in his dreams; to see how his visioncommunicated itself through his playing, and how, at the end of each piece, he had the sad habit of running one finger over the length of the plaintive keyboard, as though to tear himself forcibly away from his dream.

~ Robert Schumann

Chopin's compositions are some of the most difficult piano music to play.  Of his own music, Chopin said, "I feel like a novice, just as I felt before I knew anything of the keyboard. It is far too original, and I shall end up not being able to learn it myself." He frequently used the entire range of the keyboard, passages in double octaves, swiftly repeated notes and grace notes, the use of contrasting rhythms and rubato, a divergence from strict rhythm.

In a review of his playing, La Revue Musicale wrote, "Here is a young man, abandoning himself to his natural impressions and without taking a model, has found, if not a complete renewal of pianoforte music, at least a part of what has been sought in vain for a long time - namely an abundance of original ideas of which the type is to be found nowhere."

Completion Number: One

Chopin never married or had any children. He was briefly engaged to a young Polish woman named Maria. When the engagement was broken by her mother, Chopin collected the letters from his betrothed and wrote on the parcel in Polish, "My Tragedy".

Upon meeting the woman who would become the great love of his life, Chopin said, "I have met a great celebrity, Madame Dudevant, known as George Sand...Her appearance is not to my liking. Indeed there is something about her which positively repels me...What an unattractive person La Sand is...Is she really a woman? I'm inclined to doubt it."

After pursuing Chopin for two years, his infamous affair with George Sand began in the summer of 1838. They spent their first winter in Majorca, Spain where Chopin took ill due to the harsh weather and then convalesced first in Barcelona and then for a lengthier period of time in Marseilles. The lovers summered at Madame Sand's estate in Nohant and wintered in Paris, living side by side in adjoining but separate apartments. Chopin never regained his health and Sand became more of a nurse than a lover. In 1847, after Sand's novel Lucrezia Floriani was published, Chopin quietly ended the ten year relationship after receiving a letter from Sand that referred to their romance as an "exclusive friendship".

Life Cycle: Death

Toward the end of his life, Chopin turned quite morbid. Some of the names given to the preludes finished on the Island of Majorca are: "Presentiment of Death", "Desperation", "Suicide", and "Hades". When speaking about the incompetent doctors who attended him on Majorca he said, "Three doctors have visited me ...The first said I was dead; the second said I was dying; and the third said I was about to die". As Chopin's illness progressed, Sand referred to Chopin as, her "third child," a "little angel," a "sufferer" and a "beloved little corpse". When the affair with Sand had officially ended and a former piano pupil and benefactress confessed her hopes of marrying Chopin, he said that he was "closer to the grave than the nuptial bed". In October of 1848, a year before his death, Chopin wrote out his last will and testament and said it was "a kind of disposition to be made of my stuff in the future, if I should drop dead somewhere".

Water elements are called "The Visionary".  Listen to Chopin's Prelude No. 9, called "Vision".

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