This article explores two different perspectives on Chopin’s music from the 1920s – those of Lucien Bourguès and Alexandre Denéréaz, on one hand, and Leonid Sabaneev, on the other. The former approach displays a psychological character, so it is descriptive and focusses on such aspects as the expression and symbolic content of a work, while the latter studies the work primarily as a system of proportions, thereby constituting a form of mathematical poetics. Ostensibly confrontational, these scholarly standpoints actually represent elements in a bigger, all-embracing system of phenomenological thought which characterised that period in cultural history.
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