Chopin Review

Review of Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger: Frédéric Chopin et ses amis musiciens français

David Kasunic — 2024-08-12

Review of The Chopin Games: History of the International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in 1927–2015. Edited by Paweł Majewski; translated by Tomasz Zymer

Lisa McCormick — 2024-08-12

Review of The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism. Edited by Benedict Taylor

Michał Kuziak — 2024-08-12

A ‘Narrow-Keyed’ Pleyel: The Ergonomics of Chopin’s Interface

Dylan Henderson — 2024-08-12

Over the course of his 39-year life, Fryderyk Chopin discovered a new tactile relationship with the keyboard, developing a choreography for the hands that has never been equalled. Running parallel to these developments, keyboard instruments were themselves undergoing an extraordinary revolution, as manufacturers altered their designs, materials and construction processes in response to the ever-evolving tastes of composers, critics and audiences. Chopin came into contact with pianos from all of the leading manufacturers of his era, and was keenly aware of their divergent aesthetics. For him, the piano was a compositional tool as necessary as quills and ink; the keyboard itself a crucial interface between the aural conception inside his head, its documentation on paper and its actualisation in sound.
One of the most intriguing – yet problematic – observations of one of Chopin’s pianos from the early 1840s comes from the Baltic writer and amateur musician Wilhelm von Lenz, who observed the composer performing and teaching on a ‘light-touch, narrowkeyed, Pleyel’. The evidence to support Lenz’s observation has, thus far, been largely anecdotal, yet today, almost all pianos of Chopin’s time are assumed to have narrower keys than their modern counterparts, despite a lack of empirical evidence. By comparing the key measurements of instruments associated with the composer with other examples from their time, this essay contemplates the extent to which the ergonomics of the keyboard changed over Chopin’s lifetime, and offers some preliminary conclusions of causality between instrument, compositional process and notation.

On Chopin Editions as Discrete Sources: The Baudissin-Henkel-Pusch Exemplar of the Etudes, Op. 10

Jeffrey Kallberg — 2024-08-12

While scholarly writing on printed sources of Chopin’s music typically focuses on the class to which that source belongs (say, the second state of the French first edition of the Ballade, Op. 23), this article proposes to tackle the reception history of Chopin through a discrete, individual printed source. The article proposes a brief microhistory of an individual exemplar, to situate it in a network that does not necessarily afford the composer a governing role. The source in question is a copiously annotated exemplar of the Kistner edition of the Etudes, Op. 10. Inscriptions on the title page inform us that Wolf Graf von Baudissin presented it as a gift to Heinrich Henkel in 1838. At some later date, Heinrich Henkel gave it to his daughter Sophie Henkel, who in 1931 presented it to her colleague Henri Pusch. The annotations in the edition help uncover interesting stories, narratives that reveal a largely unrecognized connection between Chopin and an important German diplomat and translator, and that help us understand better how pianists actually engaged with Chopin’s musical texts in the first century of their existence.

Two Perspectives on the Music of Fryderyk Chopin from the 1920s: Lucien Bourguès and Alexandre Denéréaz (1921) and Leonid L. Sabaneev (1925–1927)

Michał Bristiger — 2024-08-12

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.

Musical Contacts Between the Polish and Jewish Communities and the Image of Jewish Culture in Nineteenth-Century Polish Popular Music

Tomasz Nowak — 2024-08-12

Enduring contacts between Polish and Jewish communities on Polish soil began to take shape around the turn of the thirteenth century, initiating a period of many centuries of mutual cultural and musical influence. Extant sources, although few and far between (normative documents, chronicles, journalistic accounts, commentaries from observers and scholars, iconography, sheet music, recorded music and films), enable us to follow the development of the mutual musical relations between the two national groups over time. Yet this article concentrates primarily on the state of those relations during the nineteenth century, limited to popular culture. Taking the works of Oskar Kolberg as an example, we will discuss the repertoire of the Jewish community at that time, as perceived and received by the Polish community. This will be followed by a presentation of Jewish music groups that played for Poles as well, and also of particularly popular Jewish musicians who were singled out by journalists at that time. The article also presents the way in which Jews and their musical culture were depicted by Polish journalists and portrayed in the musical expression of representatives of rural and urban communities.
The article shows that the image of Jews and their musical culture among different strata of Polish society during the nineteenth century varied a great deal. The virtuosity of Jewish musicians aroused interest and admiration among the Polish intelligentsia and acquired a mythologised personification in the literary figure of Jankiel. Lower social strata, when taking up Jewish strands in their musical expression, were often reacting to conflicts of interest experienced in their contacts with Jews representing a pre-capitalist economy. Jews in ritual and everyday situations constituted important ritual symbols bringing in wealth, and their very presence in theatrical forms was perceived partly as evidence of the veracity of biblical events. References to Jewish culture in the musical expression of the Polish community were confined to the most common stereotypes, which attests to the superficiality of the contacts between the two communities. Against that background, the actual idiom of Jewish music was far better understood, imitated and copied.

A Polish Patriot in Paris: Albert Sowiński, Essayist, Anthologist and Lexicographer

Virginia E. Whealton — 2024-08-12

If there was one musician in mid-nineteenth-century Paris who diligently promoted Polish accomplishments, it was Albert Sowinski (Wojciech Sowiński). From his arrival in France in 1828 until his death in 1880, he championed the Polish cause as a performer, composer and scholar. Sowinski was a prolific writer, but with the exception of his Les musiciens polonais et slaves, anciens et modernes, Dictionnaire (1857), his studies of Polish repertoire rarely receive more than passing attention in modern scholarship. In this essay, I investigate Sowinski’s developing paradigms of Polish nationalism and Polish identity across the entirety of his major writings about and collections of Polish music: Chants polonais nationaux et populaires (1830), Chants de la révolution du 29 novembre 1830 (1830), Mélodies polonaises album lyrique (1833), ‘Chants populaires de l’Ukraine’ (1842), ‘De l’état actuel de la musique en Pologne’ (1842), Dictionnaire (1857) and Chants religieux de la Pologne, Op. 93 (1859).

The four works from the 1830s, which focused on Polish folk music and revolutionary songs, were closely tied to Sowinski’s work with Léonard Chodzko (Leonard Chodźko) and his circle in Paris. Especially in the Chants polonais, Sowinski followed Chodzko and Joachim Lelewel in emphasising the exceptional geographic, linguistic and even ethnic diversity of the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, viewing this diversity as the basis for a glorious musical and political future. By contrast, in his critical writings of the 1840s, Sowinski interpreted Ukraine’s folk traditions as speaking largely to regional experience; he cast Warsaw and its musical institutions as the basis for a modern Polish musical identity. By the time of his Dictionnaire and Chants religieux de la Pologne, Sowinski de-emphasised Poland’s musical exceptionality in favour of delineating its long tradition of exchange with Western Europe, facilitated particularly through courts and the Roman Catholic Church.