Chopin and the Dark Forest of the Self

Above is a video of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli playing Chopin.   It is not, perhaps, the most compelling performance of the first Ballade, but seeing him play is wonderful.  As a pianist I can tell you it is technical perfection: the stillness of the upper body, the posture, the position of the hands. Then there's the way he looks: perfectly tailored, impeccably trimmed mustache, the slightly raised eyebrows.  The concert artist as matinée idol.

The piece itself is at the core of Polanski's "The Pianist."  Adrien Brody's character plays it in the abandoned chateau -- or rather plays most of it, it's slightly abridged.  None of the reviews I read comment on the centrality of Chopin to the movie.  And Chopin is in a way the first musical exemplar of tragic nationalism. 

Jeremy Denk  has an illuminating discussion Chopin whom he defends as a "serious" composer. He says  "I told Mitsuko Uchida once that I might have trouble choosing between Chopin and Schubert, and the storm that crossed her brow would have shut down the airports for days." 

Uchida's a great musician and pianist.  Her repertory is the epitome of the serious musician -- with serious meaning Austro-German.  She's much more demonstrative -- showy --  than Michelangeli, but recording the Schoenberg piano concerto is about as serious as you can get.  I would hate to think or her as a philistine, which is what Denk's report makes her look like.

Of course the discussion "Chopin vs. Schubert" is kind of like "Who would win, Predator or  Wolverine?"  So maybe her reaction was to how silly the question is. 

In any case, Denk then proceeds to a very good analysis of the Polanise-Fantasy with excerpts from the score and sound snippets -- part of a larger argument for the importance of Chopin as a serious composer.  It makes me want to hear him play the piece.  I once heard Richard Goode, a close colleague of Uchida's at Marlboro and also echt serious, play it at Macky Auditorium in Boulder on a lovely spring afternoon with the sun streaming in and he played it very beautifully.

It does seem that pianists celebrated for their Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert do not excel at Chopin.  Brendel, a very sober musician, recorded the Liszt sonata, but no Chopin as far as I know.  

In any case, it's possible that today more pianists excel at Schubert than Chopin.  Odd, because no composer is kinder to the pianist than Chopin.

Here is an extended quote from Theodore Adorno on Chopin, which makes the case better than anybody:


"Chopin's form is no more concerned with the development of the whole through a series of minute transitions than with the representation of a single free-standing thematic complex.  It is as remote from Wagner's dnyamic thrust as from the landscape of Schubert....he (removes) himself , as it were from the flow of the composition and directing it from the outside.  He does not high-handedly create the form, nor does he allow it to crumple before the onslaught of the themes.  Rather, he conducts the themes in their passage through time. The aristocratic nature of his music may reside less in the psychological tone than in the gesture of knightly melancholy with which the subject renounces the attempt to impose its dynamism and carry it through.  With eyes averted, lake a bride, the objective theme is safely guided through the dark forest of the self, through the torrential river of the passions.  Nowhere more beautifully than in the A-flat ballade, where the creative idea, once it has made its appearance like a Schubert melody, is taken by the hand and conducted through an infinite vista of inwardness and over abysses of expressive harmonics where it finds its way to its second confirming appearance. In Chopin paraphrase and doubtless every kind of associated virtuosity is the resigned expression of historical tact."

Here's Moritz Rosenthal: