Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Just for those totally devoted to Chopin

That's pretty recent - try checking four or five pages back.

The "Ill Bethisad" Chopin can be found here:
http://ib.frath.net/w/Chopin
I find this hilarious, despite a couple of parts I'd have done differently. Check out their other historical figures, too. (Their Nikola Tesla had a much easier time than ours, but their Oscar Wilde did not.) And their versions of Hillary Clinton. Don't know where they find the time to write this stuff... oh, they're not busy obsessing over their favorite composer....

I guess the Berceuse could be called abstract, more or less, and certainly experimental, but it's not at all atonal, not like the "modern," early 20th century stuff that can be difficult to listen to; if anything it's sort of hyper-tonal, since it hangs around the tonic chord so much of the time.

Elene

I only caught the end of Performance Today just now. They put a terrific end to the Birthday Month with the most gloriously exuberant rendition I've ever heard of the Krakowiak from the E minor concerto, from the March 1 concert in Warsaw. Garrick Ohlsson and the Warsaw Philharmonic pulled out all the stops. Check it out on the PT website.

There are also more posts up on My Performance Today of Chopin recordings by listeners. For quite a while there were only two others besides mine... surprising, I thought.

I'm going to miss all the Chopin, Barber, and Bach. The shows stay up on the Web for a week after the broadcasts, though.

Elene

Thanks for this, Elene. I enjoyed listening to Ohlsson's performance again, and also (for the first time) to Blechacz on the first half of the PT program.

On this same first half, in the amusing "Piano Puzzler" segment, I was struck with the confidence with which both the host and the pianist asserted that the sense of "Minute" in the "Minute Waltz" was to do with size (my-NEWT) rather than time ("minute" = "60 seconds"). Though there's doubtless more to discover, my research so far suggests the title arose in a German-speaking land in the later 1870s: the title "Der Minuten-Walzer" appears around this time only in German, even when it is programmed in England. (And there is some puzzlement about which piece it applies to, which suggests to me that the title was relatively new around then.) And "Minuten" in German refers to the time concept; the size-concept would (I think) require "minuzioes" (that should be an umlaut over the "o").

So if we're going to use the title, the cartoons probably have it right: think "60 seconds" rather than "tiny".

Jeff Kallberg

I wondered that myself - I tried copying the info to my own document so I could save it and go back to it later. And I fixed my copy. It seems like I found an extra < b/ > character after the < /a > where it didn't belong, as well as the one at the end of the line where it should be - resulting in the extra space showing up after the invisible link code so it's not apparent what's causing it.

Wow, that was cryptic! Sorry about that-- to explain: I'm still back on page 66, and this is referring to the index loveschopintoomuch was working on.

Jeff K, why not write to Fred Child (the PT host) regarding the meaning of "minute"?

I think most, if not all, of us have probably thought that the word came from French. I don't know exactly where we got the idea that it meant minute in the sense of small, but it seems like that's been written someplace or other, more than once.

I refer to it as "the D flat waltz," "Opus 64 Number 1," or "the so-called Minute Waltz."

Elene

there are more peices i found quite "modern" for the time they written,
i whould say prelude no.18, prelude no. 22 and the op.35 sonata finale, are quite modern for their era...ofcourse there are more, i just listened to them today and had tell you what i think ;), ofcourse theres the devill trill prelude, which we had the luck that dr. j. kallberg researched on it, which is extremly modern to my ears....what do you think?

When I was practicing 10/6, I often thought, "Good grief, this is only the early 1830s!"

I guess we can't even imagine what he's composing these days.

I was sad to see the Birthday Month coming to an end, but there's a consolation: Today is Rachmaninov's birthday. And I didn't see that coming either. And PT isn't doing a single piece of his today! But there are a couple of items of possible interest to us on the PT calendar:

April 1
1866 -- Italian pianist, composer, and teacher Ferruccio Busoni is born in Empoli.
1873 -- Russian piano virtuoso and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff is born on his family's estate near Oneg.
1902 -- Debussy's Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun has its North American premiere in Boston, seven years after it was first heard in Paris.
1930 -- Ninety-two-year-old Cosima Wagner dies in Bayreuth, 47 years after her husband, Richard Wagner's death.
1952 -- Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad makes her final performance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
1954 -- Aaron Copland's opera The Tender Land has its premiere in New York City.
1976 -- President Ford awards pianist Artur Rubinstein the United States Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given a civilian.
1979 -- Percussionist Fred Child breaks his castanets during an improvised cadenza while performing Boccherini's "Fandango" Quintet, and finishes the piece by using a folding metal chair as an impromptu instrument.

Busoni is not someone I'm very familiar with, but just in the past week I heard his complex, extensive, heavily virtuosic variations on 28/20, which I didn't know existed. It's worth checking out.

Elene

As far as modern pieces go, the Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano (Opus 8) sounds modern to me . . . the date I have for it is 1828/29 but it sounds so different from everything else he wrote at that time.

Lord, I had not idea Cosima was still around in 1930! She must've watched Hitler's rise with interest.

The folding chair was a nice touch, Elene. The show must go on!

April 1 is also notable for being the birthday of Rachael Maddow (commentator), Randy Orton (wrestler), Debbie Reynolds (actress), and William Harvey (scientist who discovered the circulation of the blood).

It is the date on which Scott Joplin (composer) and Martha Graham (choregrapher) passed from this world.

A 1905 view of Chopin (be prepared to cringe a bit)

Chopin the Revolutionaire

"Chopin the Poet.
Yes, the Chopin of the Nocturnes, of the slower moving Preludes, of the C-sharp minor or A-flat major Etudes, of the Berceuse, is, after all, the real, the essential Chopin! And when his name is mentioned in our hearing, it is those works we remember first. The tramp of horsehoof and the clatter of arms, though frequent enough in his works, somehow recede from our memory to give precedence to his calmer, more resigned, more reconciled moods. And when our thoughts turn to his Valses and simpler Mazurkas, it seems as if a faint smile were stealing through his tears, a smile half bitter and half hopeful, like the smile of Heine."

I think of those particular pieces as being "the real, the essential Chopin." But I think I'm still not "getting" the Polish nationalism - I've heard that his Mazurkas and Polonaises express the core of being - and I've yet to spend much time with any of those yet, especially the Mazurkas. They're still undiscovered territory that I'm saving for . . . sometime.

I've seen Chopin and Heine compared before, as in, Chopin is to music what Heine is to poetry. It makes me want to read Heine.

A well-known quote, but worth reminding:

If the autocratic, mighty monarch of the North [the Tsar] knew what a dangerous foe was threatening him in these utterly simple mazurka melodies, he would doubtless ban this music. The works of Chopin are cannons concealed amongst flowers. — Robert Schumann

JAS, was not the Polonaise in any form banned at one point in time?

Hi everyone
Here is today's FB post from Jack Gibbons who writes:

"For me this is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed, the largo from Chopin's Sonata in B minor.

The audio is accompanied by a slide show of pictures of Chopin, and of George Sand’s chateau at Nohant where Chopin began writing the Sonata... in the summer of 1844."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReRf2IbSK7A

I've never heard of it.

In 19th century, polonaise was an established international salon dance, danced also at the Tsar court. It was also present in works by composers of many countries, including Russia (Tchaikovsky). So I think such a ban would not be sufficiently specific.

OTOH, the Russian authorities were known for their stupidity. At one time the Botanical Garden in Warsaw was visited by a high-rank official who demanded all plants to be replanted in the order of their height. Fortunately, he left Warsaw soon afterwards and the gardeners managed to restore the proper planting locations before much harm had been done.

So I don't exclude that one overzealous bureaucrat might have issued such ban.

I think I work for this guy.

Re Polonaise - I must've been thinking about WWII.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow is a Chopin tune??