Imagining What Chopin May Have Heard

As I prepare to perform a rather obscure Chopin Polonaise in E-flat minor (Op. 26, No. 2) I cannot help but notice that I was drawn to this by the Polonaises of W.F. Bach, which have been on my recital series this summer. 

There are essentially two types of Chopin Polonaises: the familiar and the unfamiliar.  The familiar make sense in the light of later 19th-century works by other composers.  The less familiar make sense in the light of works Chopin may have heard as a young man--the W.F. Bach, for example--works that almost no one plays these days because they are so bizarre.

Bizarre means that they don't fit the models of post-Classical structure we are taught in music schools.

The Surface of the Sound

This evening a performance of Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings is taking place in Central Park.  As a college student I used to listen to the recording made by Britten's friend Peter Pears.  I knew it so well I could sing it by heart.

Years later when I heard a live performance I was shocked to realize that I had furnished all the bass sonorities out of my own imagination:  they were so non-present in the pre-stereo-era recording that I had simply made them up.

I wonder how much our sense of music is restricted to the treble?  Even with more sophisticated recording equipment most of our listening is through ear-plugs or in some way confined inside of metal boxes which greatly reduce the range of audibility.

Let's Hear It for YouTube

Since childhood every time there is a summer downpour I relive a choral piece that was sung at the Ravenswood Presbyterian Church in Chicago, under the direction of an inspired musician, Miss Lora M. Bell.  She retired when I was seven, so figure out how many years it has been since I last heard the piece live.

When it pours rain, as it did yesterday, I sing it: "As torrents in summer [arise]* in their channels....suddenly rise, suddenly rise though the sky has been cloudless."

So yesterday I looked it up on the Internet and sure enough, there is a beautiful YouTube performance; music by Edward Elgar to a text by Longfellow.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtYLFai-pX4 

Imagine having the wisdom to program music so unforgettable that it would continue to nurture lo! these many years.

*This is my phonetic memory at work:  the real words are "half-dried in their channels,"

Beethoven Op. 10 and Op. 11

I keep a time line of all Beethoven works where I can consult it at any time.  A wow moment this morning!

Op. 10, No. 3 is the Piano Sonata in D major which begins with the tonic as an accented upbeat white key octave slurred to an unaccented leading tone (C#) downbeat black key octave.  So many contradictions and nothing has even happened yet!

Hmmmmm: I reached for my time line.  Sure enough, the piece this was calling to mind was Op. 11, the Trio in B-flat for Piano, Clarinet, and Cello which begins with the three instruments playing in octaves: F (the clarinet's favorite note); F-sharp (fabulous on the piano); G (every cellist's favorite note).

In both cases the composition begins with a stark unlikelihood.  Acoustical fun and games.  And they were written in the same year.

I Want You to Hear This, Emphasis on the "You"

Lately I have been discussing with friends and colleagues how I have managed to teach a severely challenged young man how to produce some moments of extraordinary beauty on the piano.

Though it is impossible to describe the process, one of the critical aspects has been my insistence that he hear the content of the piece in great detail: not just the chord but the potential voicing of the chord.  This requires a finesse to which he seems to have access only via his ear.  But it must speak to him or he would not persevere in the process of learning to play the music and he would just refuse to come to work on it.

I am struck by the lack of that element in most of our training: We are expected to play to a random audience at best; at worst to an audience of critics who will "tear us to shreds."  Most of our playing is otherwise unfocused.  We are trained to show off.

I remember Rubinstein walking on stage for an encore, looking down into the audience where there was a young girl with dark blond hair.  After a smile he launched into The Girl With the Flaxen Hair by Debussy.

Something similar happened to me once.  I was seated in the front row at a lieder recital by Thomas Quasthof.  After his first encore (My Way) he began An die Musik by Franz Schubert.  I had to cover my face; I cried through the whole thing.  When it was over I glanced up; looking me straight in the eye he said "Thank you."

First Loss: The Reversal of Logic

Schumann's "First Loss" in Album for the Young is a brilliant one-page study in what is so challenging about reading music.

• The accents are on the wrong beats of the bar
• The slurs, for the most part, extend over the bar line
• The black keys drown out the white keys
• The notes of resolution are not arrival points

The whole thing is about disappointment. 

What Is There To Analyze?

Since I no longer teach theoretical concepts to my piano students I notice that they play with greater perception already at first sight--sometimes with greater perception than I bring to the same piece even after years of acquaintance with it!

How can that be?

Partly in search of an answer I looked yesterday at Schnabel's edition of the Beethoven "Moonlight" sonata.  The edition is famous for a couple of things: most helpfully, he numbers the phrase lengths.  These are often quite difficult to ascertain and it is extremely helpful to the young pianist to know that the difficulty is real in that a great interpreter of Beethoven has thus substantiated it.

The other thing is to me somewhat shocking: he puts in pedalings and fingerings that correspond to the most rigid visual analysis but which leave little room for actual sound.  For example, the very beginning consists of whole notes in the left hand with those famous triplets in the right hand several measures before that mysterious other line enters in the treble.  Is it the melody?  Schnabel clearly thinks so.

I do not agree.  To me the melody is in the left hand octaves inside of which -- senza sordini !!! -- i.e., with pedal -- the triplets melt and out of which the eerie treble line emerges as from another sound medium.  It is Beethoven's indication that the movement is to be played without dampers.

Only a purely visual analysis yields the other, more typical result, which I find not just inadequate but boring.

Then how can I say that Schnabel was a great Beethoven interpreter?  Clearly his playing turned a whole generation of pianists onto this repertoire:  it must have been exciting.  Does the edition correspond to his playing?  Only someone who had heard him live would know because even the recordings are suspect, in my opinion, since he didn't want to make recordings, who knows exactly for what reason and what his reactions were to the recordings once made.