Chopin is not my favorite composer. His music is deceptively complicated, but his expression is simple. He expresses primary emotions. Like any decent writer should, my everyday listening is to composers whose emotions are complicated: Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Mozart, Faure, Vaughan Williams, Janacek, Bartok, Mahler, Shostakovich and Beethoven.
I have written about my problems with Chopin before. I've always felt you could hear his well-recalled snobbery baked into the music. It's music for the 'in-crowd' who have the luxury and good looks to constantly pursue romantic affairs. Brahms is for the nerds, Chopin is for the cool kids.
There are certain great composers, particularly among romantics, whom I've always felt have written with an eye to the mass market. There's nothing wrong with the mass market if that's to whom you want to appeal, but if that's whom you want to appeal to, the appeal must be instant, further contemplation can be pursued, but it is not required to appreciate its appeal, and it ultimately must not challenge or confront the listener. It is a forerunner of the 20th century's popular culture, and in that sense, Chopin is a composer of popular music, Verdi is a pop composer, Liszt is definitely a pop composer (not the late stuff in either case of Verdi or Liszt...), even Schubert wrote many lieder with an ear to the mass market. Even Mozart wrote a work as towering as The Magic Flute with an ear to giving the public exactly what they wanted. Obviously certain composers wrote who are still thought of as 'pop': Rossini, Offenbach, Johann Strauss, and that's what they meant to be.
There is nothing wrong with popular music. In so many ways, it's harder to make great entertainment than great art. Art may forgive technical sloppiness, entertainment rarely does because if it's seams show, it doesn't entertain. Furthermore, just as there are many classical composers who aim for entertainment as much as great art, there are many musicians from popular genres who aim for great art as much as entertainment. Anybody who denies the title of 'great artist' to Miles Davis or Charles Mingus, Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits, misunderstands art.
But one of the great advantages of pop music is that it depends far more upon the individuality of the performer. Every time you hear a Chopin nocturne on two recitals in close proximity, every time a new singer takes a major role mid-run of a Verdi opera, it's a completely different piece. Listen to five performers do a Chopin nocturne, the emotional meaning of the piece can become unrecognizable from performance to performance.
When Rubinstein does Chopin's B-Flat Minor Nocturne, it's almost completely metronomic, but he finds a new color for every chord change, and the phrases expand and contract with coital eros. It is sexy, it is cast with magic, it is wafted with perfume. When Maurizio Pollini does it, he follows the score quite closely (though not entirely) and takes the metronome marking of 116 to the quarter literally (did Chopin do the MM's or was it an editor?), and sometimes pushes a strigendo quite beyond the marking. Forte and fortissimo markings are truly loud, and frankly so are the piano and pianissimi. Like most things Pollini, I find it a frustrating performance. It's not a bad performance, sadly I find Moravec truly bad and boring and I love many things Moravec does (note: on second hearing it's not bad, but the dynamic contrasts are marginal except at the end and the rubato yo-yos all over the place for flimsy reasons. Where are the soft colors Moravec is famous for? Where's the vocal line?), but Pollini breaks the hypnotic spell so many times that he clearly doesn't mean for us to feel anything erotic. Perhaps it's meant to be an essay in frustration, tragedy, pathos, even rage.
But then you get to Arrau, and suddenly the work becomes as complicated and nuanced as anything in Schubert and Brahms. He teases out every possible meaning, emotional, harmonic, rhetorical. He finds an essay's worth of ambiguity. It would take a day of writing to explain how and why. I don't know if the work is inherently as complicated as Arrau makes it, but I know that when Arrau performs it, he makes it into a work of great art.
There is always the question of how to play Chopin. Ever since Rubinstein, there's always been a desire to 'clean Chopin up' from the oral traditions and make him musically respectable. It was great when Rubinstein did it, he was drenched in the long Chopin tradition, and even without the characteristic rubati, his Chopin still sounded like Chopin, only more meaningful.
But if it's the Chopin cleanup you get from Pollini, Ashkenazy, Perahia, forget it, even Schiff, whom I love, what does Chopin mean in their hands? I often find it sterile, generic muzak, little different from a second tier composer like John Field. And then you have all those pianistic flavors of the month over the years who play Chopin with no interpretive barnacles and still manage to make the music vulgar.
And yet, who can deny that so much Chopin playing is drowned in vulgarity?
Take, for example, Chopin's first Scherzo. Even so many of the greatest pianists treat it as a virtuoso exercise: early Richter, Pletnev, Pollini, Ashkenazy, even Josef Hofmann! It's all just a blur of notes to show off how fast they can play, but usually there's so much pedal you can't even tell that. Then they slow down so melodramatically that the rhythmic pulse is completely lost and momentum grinds to a halt.
Yet listen to the opening figures, particularly in the left hand (bass). It's an exercise in rhythmic ambiguities: 2 against 3 against 6 against 12! This is the Chopin of genius who is so much greater than the music he's known for.
But then you hear the one pianist synonymous with empty virtuosity: Vladimir Horowitz. Horowitz may have lit too many fireworks, but empty he was not. He was a genuine musical mind, and like many great instrumentalists and conductors, settled for their instrument after a youth of wanting to be a composer. Whatever one feels about Horowitz's propensity to inappropriate thunder, there are so many details in a Horowitz performance, more than nearly any other pianist. So many that we'd find him fussy and pedantic were he not such a sensational virtuoso.
Horowitz disobeys practically every marking, piano where Chopin marks forte, forte where Chopin marks piano, with jabbing accents and a sound in fortes that's probably three times the volume Chopin had in mind. But the left hand is absolutely clear and he barely uses the pedal, and consequently brings out just about every rhythmic ambiguity in the piece. Here you finally realize the absolute kinship with the Mephisto Waltz (you know which one). He changes tempi when Chopin calls for it, but he never drops to a turtle crawl, and no matter how much rubato, the pulse and line are absolutely clear and almost never broken. If broken, as in the transition back to the recapitulation, it is always to a purpose.
Score or not, this is great Chopin playing sounds like; catching Chopin's exact mix of popular vulgarity and sublime genius. If this is what Chopin is, then there is no reason not to love him beyond reason.
Arrau's Nocturne https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKlonPJnypI
Horowitz's Scherzo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CXFdgc5p_o
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