CHOPIN 24 PRÉLUDES AND BACH'S PARTITAS 2 AND 5 NOTES BY VIKINGUR OLAFSSON © LATE NIGHTS IN PARIS Chopin does not derive his satisfaction from the fact that his hands are applauded by other hands for their agile dexterity, he aspires to a greater success; his fingers are the servants of his soul, and his soul is applauded by those who do not merely listen with their ears, but also with their souls. H. Heine All sources agree that Frédéric Chopin was one of the true improvisatory geniuses in the history of music. One can easily imagine the evenings of the 1840's and 50's when the aristocratic parties in Paris ended with Chopin seated at the piano, unleashing his extraordinary musical powers in the presence of some of the greatest artists of the time: Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, Eugène Delacroix, Heinrich Heine and George Sand. In his memoirs of Chopin, Berlioz describes these evenings: "A small circle of select listeners, whose real desire to hear him was beyond doubt, could alone determine him to approach the piano. What emotions he would then call forth! What ardent and melancholy reveries he loved to pour out his soul! It was usually towards midnight that he gave himself up with the greatest abandon, when the big butterflies of the salon had left, when the political questions of the day had been discussed at length, when all the gossips had exhausted their supply of stories." Berlioz' account is in accordance with those of others. The French poet Ernest Legouvé remarked that Chopin was a good pianist till midnight – when he turned magnificent. But even though he had seemingly unlimited access to divine inspiration late at night, Chopin meticulously studied every detail of his works by day. One of his pupils, Josef Filtsch, wrote in a letter to his parents: "The other day I heard Chopin improvise at George Sand's. It is marvellous to hear him compose in this way; his inspiration is so immediate and complete that he plays without hesitation, as though it had to be thus. But when it comes to writing it down and recapturing the original thought in all its details, he spends days of nervous strain and almost frightening desperation. He alters and retouches the same phrases incessantly and walks up and down like a madman." Although he was one of the most famous pianists of his day, Chopin preferred playing for small groups of friends, and only gave about 30 public recitals in his life. He once confided in a student that in his view, concerts never created real music. They were a form that one needed to dispose of in order to reach the most beautiful in art. When announcements were made about Chopin's recital in Paris in 1841, his lover George Sand wrote to her friend: "This Chopinesque nightmare will take place in Pleyel's Salons on the 26th. He doesn't want any posters, he doesn't want any programmes, he doesn't want anyone to talk about it. He is afraid of so many things that I have suggested he play without candles, without and audience on a mute piano." The story goes that Chopin didn't reach a state of calm until he had retired to his study and played some fugues from Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. CHOPIN AND BACH Chopin derived limited compositional inspiration from his contemporaries. At the dawn of great, epic symphonies when the likes of Liszt, Schumann and Berlioz could unite in the ideology of program music – composing instrumental music around particular themes or narratives – Chopin focused exclusively on works of all types for piano, except programmatic ones. The influence of Bellini's bel canto style is obvious in Chopin's work and so is the stylistic serenity of Mozart. However, it can be argued that it is in Bach's practice of polyphony and chromaticism that Chopin's art is most firmly rooted. Bach's music was in vogue after being revived by Mendelssohn's performance of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829. While the classical composers had been influenced by his works, they had never entered concert repertoire. In the aftermath of the famous revival, a mini “Bach-craze” shook the music world, Liszt made piano transcriptions of Bach's works while Mendelssohn wrote preludes and fugues. However Chopin arguably incorporated Bach's qualities most effortlessly into his own, distinctive style. Even with all its abundance of inspired melodies, Chopin's music is always contrapuntal: even the simplest melodic accopaniments are elevated to refined organisms of polyphonic complexity. And he intended for them to be played thus, imploring his piano students to lend the inner voices the same singing rendition as the leading melodies. His knowledge of Bach's music was also of a scholarly nature. In his free time he not only played the fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier for his own well-being but also corrected editions of it “not just the engraver's mistakes, but also passages accepted by those who claim to understand Bach (not because I pretend to understand him better, but from a feeling that perhaps I can sometimes guess right).”5 Furthermore it is difficult to imagine the wild chromatic harmonies which make for some of Chopin's most captivating moments without his acquaintance of Bach's incomparable, progressive treatment of chromaticism. In some of Chopin's late works, there are moments when harmonies are juxtaposed so adventorously that the music seems to approach a harmonic no man's land, almost unaffiliated with any key whatsoever. Under Bach's influence, Chopin approached the boundaries of tonality, which was later to be stretched yet further by Richard Wagner and Claude Debussy. 24 PRELUDES IN 24 KEYS Valldemosa, between the mountains and the sea, a huge abandoned Carthusian monastery, where in a cell with doors larger than any pair of gates in Paris, you can imagine me, my hair uncurled, without white gloves, pale as ever. The cell is in the shape of a tall coffin, with great dusty vault, a small window, and, outside oranges, palms, cypresses. Opposite the window, my bed of straps, under a Moorish filigree rose. Next to my bed there is a hopeless square desk I can hardly write on, on it a leaden candlestick (a luxury here) with a candle in it, my Bach, my own scrawls, someone else's papers … silence … you can yell … silence still. In a word, it is a strange place I am writing from. These lines were written by the gallant Chopin – a sophisticated man of the world, not unfamiliar with life's pleasures, renowned for his glove collection and immaculate attire – in a letter to a friend from Mallorca, dated 1838. The purpose of the stay was therapeutic but it turned into quite a misery, the weather was dreadful and Chopin's health deteriorated sharply. Even in the most spartan of facilities, Bach's music wasn't far away and it was here that Chopin finished his 24 preludes. The title and the format – one prelude for each musical key – indicates an indisputable connection with Bach's two sets of 24 preludes and fugues in all keys. The form of the prelude dates back to lute compositions of the Renaissance period. Preludes functioned as short appetizers before longer, more substantial works and served the lute players as a means of testing their instruments and the acoustics before the actual concert commenced. From the outset the prelude was intrinsically improvisatory and unpredictable. From the early stages of his career, each new work of Chopin's was awaited with anticipation. Still in his late twenties, he had already created the ballade as an instrumental form and reinvented – and elevated – older forms such as the etude, nocturne and mazurka. He redefined everything he touched in those years and it is safe to assert that few could have predicted what the new set of preludes was to present. Many of them are very brief, the shortest one (Nr. 7) is only sixteen measures in total. Indeed, around half of the preludes last for less than a minute each, and some (11 and 14) can be described rather as hints of an emotion then fully worked out pieces. The preludes as a whole can be viewed as a kind of an artist's workshop, not entirely unlike what the Bagatelles were for Beethoven. They provided an opportunity for bold experimentation with harmony, form and lyricism – Chopin's pursuit for the maximum level of conciseness attainable. Some of them could easily have passed as nocturnes (13 and 15), others as etudes (8, 16, 19 and 24) and yet others bear close resemblances to the mazurkas (7 and 10). The C-minor prelude (20) could be a chorale written by Bach, while the most progressive ones cannot be classified with any previous genres – or what could possibly be called the predecessors of the E-flat minor prelude (14), the F-minor (18), or the one in G-minor (22)? Naturally, the preludes evoked strong responses. Liszt was overwhelmed with fascination and immediately recognized their uniqueness. Robert Schumann, a great admirer of Chopin, had doubts and wrote in his journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik: "I must mention the Preludes as most singular. I will confess that I expected something quite different: compositions carried out in the grand style, like his études. We have almost the contrary here: these are sketches, the beginnings of studies, or, if you will, ruins; eagles’ pinions, wild and motley pell-mell. But in every piece we find, in his own pearly handwriting, ‘This is by Frédéric Chopin’; even in his pauses we recognize him by his agitated breathing. He is the boldest, the proudest poet of these times. To be sure, the book contains much that is sick, feverish, repellent; but let everyone seek for what becomes him. Only let the Philistine keep away!" Indeed, the preludes are like unique feathers – plumes, as it were – that Chopin entrusts with a life of their own, delicate and fragile as they may be. Many of them are invested with such inspiration, that most other composers would have used the material for larger works. But this is perhaps exactly where Chopin's genius shines through, allowing such beauty to glow for just a brief moment before disappearing into the dark. TO REFRESH THEIR SPIRITS Keyboard practice, consisting of preludes, allemandes, courantes, sarabandes, gigues, minuets, and other galanteries, composed for music lovers, to refresh their spirits, by Johann Sebastian Bach. Thus reads the title page of the six partitas by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), his first published works. At the time of publication he was in his forties, a veteran composer having written hundreds of pieces in all genres. The first published opus was incidentally also the last collection of suites Bach wrote and unquestionably ranks among his finest works. The suite developed into a standard set of four dance movements in the baroque period: allemande originated from Germany, courante from France (or corrente from Italy), the Spanish sarabande and the Irish-originated gigue. In addition, composers often wrote a prelude as opening movement and added two or three shorter movements inbetween the standard ones. In the six partitas, these showcase the greatest variety of styles; perhaps the composer was purposely portraying maximum stylistic diversity for the first works to circulate outside his home region. The choice in itself was highly ambitious; the partitas were hardly the most accessible music for the public in 1730's. Apart from their compositional complexity, the technical demands were such that few had the technical prowess to give a satisfying reading of them. In his biography on Bach dating from 1802, Johann Nikolaus Forkel wrote that: “Whoever learnt to perform any of these pieces to a high standard could make his fortune in the world.” The two partitas on this album contrast each other in many ways. The G-major partita contains some of Bach's most joyous and worry-free music for keyboard while the C-minor partita belongs to his most turbulent works. The opening chords in the sinfonia are dramatic to the extent that 70 years later, Beethoven drew inspriation from them for the famous opening of the “Pathétique” piano sonata, also in C-minor. There is a sense of uncertainty and fragility that colours the allemande and sarabande. Bach abstains from stabilizing the music with chords, maintaining a two-part texture throughout. Inbetween the introverted movements stands the proclamatory and serious courante. In the concentrated rondeaux which follows the sarabande, the main theme is repeated and varied four times between brief energetic episodes, all within the span of just over a minute. The lively and brilliant capriccio is the only final movment in all of Bach's solo instrumental suites which is not a gigue. This is music in joyful minor, at times almost jazzy in its off-beat swing. The first movement of the G-major partita, preambulum (prelude), consists of fast and unpredictable runs up and down the entire keyboard, seperated by abrupt and often unexpected silences. It is free and improvisatory; as a performer, Bach's ability to improvise elaborate fugues on the spot was legendery. The allemande is characterized by very long, flowing lines while the following corrente relates to the first movement: fast sequences of notes with quick shifts in development. Following a contemplative sarabande comes tempo di minuetta: in the tempo of a minuet. It is structurally related to the minuet form without being categorized as such, refined in its playful combination of two and three part division of the measure. Following the passepied, whose origin goes back to the tradition of 17th century French court dances, the partita draws to an end with a gigue in the same effervescent spirit that characterizes the whole suite. Víkingur Heiðar Ólafsson ©