Can the philosophical views of the historical Socrates be distinguished from those of his pupil Plato? And if so, how do the master's views differ from the pupil's? And do these Socratic views add up to a coherent philosophical position?

In Section I of this chapter, I explain the basis on which, following most modern interpreters, I feel able to divide Plato's dialogues into a group of (earlier) “Socratic” dialogues, where the character Socrates speaks more or less for the historical Socrates; and a group of (middle and later) dialogues in which the main character (now not always Socrates) speaks rather for Plato. I argue that the Plato of the middle and later dialogues, though some of his views remain the same, and though he attacks some of the same enemies and for some of the same reasons, has nevertheless in some ways gone well beyond the master. On some points, I suggest, he even contradicts him. In Section II, I contrast these Socratic dialogues with the other dialogues - first, in their form, method, tone, and subject matter; second, in their attitude to the sciences (arts, crafts, expertises), education, rhetoric, and mathematics; and third, in their theories of virtue, desire, and “weakness of will.” In Section III, I address myself to the question with what right I attribute any views at all to a philosopher who claimed that he knew only that he knew nothing - especially when the Socratic dialogues virtually all end negatively.

Chopin was a master of small forms. Few beliefs more centrally govern modern perceptions of Chopin than this one. It supports not only the myriad manifestations of his high stature in our culture (performances and critical analyses alike can be read as endorsements of the composer's extraordinary skill at miniatures), but also the occasional barbs that are thrown his way (some writers profess a complementary axiom that mastery of large forms eluded him).

But while the centrality of this belief may lend it the appearance of a timeless truth, it seems instead that the meaning of its fundamental term, form, has altered substantially over the past century and a half. When we unreflectively discuss form in Chopin's music as if its intent were self-evident, we therefore at least to some degree misrepresent its significance to his culture. All of us – pianists and amateur enthusiasts as well as musicologists – need to be aware of this disjunction between past and present: before we can probe aspects of form in Chopin's miniatures, we need to explore some of the ways in which the ideas of form and (to a lesser extent) smallness were construed in the first half of the nineteenth century. That these explorations can have very practical applications I hope to show in the second portion of my essay, which will focus on Chopin's smallest forms, the preludes.

Chopin's early music has attracted surprisingly little attention in the scholarly literature on the composer, notwithstanding its vital role in the evolution of his mature style. This comparative neglect can be attributed to certain fundamental problems surrounding the works composed in Warsaw before November 1830 (when Chopin left Poland to embark on his career as a composer-pianist) and in Vienna and Paris in 1830–2. Only a small number of autograph manuscripts from before 1830 survive, making it difficult to ensure the accuracy of modern editions, to determine the music's exact chronology, and to draw firm conclusions as to how Chopin's style gradually took shape. Furthermore, an underlying critical bias in many assessments of the early works inhibits objective evaluation of their significant contribution to Chopin's stylistic development. Most commentators tend to stress the early repertoire's inferior status in comparison with the composer's mature works and thus fail to view music from his ‘apprenticeship’ on its own terms, implicitly succumbing to notions of artistic ‘progress’ which are untenable from both analytical and historiological points of view.

This is not to say that the early pieces are altogether without weaknesses. Many works from the Warsaw period suffer from a somewhat rigid ‘formal’ conception, whereby more or less independent, closed sections were simply juxtaposed to form the whole, rather like separate beads on a string. Imperfect proportions between sections, imbalanced periodic structures, endless sequential passagework and overabundant ornamentation in the large-scale virtuosic compositions further inhibit musical flow, while exact recapitulation in the smaller genres, most of which follow a ternary formal plan, has a similarly stultifying effect, particularly in the early solo polonaises, where section A of the typical ABA CDC ABA form is heard six times in all (taking repeat signs into account).

Every age views musical works in its own way. The study of reception documents the changing functions and meanings attributed to a given corpus of music in particular milieus and at particular times, and in doing so it can enable generalisations about the role that music plays within society. This chapter assesses the part played by Chopin's music in nineteenth-century Polish culture, describing prevailing attitudes to his works and identifying the specific distinguishing features of Polish reception.

Literature on Chopin reception in Poland is exiguous, addressing only small corners of the field and concentrating for the most part on the views of composers and critics. The present study broadens this to consider ‘social’ reception (a historical-aesthetic interpretation of the ways in which the music was received by listeners) as well as ‘artistic’ reception (the influence of the music on the artistic world). Even so the study has certain constraints. From the artistic viewpoint, it will consider only Chopin's influence on other music. And from the social viewpoint, it is hampered by the restricted nature of source materials and by limited opportunities for research.

A study of present-day reception is of course facilitated by modern sociological methods such as questionnaires. These enable us to establish differences among various social circles and to determine the extent to which the reception of a composer's work is uniform at a given time and in a given milieu. Thus one can study fairly systematically the socio-functional aspect of reception in today's world. For earlier periods, however, the possibility of such study is very limited. In this case social reception must rely upon indirect sources such as critical literature and the repertoire performed.

If this were a book on Mozart or Beethoven, one would have needed more than a single chapter to analyse all of the sonatas. Seventy sonatas of Mozart and fiftyfive of Beethoven make up substantial chunks of their output. In fact, almost everything they composed for one or two instruments, except for variation sets and a few trifles, were sonatas.

With the next generation of composers the sonata lost its overpowering dominance. Mendelssohn limited himself to thirteen sonatas; Schumann settled on eight (including the C major Fantasy); Chopin tried one at the age of eighteen, subsequently contributed two great sonatas to the piano literature and later added to them a cello sonata; among Liszt's dozens of instrumental compositions, there are only two sonatas.

One cannot say that Romantic composers lost interest in the sonata. It still remained the most prestigious instrumental genre, an obsession for many composers striving to prove their ability to handle complex structures. In this respect it might be compared with the fugue in the Classical era.

Composers’ uneasy relationships with the sonata were not at all alleviated by the readiness of nineteenth-century music criticism to disparage their attempts at the genre. Traces of this criticism persisted well into the twentieth century. Some writers still consider that sonata forms in Romantic music suffer from a lack of structural continuity, and from composers’ inexperience with large forms or their inability to develop material and to conceive large organic wholes.

It was Oscar Wilde's patrimony as an Anglo-Irish writer which allowed him to combine the detachment of a foreigner with the first-hand experience of a native. This, together with his sharp social observation, unfailing ear for dialogue and biting wit, resulted in characters who were often only just larger than life, and, far from being caricature, the above quotation encapsulates a view of music and musicians in Britain which hardly changed between 1850 and 1930.

The Victorian attitude to music exhibited the compartmentalisation with which we now characterise the era in general. Musical entertainment for the aristocratic and upper-middle classes was largely opera (invariably Italian), together with orchestral and benefit concerts, at which the centre-middle classes were also to be seen. These concerts would include symphonies and other orchestral works as well as concertos and that staple of the British concert, solo vocal items, usually featuring a soprano. The Victorian penchant for public displays of piety was satisfied by frequent oratorio performances in the choral concerts that became fixtures in many parts of the country; the best-known of these, the Three Choirs Festival, still thrives. For the lower-middle and working classes there were the various spa and seaside orchestral concerts and, later, the Music Hall.

INTRODUCTION

It is widely recognised that Chopin's music took on new dimensions following his departure from Poland in 1830. It is recognised not least by pianists and concert promoters, who have conspicuously avoided most of the music from the Warsaw years. In some ways this is a pity since, as John Rink argues, there are works of great value from the early period and they should be assessed on their merits – as some of the highest pinnacles of post-classical popular concert music – rather than measured against the inimitable products of his full maturity. What is not in doubt, however, is the qualitative change that took place in the early 1830s. It was nothing less than a major transformation of his musical style.

That transformation, however slowly prepared, was in the end rather quickly effected and the full range of impulses underlying it are as yet only partially understood. Certainly there were biographical factors beyond the usual growth to maturity – a radical change in Chopin's self-image as Warsaw's admiration gave way to Vienna's indifference; an increasing disenchantment with the proposed career of a composer-pianist; a nostalgia for, and commitment to, his native country, sharply focussed by the Polish insurrection of 1830. Whatever the underlying causality, the result was a change not only in Chopin's musical style but in his whole approach to composition, amounting in effect to an investment in the work rather than the performance. There is too a wider context for this change in nineteenth-century concert life, as Janet Ritterman's essay in the present volume demonstrates.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the city of Vienna, long a prominent centre of European musical life, played a leading role in the development of pianos and of piano playing. Instruments from Viennese makers were sought throughout Europe, while aspiring pianists travelled there in order to study and to perform. The fact that it was with Vienna that pianists such as Mozart, Beethoven, Ries, Hummel, Moscheles and Kalkbrenner were associated gave substance to its confident claim to be die Heimat der Klavier-Virtuositdt. So when in August 1829 the nineteen-year-old Chopin gave two concerts in Vienna – the first performances of note which he gave outside his native Warsaw – the praise that Viennese critics accorded to his unusual talent was of no mean significance.

It was after the second of these concerts that a critic singled out Chopin as one pursuing a path of his own. This was not apparent, however, from the choice of repertoire, or from the circumstances surrounding the performances. There was nothing about the character of these concerts to differentiate them from other events of the season. Each took place in the Imperial Theatre, the Kärnthnerthor-theater, using the orchestral forces available; each consisted of a mixture of vocal and instrumental items for the first half of the programme, with a ballet to complete the evening's entertainment. In each programme Chopin performed twice, playing works of his own composition. The Variations on 'Lá ci darem' he performed on both occasions; for the second concert, the Rondo á la krakowiak replaced an improvisation on vocal themes.

Biography is a discipline sufficient to itself, and one which presents formidable intellectual challenges. As a component of art histories, however, its explanatory value needs careful assessment. The traditional ‘life and works’, much favoured by English writers on music, highlights the difficulties. With notable exceptions it has been a hybrid genre, seldom addressing – except on a rather surface level – just how a composer's life may explain his music. More often than not we are given two books in one, even when they are interleaved rather than formally separated. And in writing two books in one, the author will be hard pressed to do justice to either. A worthwhile objective would be to translate the ‘life and works’ from a hybrid to a compound genre, and the present introduction, biographical in orientation, is programmatic of such an approach.

A key issue is to evaluate the respective roles of ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ biographies in the elucidation of a composer's creative output. For the biographer the task is of course clear-cut: to extract the real from the ideal. But for the music historian it is by no means so simple. The real biography bears directly, though in very complicated ways, on ‘production’ (poiesis) and is therefore a primary cause of the music itself. The ideal biography, on the other hand, bears on ‘reception’ (aesthesis), since it influences substantially the several ways in which the music has been ‘made concrete’ or ‘constituted’ in the world. Both the real and the ideal biographies are therefore of concern to the music historian.

It was just over a hundred and fifty years ago that Parisian audiences were hearing Chopin play his newly-composed piano works for the first time. His music was accepted very rapidly into the repertoire of the piano and by the end of the nineteenth century he was widely regarded as the piano composer par excellence. Since that time virtually every pianist has at some stage of his career included Chopin's pieces in recital programmes. This chapter considers the playing of a selection of noted Chopin exponents and examines various influences that have affected the style in which his music has been interpreted.

Of the century and a half of Chopin playing, we are fortunate in having sound recordings of pianists whose careers have covered over three-quarters of this period. Thus a relatively comprehensive study of changes in the style of Chopin playing is possible. However, sadly we do not possess discs of any Chopin pupils, the last of whom died as late as 1922; the earliest-born pianist to record his music, the Frenchman Francis Planté, was a mere ten-year-old when the composer died in 1849.

There are only two sources that can be consulted in investigating performances by pianists of the period closest to Chopin: firstly, the written accounts of those who heard them play and, secondly, critical editions prepared by performers, such as von Biilow, which reflect their ideas on how the music should be interpreted. This data, however, leaves a number of questions unanswered. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of all is that of tempo.

INTRODUCTION

The publication of the Douze grandes études, Op. 10, in 1833 provided the musical world with its first conclusive evidence of the depth of Chopin's creative talent. In many ways this was an appropriate and symbolic form of announcement. The early development of the piano etude, in which Chopin played a crucial part, was intricately associated with developments in piano technique, piano composition and the instrument itself. It was to the piano that Chopin was to devote nearly all his important work. It was from the sounds and performance idioms of the piano that he drew his inspiration, this being nowhere so evident as in his etudes. Inasmuch as the Op. 10 Etudes disclosed the true quality of that inspiration for the first time, they signified a vital stage in Chopin's own development, as both composer and pianist. They mark the end of his artistic adolescence, the clear beginnings of a maturity that was resoundingly confirmed by the contents of his second collection, Op. 25, published in 1837.

‘Chopin's Etudes stand alone’, pronounced Tovey in 1900; ‘… [they] are the only extant great works of art that really owe their character to their being Etudes.’ It is true that the etudes occupy a special position in the vast repertory of didactic piano music. For one thing, they stand at the apex of a transition from early nineteenth-century prototypes (generally modest in expressive scope and technical function) to the extroverted concert etudes of Liszt, Alkan and others.

While Chopin's influence permeates many countries and traditions, this chapter concentrates mostly on his adopted country of France. In addition to the direct effect of his own compositions, Chopin left an enormous influence there through his piano teaching. To take a few examples, Saint-Saëns, Bizet, Fauré, Debussy and Dukas were all immediate recipients of the ‘Chopin tradition’ through teachers or close musical contacts.

Fauré, Debussy and Ravel in particular are regarded as Chopin's natural musical heirs, being fundamentally pianistic composers and innovators. Support appears to come from the genres of nocturne, barcarolle, ballade, impromptu and prelude (and a single mazurka) taken over by Fauré, plus the piano Mazurka, Ballade and Nocturne of Debussy's early years, as well as his later Preludes and Etudes. On closer inspection, though, the title connections yield limited musical insights. Indeed, Fauré had little interest in those genre titles, which were often pressed on him by publishers. Debussy's early Chopinesque titles often conceal different sources, his later Lisztian use of picturesque titles is quite different from Chopin's practice, and with Ravel such titular connections are almost non-existent. From that point of view it could well be argued that all these composers grew farther from Chopin as they matured. Yet their music tends to tell the opposite story, as we shall see, with the most potent links lying under the surface of their mature music, and in less obvious contexts.