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.

When the exiled Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) closed his epic poem Pan Tadeusz (‘Master Thaddeus’, 1834) with a vivid description of a polonaise, he was not only evoking the romantic image of Poland and Lithuania in 1811 but also investing the dance with Polish history, with its continuing patterns of partition and insurrection. In Book 12 of Pan Tadeusz, the inn-keeper Jankiel – renowned for the power and brilliance of his dulcimer playing – sparks off the wedding celebrations for Tadeusz and Zosia with the Polonez Trzetiego Maja (Polonaise of the Third of May), written to celebrate the enlightened but shortlived Constitution of 1791. Mickiewicz – through his description of Jankiel's performance – darkens the mood with reference to the renegade Confederation of Targowica in 1792 and to the horrific slaughter by the Russians of the citizens of the Warsaw district of Praga during the Polish insurrection of 1794. Jankiel then pays homage to General Dąbrowski, who commanded the exiled Polish Legions in Italy in 1797, by strumming the famous Mazurka Dąhrowskiego (since 1926, the Polish national anthem), and a second polonaise concludes the festivities.

Mickiewicz wrote Pan Tadeusz in Paris, where he and many other Poles, including Chopin, had settled in the aftermath of the Polish uprising of November 1830. By then, polonaises, mazurkas and other indigenous folk dances were very much part of Polish art culture. But they had not always been so: their history lay principally outside Poland, and, in finding exotic colour in their rhythms and melodies, Mickiewicz was following a well-trodden European path (the tapping of overtly patriotic sentiments, however, was a relatively recent phenomenon).

The year 1812 was significant in the development of the early nocturne. It was the year in which John Field published his 1erNocturne, the first in a series of similar works which led directly to the mature nocturnes of Chopin. Hitherto Field's role as the inventor of the genre has been largely unquestioned, and it has been assumed that Chopin simply inherited a well-established formula; but the early history of the nocturne is more complex than it might at first appear. The keyboard style normally associated with the genre had already been established in France by the end of the eighteenth century, so that its use by Field in 1812 was nothing new. It is in any case questionable whether this style should be so closely identified with the genre, since many subsequent nocturnes fail to use it. It would also be a mistake to imagine that the term ‘nocturne’ was quickly accepted to mean a solo piano piece with a particular character. Jeffrey Kallberg has pointed out that the term was only defined in this way from the 1830s onwards.

In the meantime, a number of works in ‘nocturne style’ had appeared with other titles. Perhaps most striking of all in the early history of the nocturne is how slowly the genre developed. Apart from some of Field's pupils and acquaintances it seems that very few composers had any immediate inclination to follow his example, and it was only in the 1830s that nocturnes began to appear in any number.

The Cartesian system is standardly seen, as indeed it was in Descartes' own day, as a reaction against the scholastic philosophy that still dominated the intellectual climate in early seventeenth-century Europe. But it is not sufficient, when discussing Descartes' relations with scholastics, simply to enumerate and compare the various Cartesian and scholastic doctrines. To understand what set Descartes apart both from scholastics and also from other innovators, one has to grasp the reasons behind the various opinions, but beyond that, one has to understand the intellectual context in which these reasons played a role, to see what tactical measures could have been used to advance one's doctrines or to persuade others of them. In this essay I first attempt to contrast Descartes ’ attitude toward scholastic philosophy as seen through his correspondence, with his attitude as revealed through his published works. I then try to give enough background about Jesuit pedagogy and Jesuit philosophy to begin to understand Descartes ’ attempt to gain favor among those of that order. Finally, I depict a few skirmishes between Descartes and the Jesuits, to capture the flavor of such exchanges. Perhaps the most interesting lesson that can be learned by looking at Descartes' relations with scholastics is the sheer power and authority of Aristotelianism during the seventeenth century.

The basic story is well-known. Descartes goes looking for something absolutely certain, beyond even the slightest, most unreasonable doubt, to serve as the permanent foundation for his knowledge. He dismisses the propositions evidenced by his senses. The traditional skeptical worries about hallucinations, madness, dreams and deceiving gods convince him that there is no certainty there. He lands on a bedrock certainty capable of withstanding even his worries about a deceptive god: He exists.

In the Regulae, in first part of Rule XII, Descartes characterizes “ideas” in terms of “figures” or “shapes”formed in the imagination (AT X 414: CSM I 41), thus reworking in a fairly precise, if critical, fashion the doctrines of Aristotle's De Anima. But in the second part of Rule XII, he abandons this seemingly cautious use of the traditional framework, and introduces an utterly new concept, that of the “simple nature” (natura simplicissima; res simplex). This is not only, or primarily, a terminological innovation; what is involved is an epistemological revolution.

A simple nature has two characteristic features: it is neither simple, nor a nature. It is, first of all, opposed to "nature," since in place of the thing considered in itself, according to its ousia (essence), or physis (nature), it denotes the thing considered in respect of our knowledge: "when we consider things in the order that corresponds to our knowledge of them (in ordine ad cognitionem nostram) our view of them must be different from what it would be if it were speaking of them in accordance with how they exist in reality" (AT X 418: CSM 144).

Descartes understood the subject matter of physics to encompass the whole of nature, including living things. It therefore comprised not only nonvital phenomena, including those we would now denominate as physical, chemical, minerological, magnetic, and atmospheric; it also extended to the world of plants and animals, including the human animal (with the exception of those aspects of human psychology that Descartes assigned solely to thinking substance). In the 1630s and 1640s Descartes formulated extensive accounts of the principal manifestations of animal life, including reproduction, growth, nutrition, the circulation of the blood, and especially sense induced motion. In connection with the latter he discussed at length the bodily conditions for psychological phenomena, including sense perception, imagination, memory, and the passions. He also examined the mental aspects of these phenomena, sometimes by way of complementing his physiological discussions and sometimes as part of his investigation into the grounds of human knowledge.

At the height of his enthusiasm for Locke, Voltaire delivered a characteristically witty verdict on his great compatriot:

THE ROLE OF GOD IN DESCARTES' SYSTEM

There is a paradox at the heart of Cartesian metaphysics. On the one hand, Descartes' whole system of scientific knowledge depends on our assured knowledge of God; but on the other hand, the idea of God is explicitly stated by Descartes to be beyond our comprehension. This paradox emerges in Descartes' proofs of God's existence, and hinges on the relationship between the affirmation of God's existence and the elucidation of the idea of God, which is the basis for that affirmation. The relationship is difficult to explicate precisely: is the idea of God prior to the demonstration of his existence?

All the proofs Descartes offers of God’s existence, whether a priori or a posteriori, make use of the idea of God. And we are told that "according to the laws of true logic, one must never ask if something exists [an sit] without knowing beforehand what it is [quid sit]" (AT VII 107-8: CSM II 78); in the absence of such prior knowledge, we could not identify as God the being whose existence we are demonstrating. The idea of God would thus appear to be a necessary premise for all the proofs of his existence, and this clearly implies that we must possess within us the relevant idea in order to be able to infer that its object or ideatum really exists outside our minds.

Throughout his life Descartes firmly believed that the mind, or soul, of man (he made no distinction between the two terms) was essentially nonphysical. In his earliest major work, the Regulae (c.1628), he declared that “the power through which we know things in the strict sense is purely spiritual, and is no less distinct from the whole body than blood is distinct from bone, or the hand from the eye”(AT X 415: CSM I 42). In his last work, the Passions de l'dme (1649), he observed that the soul, although 'joined' or 'united' to the “whole assemblage of bodily organs”during life, is “of such a nature that it has no relation to extension, or to the dimensions or other properties of the matter of which the body is composed” (AT XI 351: CSM I 339). And between these chronological extremes we have the central claim of the Meditations (1641): there is a 'real' [realis) distinction between the mind and body, - in other words, the mind is a distinct and independent 'thing' (res). The thinking thing that is 'me' is “really distinct from the body and can exist without it” (AT VII 78: CSM II 54).