- by Art Sulit, www.MuSeeks.com/ArthurSulit
Music Timeline Author
Friedrick Chopin, the Romantic, was an astute fan of Johann Sebastian Bach, the master of form and Fugue. Although Chopin never mastered the art of fugue-form writing (neither did Mozart), he did derive from Bach a sense of symmetry and design, which he infused with his own passively-emotive, almost feminine temperment to create a very flowery repertoire of great piano music.
Like all early Romantics, he broke conventions, moving away from the tepid, tense, restricted scales of the German classicists to the more fluorid, chromatic melodies of Polish & French origin. He thus opened up the way for even more serious digressions from Classical convention, such as Wagner's journey to the beginnings of atonality, and later artist's free-form writing. In Chopin, you will not find the intense intellectual and form-within-a-form structural writing of Brahms. Instead, you will find a most satisfying appeal to the heart, a pensive, almost sad kind of elegance, in contrast to Mozart's "happy" elegance.
Chopin also liberated the "left hand"--giving the formerly "passive" chord whomping hand a more agile and predominant role in creating fast-moving textures--later seen in Liszt and especially Rachmaninov. He himself was not a great piano player, due to his frail body unable to execute some of the louder, forceful passages (like in Beethoven't music) with sufficient volume. In fact, Chopin's own playing was rather soft. He only performed some forty appearances in public--the rest mostly being private performances amongst peers like Liszt. However, what flowed from his pen surely was demanding a heavy toll on all great pianists to come, calling for a duality of both physical strength, mammoth endurance, plus gentle sensitivity in order to play properly.
Chopin then, is the master of melody, able to create moods which make you think, or reflect upon life whilst looking out a window. His is playful music too, dazzling and delighting the ear sometimes with dizzying speed. One does not need words set to Chopin's music. His melody speaks for itself.