Every pianist who has studied the famous Polish-French composer Fredryk Chopin asks themselves if they are playing Chopinesque, and using his famous tempo rubato correctly.

I am here to answer the age old question. Can you play like Chopin? The answer is NO! Chopin gave lessons to many students, but they all ended up amateurs! Chopin's style is dead, it died of tuberculosis, and it died with him.

My suggestion? Let your fingers, and your heart, and your soul play Chopin, and stop worrying if it would have sounded like him, because odds are it doesn't. In fact, odds are no one has sounded like him, ever ever ever.

This really irks me, but the truth is that Chopin is a chore emotionally to play... and if you can play with emotion, play with conviction, and play with vunerability, you are playing Chopin correctly.

Sorry, but I don’t agree with some of what you say. First of all, I have studied Chopin – his teaching, his music, his life, but have never asked myself that question. I don’t really think ‘playing Chopinesque’ is even valid because one does not ‘play’ Chopinesque; it is the character of his music that one can say ‘sounds’ Chopinesque. What I mean is that if you randomly listen to five different composers’ music, you can most likely tell which one is by Chopin. It sounds Chopinesque. All I ask myself is if I played a certain Chopin composition to the best of my ability and does it sound ok.

Also, how do you know Chopin’s style is dead? We have accurate accounts from persons close to him on how his playing was so sublime and perfectly executed, but are there not other players since Chopin able to play as well? Part of me wants to answer that question with a big fat no, because I am a big Chopin nut. But the other part says that yes, there have been many, many players after Chopin that can play very well and probably as well as Chopin himself. Of course, we will never know for sure, but when you’ve listened to a top player play something so beautiful, compelling, gripping, or mind-blowing, you know that you just heard perfection and how could anybody play it any better?



I don’t get that one at all. It may be a chore to learn the notes and train your fingers how to play them, but when you get to the point when you can insert emotions into the music - that is no chore, that is the most wonderful thing. That’s what it is all about and why we play the music we like to play.

I think I misrepresented my point.. I'm having one of those days. I too have studied Chopin for several years, and I am simply trying to say that Chopin is difficult enough to play without having to worry about the elitism that goes with it. I'm tired of prospective students being discouraged because they're playing is not perfectly affected. The power of Chopin is in it's emotional simplicity. I, as a youth, believed Chopin to be extremely ambivalent, and complex... but it's so complex it's simple. What in your life has ever been as purely sad as his Prelude in B minor? What in life is as joyous as his Prelude in E Flat Major?

Chopin belongs not to the elite pianists who touch his intention perfectly. He belongs to the simple Polish peasent, recreating a mazurka on his fiddle. He belongs to the amateur pianist discovering the world through the eyes of an expatriot. He belongs to the lowliest pianist, the person with the smallest ammount of musical knowledge, just as much as the greatest pianist.

I am excellent at playing tempo rubato... but I do not draw from training. I draw from the simple emotions, the sadness, the happiness. I leave the piano a drained and broken man, and yet I do it to myself often. That's because Chopin is a wonderful chore, but a chore none the less.

But in a way, that’s what makes playing his music so special. I think there is some elitism in playing and understanding Chopin. If someone who knows crap about playing piano sits down and plays a Chopin piece without paying very careful attention to phrasing, voicing, dynamics, etc…that person’s rendition of the music would be terrible and no knowledgeable musician/pianist would dare say it was acceptable. When a player is able to play Chopin’s music well, then that person is above the schmucks who think it is ok to toss off a piece without applying all the fine details and then calling themselves a “Chopin player”. The ‘better’ pianist has taken the time to learn, grow, and understand Chopin’s music and therefore can be considered part of the “Elite” club. Yes, Chopin’s music belongs to everyone, but not everyone can claim that they can play Chopin. That’s the elitism, I think, and something many of us here strive to obtain almost every day.

Still don’t get your ‘chore’ thing, either. The word ‘chore’ has a negative connotation and playing with emotions is not a chore. It is a gift. You should be proud that you feel so emotionally drained after playing one of Chopin’s pieces. Like I said before, that’s what it is all about.

I suppose your position makes sense to someone who has been playing for awhile like us. I guess I just think it's easy to hear the emotion in Chopin, it doesn't need to be a fantastic player. His intention is discernable even through the shoddiest performance.

It all depends on how you look at it. Many pianists see Chopin's works as organic masses, from start to finish, all part of the same piece.

I'm a composer first, and a pianist second, and I believe that gives me the notion to see Chopin's pieces as breakable phrases, each with it's own color, and magic. That is why I'm able to say, with all honesty, that there are some Chopin pieces that I love a part of, and hate another part of. (A great example of this is his Funeral March, Op. 72, I like the theme, but the development section is very weak to me.) Therefore, a terrible performace of a Chopin piece, still holds, for me, the magic of specific phrasings so indigenious to the Slavic region.

I believe later that Dvorak would come closest to capturing Chopin's nationalism... but it's not the same. To say Chopin is the best composer of all time would be, to me, a bit rediculous. But he is mine, and your favorite... why? Because the things that make his music so wonderful are not his use of polyphony, his chord progressions, or even his oh so famous apoggiatora. It is coded in the notes and keys he chose. Therefore he is a sort of greatest composer, a genius without genesis, a motivator without motive. The world's first true tortured artist, and the world's last true Chopin recreationist.

4th scherzo.

Ok, this makes sense.



Getting a little confused, here. Now we are relating nationalism to playing Chopin correctly? That may be so in many of the mazurkas where his Polish roots are unmistakable and we try to get just that right kind of accent on the 2nd or 3rd beat. But I think that a lot of his music could be written by a person from anywhere. I hear no Slavic tones in many nocturnes, ballades, preludes.

And it is the use of his polyphony, chord progressions, notes, keys, all of that. But I’ve never heard the term ‘famous Chopin appoggiatura’. Please explain.


This does not make sense to me. There were plenty of tortured artists before Chopin’s time. Right off the top of my head, and not too much before Chopin, I think of Mozart and Beethoven. And what exactly is a Chopin recreationist? That’s another new one on me.

They weren't as good, though. IMNSHO. Bach was as good (most would say better, and I don't know that I would disagree) but he was a remarkably non-tortured musician.

agree.

Apoggiatura means "leaning note". It is the technique of landing on a note, usually a dissonance, directly below or above the anticipated note. (his Nocturne in D flat is full of them)

Ok, I get what you mean. That happens to be my favorite nocturne. I've just never heard it called 'appoggiatura playing' before. Learn something new every day!

Chopin's use of it was just a complication of a practice that had been around for a long time, of writing on-beat dissonances as little grace notes marked before the beat, and the consonance on the beat. That way, they could pretend they were following the rules of aesthetics that demanded no dissonances be written on the beat, all the while intending exactly that.

You could sort of look at Chopin's 25/5 étude (the "wrong note" étude) as being a bit of a parody of that practice, even though the "grace note" apoggiaturas are intended to be played before the beat - the subtle differences between his three ways of writing it are intended.

And yeah, all of the appoggiaturas in the 27/2 are some of the most difficult bits to play artistically - the handling of those can make or break a performance of that nocturne. But I suppose that puts me at odds with the OP.

Haha, no I totally agree. I'm not for the dissolution of Chopin specialists, I'm for the spread of Chopin's popularity among young students.

That I can agree with, but I see no problem there. Young students always want to play Chopin - I have found that it is the accomplished pianists who are reluctant to play Chopin far more often than the inexperienced ones. And that's a shame, really. One of my piano profs - by far the most accomplished one at my school - hasn't played any Chopin in her biannual recitals over the last two years I've been here. I thought at first that she bought into the attitude that is popular among some scholars, that Chopin is fluff with no substance, or badly written. But I took a course in keyboard literature from her, and she nearly gushed with adoration when we got to Chopin.

Also, we had a piano competition last spring, and the winner and runner-up of the competition were the only pianists competing who did not play any Chopin. I listened to many of the auditions, and I don't think that their omission of Chopin was the reason why they won - they were just simply the best pianists of the day.

IMO, Chopin's "style" represents the ultimate in simplicity within extreme complexity. After all the hard work, his music should just "flow like oil" from one's hands. Not to say you shouldn't gain a few white hairs trying to attain that simplicity.

Also, IMHO, there is no such thing as an elitist when it comes to Chopin's music. There's ALWAYS a different skillful way of executing it. Note the word skillful. It's much preferable to play a simple piece well than to "go for" a piece which is out of one's technical range. There must always be this evolution from simpler to more complex for any pianist to reach his or her potential.

Are there elite pianists? I think so. Rachmaninoff, Perahia, Pollini, Horowitz, Ohllson, Schiff, and Annie Fisher - one could argue strongly, Abby Whiteside - are all elite in their own way. This is all highly subjective but I believe it's fairly obvious when one hears a great performance of Chopin's music.

But how do they measure up to Chopin? I have no idea. Nor do I really care. In skilled hands, his music speaks for itself.

Pete