Kovba Julia
Dragomanov National Pedagogical University,
Institute of Arts, student
Pet’ko Lyudmila,
Scientific supervisor, Ph.D., Associate
Professor,
Dragomanov National Pedagogical University
FRYDERYK CHOPIN IN BRITAIN
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Fryderyk Chopin was born in Zelazowa Wola (1.03.1810, Mazovia, Poland). His father Nicholas was born in
France (1771) in Marainville, a village in Lorraine – an area which at that
time was ruled over by the Polish King Stanislas Leszczynski [4].
In Poland, he is
regarded as a national hero. His heart is even interred in one of the pillars
of the Holy Cross church in Warsaw: as stipulated by his will, his sister took
the organ home, pickled in cognac.
This was a great
pianist, still in possession of his musical and mental faculties with his fingers perfectly under control, giving a
large number of people the opportunity to hear for the very last time an
extraordinary and unique performer [1,
6].
The
Chopin that Poland celebrates is the opposite of this listless Paris
consumptive: he's a lion of the keyboard, a compositional revolutionary, the
symbol of a national identity that resounds through pieces such as the
barnstorming Revolutionary Etude, or the two piano concertos Chopin composed
and played in Warsaw just before he left the country for ever. Chopin's music
is a tapestry of poetic paradoxes. He never wrote a work of "programme
music" in his life, a piece that sets out to tell a story or invoke an
image [3].
One
of the last book about by A.Cobbe [2]
recounts the story of three pianos Chopin lived with and used in his concerts
in 1848. On two of them, in an exceptional burst of musical activity, he
endowed English audiences with the final performances of his life – his
swansong. He third belonged to his close friend and pupil Jane Stirling who
organized his visit to Britain and whom, at this time, he was seeing almost
every day. The author discusses Chopin's relationship and opinions concerning
Jane Stirling and the three piano makers.
Jane
Stirling, and her elderly sister Mrs. Katherine Erskine, who proposed that
Chopin should come to London, where they promised to find him both pupils and
engagements. Jane was the daughter of a wealthy Scottish landowner. She and her
sister spent much time in Europe. She became a pupil of Chopin in 1842 and he
dedicated two nocturnes to her in 1844. Chopin took up the sisters' proposal,
arriving in London on April 21st 1848 armed with letters of introduction, and
lost no time in going to Richmond to visit the French Royal Family.
Chopin was to
give a concert in Edinburgh during the Caledonian Rout and this took place at
the Hopetown Rooms on October 4th. It was a unique occasion as not only was he
the only artist in the concert, but it would seem that he played for nearly two
hours, an extraordinary feat for a dying man. One can say that this Edinburgh
concert was his last real performance in public. He left London for Paris on
November 23rd, and died a year later, on October 17th 1849, aged 39 [5].
Chopin was in
Britain seven months in all.
The
British visit is seen as a rather depressing mistake at the end of Chopin’s
life, with the dying man being dragged around an unsympathetic country and
forced to play to earn his living. Out of a total of around 30 public or
semi-public concerts during the whole of his life, Chopin gave 5 of these in
the British Isles in 1848: 2 in London, 1 in
Manchester, 1 in Glasgow and 1 in Edinburgh. Amongst these 5 there were 2
personal firsts. Chopin never played to more than 3 or 400 people, except in
Manchester where he had an audience of over 1,000 at the Gentlemen’s Concert
Hall [1, 1].
Anyone who has
made it to grade four or five on the piano will, almost certainly, have
encountered a piece by Chopin. Certainly, no compilation of "classics for
beginners" is complete without his E minor Prelude. It's got everything
the fledgling pianist needs to feel good about their technique: it's short,
it's in a gratifyingly slow speed and it has a superficially straightforward
left-hand part, with a sad, singing melody line in the right [3].
Chopin is a miniaturist, but he also created forms and
structures – the ballade, the scherzo, the hybrid fantasie – that are models of
innovative musical architecture.
It
is interesting to read a report of Chopin playing incognito at the home of
James Broadwood back in 1837. “Was Chopin not the most retiring and unambitious
of all living musicians, he would before this time have been celebrated as the
inventor of a new style or school of piano composition .... He is perhaps par
eminence the most delightful of pianists in the drawing room. The animation of
his style is so subdued, his tenderness so refined, its melancholy so gentle,
its niceties so studied and systematic, the toute
ensemble so perfect and evidently the result of an accurate judgement and
most finished taste, that when exhibited in the large concert hall or the
thronged saloon it fails to impress itself on the mass” [1, 5–6].
Berlioz,
writing about Chopin's power to encompass so much experience in a musical grain
of Sand, said: "Chopin has written two wonderful mazurkas which are worth
more than 40 novels, and are more eloquent than the entire century's
literature" [3]
and later made a famous remark that “Chopin has been dying all his life” [1, 5].
Bibliography