The Latin American Prelude and Some History

Last week I posted a performance of myself playing the Prelude No. 4 for guitar by Villa-Lobos. I'm going to put up some more preludes by another Latin American composer soon, but I want to say something about form first. The pre-lude, literally the thing you do before you play, started out in the 17th century as a couple of chords just to check the tuning for lute-players. I went into that in some detail in this post. Given that origin, the earlier preludes tended to be fairly simple arpeggiations. Bach, of course, made them a lot more complex, but the basic idea of a single, fairly simple, texture throughout, remained. Let me just give you some examples. First, a 17th century unmeasured prelude by Louis Couperin:

Other preludes by Louis Couperin extend into fantasia-like pieces. Here is a very typical lute prelude by S. L. Weiss based on a simple arpeggio:

And here is the kind of prelude Bach liked to write. There is but a single musical idea and it tends to be some sort of arpeggio:

Chopin, the next composer after Bach to really take the prelude seriously, followed this basic idea but with one important addition. Alongside a kind of arpeggio pattern he placed a touching and expressive melody:

But the idea of a prelude as being essentially a piece without contrasting sections was preserved. The first guitar composer to write preludes was Manuel M. Ponce, probably in the 1920s or 30s. He wrote twenty-four preludes, more or less emulating the example of Chopin. They are mostly very short pieces, less than a minute long, and each explores a single idea. Here is the Prelude in F# minor (they have different numberings depending on the edition), one of the longest:

Then came Villa-Lobos who wrote his five preludes for guitar slightly later, in 1940, with quite a different model. Though Bach was an important influence, when it came to his preludes the popular music of Brazil was just as important. All of his preludes are in at least two different sections with two different tempos, themes and moods. Take the Prelude No. 2, for example: short arpeggios with appoggiaturas and occasional scale passages are found in the first section, while the second section, piu mosso, uses a single arch-like arpeggio throughout. Then the first section returns for a basic ABA form. Here it is a live performance with John Williams. Sorry about the funny sound, but even with that, I think you would like to hear this version:

With the exception of the Prelude No. 5, that has three contrasting sections (ABCA), all the Villa-Lobos preludes rely on two contrasting ideas in different tempi. Except for the Prelude No. 3, that repeats ABAB, they are organized as ABA.

So that's a little history of the prelude with special attention to preludes written for guitar in the 20th century. This will be an introduction to the next group of recordings I am going to post. I am going to put up the Five Preludes by Máximo Diego Pujol (b. 1957), the Argentinian guitarist and composer. As one might expect, a major influence on his music is that of Astor Piazzolla, the great tango composer.

Read more »

Masterpieces of Music: Chopin, Part 3

Yesterday we started looking at the first ballade, in G minor, written when Chopin was in his early 20s and newly resident in Paris. There are a lot of different ways of looking at a piece like this. It has a lot of the structure of a sonata, with an introduction, contrasting themes presented in different keys, development of these themes and recapitulation of them. There is also a coda, but unlike a sonata movement coda, which tends to relax harmonic tension with subdominant harmony, this one continues the ever-increasing arc of intensity by using more chromatic scale passages, much greater virtuosity and fortissimo dynamics. Some have mentioned the strophic character of the piece, where the same motifs return as a kind of refrain. This goes with the title reference to the literary ballad.

In the last post (if you haven't seen it, go have a look as this is a continuation), I quoted the basic motif of the ballade, which comes in various forms and extensions, but whose basic shape is always recognizable. Here is that motif again:

Click to enlarge

Contrasting with this is the second motif, which instead of a curling, sinuous shape has a more serene, falling contour. Here it is:

Click to enlarge

(Sorry for the sloppy notation--I'm trying out a new program and it has a few quirks. But it saves me a couple of steps as it allows me to save an example directly as a graphic I can insert into Blogger.) The tempo changes at this point to Meno mosso which simply means a bit slower. Notice that while the key signature is still two flats, the key is no longer G minor, but Eb major (there is an Ab in the accompaniment, which completes the three flats needed for Eb major). Here is Horowitz in a recording of a concert performance. The second motif I show above comes just after the 2:40 mark.

The key layout for the whole piece is G minor, Eb major, A major, Eb major and G minor, forming a "tonal palindrome". Beethoven would probably have indicated the key changes by changing the key signature, but Chopin keeps the two flat signature throughout even when, as in the A major section, nearly every note has to have an accidental.

Taruskin, in the Oxford History of Western Music, makes a splendid argument for the 'literary' nature of this piece. By that I mean that he presents a good argument for an historical and literary context for the piece. From documentary evidence he shows that one of the inspirations for this piece was the literary ballads of Adam Mickiewicz (1798 - 1855), the Polish nationalist poet. He argues that the strophic aspects of the form reflect the literary form of the ballad and even that the heroic arc of the piece is a prophetic call for a revolution and the liberation of Poland. He suggests that Chopin is "telling a national story" using the abstract means of sonata form and a "complex interaction between creative intentions and critical perceptions."

Now far be it from me to rule this out and Taruskin does indeed assemble a fascinating amount of evidence for these creative intentions and critical perceptions in volume 3 of the Oxford History (pp 367 - 376) but the truth of the matter is that if this were the whole, or even the most important aspect of the piece, then all of us listening to the piece who are NOT aware of Chopin's creative intentions nor the historical context and critical perceptions would scarcely find much of interest in the music. But we do. Most listeners in most places are simply unaware of these things. But are able to respond with real pleasure to the powerful expression of the piece because, while you can listen through that whole historical context, you don't actually need to. It is because music is not semantically delimited the way language is that the piece makes an immediate impact. You do need to be accustomed to this general kind of music, be able to hear the harmonies and so on--in that sense the music is culturally specific--but that's all. Let's listen to it one more time in a different performance:

Read more »

Masterpieces of Music: Chopin, Part 2

Chopin at age 25

Continuing on with Chopin, I would like to look at (listen to) a longer piece. The four ballades are recognized, not only as challenging and virtuosic, but also as musically profound. Let's immerse ourselves in the first one, in G minor. The Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23, was composed in 1835–36 during Chopin's early years in Paris. Like the other ballades, it is a one-movement piece, lasting about nine minutes. How do you structure a piece that long that isn't divided up into sections like a set of variations? The obvious model is the sonata form, which allows a sophisticated use of harmony to structure the overall form. Despite a lot of criticism of Chopin's handling of sonata form, the reality is that he made use of it in very sophisticated ways. First, let's just listen to the music:

Like so much of Chopin, it is both spectacular and expressive! Even more impressive, it is also a unified whole. The opening phrases are mysterious, the first outlining a very remote harmony from G minor: it is an Ab major chord in first inversion, that is to say, C Eb Ab. This harmony, which sounds innocuous on its own, is in a very intense relationship with the tonic. If we write it according to the symbols of harmonic analysis, this becomes clear it is bII6 or a first inversion chord built on the flattened supertonic. This chord is colloquially known as the Neapolitan sixth. It prepares the dominant, as it does here. The second phrase circles around the dominant, D. Finally, there is an odd pair of chords that sound like they should be a cadence, but aren't. The harmonies, analysed in G minor are iv6 to VI4/2. They just sound cadential because of the characteristic rhythm and because at this point we are expecting one. Perhaps it is a kind of substitute half-cadence from the iv chord to a substitute V? In any case, after this introduction, the piece proper begins with the most important motif:

Click to enlarge

In one way or another, this motif tends to permeate the whole piece, right to the very end. There is a lot more to say about the piece, but I'll stop here for today and leave you to listen to the piece a couple more times.

Read more »

Masterpieces of Music: Chopin

The first generation of 19th century composers to break new ground, including Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and Mendelssohn, were all born around 1810. Berlioz was slightly older. I'm going to put up posts about each of these composers. My "masterpieces of music" series has been in hiatus for a couple of months now, so it is time to get back to it. These posts take a bit more time to prepare, but I have also been taking the time to re-read Taruskin's volume on the 19th century in the Oxford History. The 19th century is a formidably complex era. It includes not only romanticism, complex enough in itself, but also realism, nationalism and folklore, all of which play important roles. It was also when many of the most important musical institutions of our day were founded such as subscription concert series, the music publishing business, impresarios and agents, touring virtuosos and so on.

Chopin in a characteristic setting: Prince Radziwill's salon

Frédéric Chopin (1810 - 1849), born in what is now Poland (but then part of the Russian empire) to a French father and a Polish mother, is not only a Romantic composer, but also often regarded as a nationalist one. Despite writing almost exclusively for piano, his influence on subsequent composers has been immense. His gifts were recognized very early, by Robert Schumann among others. I don't want to talk much about Chopin's life, but go straight to the music. I have posted on Chopin quite a few times. The most detailed post is this one. A guide to Chopin's aesthetic views comes from his companion, George Sand, who wrote in her Impressions et Souvenirs (1873) that:

The beauty of musical language consists in taking hold of the heart or imagination, without being condemned to pedestrian reasoning. It maintains itself in an ideal sphere where the listener who is not musically educated still delights in the vagueness, while the musician savors this great logic that presides over the masters' magnificent issue of thought.

I think that captures the essence of it rather better than shouting out "Dopamine!" "Dopamine!" as some have done recently. The Baroque genre of the prelude, of which Bach was the particular master, was given new life by Chopin in his op 28, preludes in all the major and minor keys. Bach's first prelude, (from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk 1) is an obvious influence:

And here is Chopin's C major prelude:

I think the more closely you look at that music, the more impressed you will be by the harmonic ingenuity of it. And all in about thirty seconds. But that is more than matched by the even more cryptic second prelude, in A minor. Well, sort of in A minor. The theorists are still arguing about this one...

That is one eerie prelude. It is as if the piece is simply too over-wrought to know what key it is in! The grotesque cross-relations between G and G#, between C# and C double-sharp and the constant chromatic neighbors make for a very uneasy harmonic background. That little chorale at the end that finally lands us in A minor seems, as many have noted, arbitrarily tacked on. This prelude, expansive though it feels, is still only two minutes long.

Some of Chopin's most remarkable pieces and the foundation for viewing him as a 'nationalist' composer, are his mazurkas based on a variety of peasant dances from the area around Warsaw. Here is General Dombrowski's mazurka, a traditional melody from around 1800. Note the heavy accent on the second beat:

Here are two mazurkas by Chopin, composed soon after he became an exile in Paris.

I think I will stop here for today and next time do a more detailed exploration of one of Chopin's longer pieces. Enjoy!

Read more »

Unpopular Music

A lot of people in the classical music world are working on the problem of, as Greg Sandow calls it, the "future of classical music", that is, how can we bring in new audiences to symphony, opera and chamber music concerts? The statistics are unclear, but it seems as if audiences are declining and attracting more young people is a project a lot of musical organizations see as critical.

The massive place that popular music now occupies in the public consciousness is one major factor in the increasing pressure on the classical music world. The change has come in the last fifty or sixty years. If we go back to the fifties, a huge classical artist like Van Cliburn, the winner of the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, could sell more records than Elvis Presley. But with the coming on the scene of pop artists like the Beatles and the host that followed them, this changed and now classical sales are a tiny fraction of popular music sales. Popular music and the mass media have proved to be such a powerful partnership, as exemplified in the music video, that mere classical artists are forced to emulate them, just to be heard. I have posted a few times on this here and here.

So the question is, if popular music is what we mostly hear in the mass media, is classical music now "unpopular music"? In terms of sales? Sure. So administrators and promoters and artists are all working to make classical music more popular. There are a few problems, though. For one thing, popular music is popular because it is easy to listen to. Classical music is often not so easy to listen to. In fact, if you really want to enjoy all the glories of classical music, you need to investigate a bit, be curious, learn about it. Now mind you, classical music can have an immediate impact. Have a listen to this, for example:

For sheer musical power and glorious sound, this is pretty outstanding. I still get shivers every time I hear that theme in the French horns. Or listen just to the first couple of minutes of this:

Those horns again! But there is much more to classical music than just the orchestral showpieces. There are pieces of subtlety and sheer musical beauty such as this:

A piece like that is not going to overwhelm you on first listening like the first two did. No, you need to listen to it a few times. Each time you will notice something new and the beauty of it will grow on you. Some music makes very little impression the first time, but just sounds odd:

The first time you listen you might say "what the heck is going on there"? It may make little sense because of the big contrasts and may just sound confused. But then, after a few listenings, some things might suddenly capture your attention, and as time goes on it all starts making sense and a kind of sense that no other piece has. Other music is very challenging at first:

And may continue to be challenging, even after many hearings! Or you may start to pick up on the eerie floating harmony... One thing for sure, this music is very subtle and intricate: you must listen with your full attention and no distractions.

Classical music may be the "unpopular music" as compared to pop music. But it is not unpopular because it is bad music! It is unpopular because a lot of classical music does not give up its secrets and beauties immediately. You have to work at it a bit as a listener. Perhaps you might read a book on the composer, or at least look him or her up on Wikipedia. There is a wealth of information there. There are even individual articles on pieces. Here is the article on the 'Serioso' Quartet by Beethoven that is the fourth YouTube clip above. Here is another one on the Piano Sonata by Alban Berg that is my last example.

The neat thing about Wikipedia is that each article contains links to others. In the one on the Berg sonata there is mention of whole-tone scales which is linked to an article on them which explains what they are. If you follow those links you will start being knowledgeable about such things.

Most pop songs are just what you hear the first time, nothing much beneath the surface. But classical music is like an iceberg: what you hear the first time is just a fraction of what is going on. The more you dig, the more you will discover. Take my word for it, there are pieces of classical music that no-one has ever gotten completely to the bottom of:

 

Read more »

Musical Humor

After several rather heavy theoretical posts, time for some fun. I call this "musical humor" rather than "humor in music" because they are different things. Here is humor in (or perhaps with) music:

Lots of possibilities in making fun of the formality of classical music. Take the Marx Brothers, for example:

But my favorite has always been Victor Borge:

There is a little known piece by John Dowland "for two to play on one lute" that is just as funny. Not for the music itself, but the contortions involved in the performance. Just as the audience settles down to enjoy the music, the players switch parts and more hilarity ensues:

Alas, most performers don't let themselves enjoy the comic aspects of the piece! But I have performed this in public and it can be nearly as funny as the Borge performance of Liszt. And this was written this way! Good set-up line: "hands off my G-string!" How about some more Victor Borge?

It's the incongruity that makes for the humor: famous virtuoso pianist can't get it right, but every backstage blue-collar worker can just toss it off, even wearing gloves. Lots more Borge on YouTube for you to watch.

But we also have musical humor. There are only a few composers really good at musical humor and probably the best is Haydn. Here is a minuet that is so rhythmically twisted that the first rehearsal is likely to be pretty hilarious for the players:

Then there is his famous quartet from op 33 nicknamed "The Joke" because the last movement has multiple false endings, each tempting members of the audience to burst into applause before the piece is actually over:

That almost worked! I think audiences nowadays are so cowed by the tsk-tksers that they live in fear of clapping in the wrong place--even when the composer tempts them. Another composer with a sense of humor--though rather dark at times--was Shostakovich. Here is his setting of "Tea for Two" which he re-named "Tahiti Trot" and orchestrated for his ballet The Golden Age:

Here is a polka from that same ballet, arranged by Shostakovich for string quartet:

Another humorist in music is Beethoven, but I'll save that for another post as it takes a bit more context. But this post was inspired by a post on Norman Lebrecht's blog about a recently discovered letter from Beethoven. The letter was written to a composer named Stockhausen--alas, not Karlheinz, but a Franz Anton Stockhausen, living in Paris. Norman comments, "As usual, Beethoven complains about his health and living conditions. He does not, sadly, offer analysis or criticism of Gruppen." That sounds like good material for another post!

Read more »

More Examples

I'll take a stab at coming up with some more examples of the things talked about in this post. Let's look at the virtue of expression and the sins of melodrama and the mechanical. Talking about expression can quickly become rather tricky. I'm reminded of some great philosophers trying to talk about time and concluding that "as long as you don't ask me what time is, I know perfectly well, but as soon as I begin to think about it, I no longer know..." That's just a rough paraphrase. I think it was St. Augustine who said something like that. Expression is like that. Until I start thinking about it, I know perfectly well what expression is. I suppose I know it primarily from the inside: i.e. when I am playing a phrase and successfully capturing or communicating the expression inherent in that phrase, I know it. By analogy, I sense it in performances of other people. Let's find an example.

Rubenstein playing Chopin is an easy call. The piece is written to be very expressive--so much so that almost any musically sensitive player will capture at least some of it. But listen to the subtleties: the eighth-note pulses are all slightly different in length. Some are extended slightly for emphasis, others passed over slightly to create forward movement. Each note is handled with a slightly different touch, some stronger, some lighter. And listen to the piano of the second phrase, how delicate it is compared to the first phrase. But more vigorous and motoric music can also be expressive. Here is Horowitz playing Mozart:

Now the sin or vice that is the opposite of this could either be melodrama--emotionalism to soppy excess--or a typical recent failing: industrialized musical product. Let's have an example of each. Here, standing up for melodrama, is the inevitable Andrew Lloyd Webber:

Going in the other direction we have industrialized musical product:

Now it is undoubtedly the case that both these kinds of music have their utilitarian purpose. I just don't think it is primarily an aesthetic one! One other point: what I am talking about here is largely focused on the composition itself, rather than different performances. I think the same principles would apply to different performances as well. I'm sure you could overdo the expression in a piece by Chopin, or play it mechanically.

Oddly enough, looking over this post I see that I have unwittingly followed a principle put forth by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. In it he follows the principle that the right course of action is a moderate one, between two extremes. For example, courage is a virtue between the two extremes of cowardice and recklessness. Similarly, in my formulation, expressiveness is an aesthetic virtue between the two extremes of melodrama and the mechanical.

I welcome discussion of either the principles or the examples I have chosen. Have at it!

Read more »

Two Examples

Yesterday I put up a post about aesthetic virtues and sins in composition. In ordinary music criticism we get detailed accounts of specific performances. In music philosophy we get arguments about the ontological status of a composition or perhaps the relationship between aesthetics and morality. In music theory we get descriptions of technical devices and how they are used. What we don't seem to get anywhere is a set of simple aesthetic principles. That's what I was trying to do in that post. I suppose for proper parallelism I should have said virtues and vices, but I took as my model the long tradition of the four cardinal virtues and seven deadly sins of the Catholic tradition.

That post was rather wordy and so today I would like to pick a couple of examples to show what I am talking about. The first virtue, parsimony, is pretty easy. Here is an example:

This is the Prelude and Fugue in D minor from Bk 2 of the Well-Tempered Clavier played by Friedrich Gulda. My example is just the prelude. You could choose just about any prelude from either book as most of them are very tightly written, meaning that a minimum of music material is used for maximum effect. This prelude gets by with little more than a scale and an arpeggio. The first prelude from Bk 1 is just one arpeggio put through a lot of harmonies. Other similar preludes are the one to the E major violin partita, again a scale and an arpeggio and the prelude to the first cello suite, just an arpeggio. Chopin provides us with another example:

And so does Shostakovich:

Preludes are a good place to look for basic compositional principles because there is no fixed form, no boxes to fill up. Now how about one of those aesthetic sins? I mentioned a Schumann quartet finale. Here it is:

This brings us face to face with one of those fascinating paradoxes of aesthetics: this movement has a lot of repetition. The preludes I put up above, as examples of the virtue of parsimony, also have a lot of repetition. So why was it good there and bad here? I trust that you got as tired as I did of that dotted-note figure? Perhaps you loved it? While acknowledging that these are tricky matters, let me see if I can sort it out. The problem with the Schumann finale is that the material is both too little and too much. The dotted note theme keeps returning too many times and it is too much the same each time. The contrasting passages in between are also too similar. There is also a real clunkiness to the dotted note theme, a rhythmic stiffness that doesn't get better on repetition. The dotted-note theme and the contrasting passages also don't seem to have much relation to one another, it is as if they are pasted together from different pieces. Now let me put up another string quartet finale that shows how this kind of thing should be done:

The finale is preceded by a short adagio. Some similarities in the two movements; both have themes that keep coming back, with contrasting passages. But how Beethoven handles the material is completely different. His themes are constantly transforming, never returning quite the same. And they seem to affect one another as they blend and separate. The themes are taken apart and reassembled in ways that we can never quite anticipate. In short, he is doing everything that Schumann doesn't do. You have to work with the material according to how much musical time is involved. The preludes above are all very short and allow little room for development. A seven to nine minute string quartet movement is a different thing. You may need more material, or you may need to do extensive transformations of that material. The Beethoven, in my view, succeeds in this, while the Schumann fails. Unfair comparison? Well, possibly, but I wanted to make my point as clearly as possible.

Read more »

More Extreme Music

Here is a very famous and very beautiful prelude by Chopin:

What's so extreme about that? The piece starts rather conventionally in D flat major with an 8 measure phrase  answered with an 11 measure phrase, then the first phrase is repeated. So far, except for the expanded middle, this is pretty ordinary. But Chopin noticed that in the accompaniment there was this repeated A flat note that was present in every measure except for six measures in the middle where it becomes a repeated F. That seemed the most interesting thing going on, this obsessive repetition of, almost, a single note. So he continued the piece, moving to the key of C sharp minor. C sharp is the same note as D flat, of course, just spelled differently. This section of the piece is twice as long as the first part and now G sharp, the same note as A flat, is repeated over and over and over in every bar. Finally, the opening 8 measure phrase in D flat returns, with its repeated A flat note. This is the kind of against-the-grain kind of thing that Beethoven might have done: start by writing a rather ordinary piece, then realize that the really interesting thing is a detail of the accompaniment, so keep focusing on that until the possibilities are exhausted. Rather extreme... This device, of repeating or holding a single note while the rest of the music revolves around it is call a "pedal" or "pedal point" because it was typically used on the organ where it is very easy for the foot to hold down a single note in the bass while the hands do something else.

Read more »

Extreme Music

One of the finest music critics is Charles Rosen who is both an expert pianist and the writer of several extraordinary books on music. One of them, The Romantic Generation, has helped me to understand 19th century music (not one of my first loves). One of the pieces he discusses is the finale to Chopin's B flat minor piano sonata. In this clip, it is preceded by the previous movement, the well-known funeral march. The finale itself, a mad gallop in octaves, begins at the 9:40 mark:

What an extraodinary piece! It is like a Bach gigue for solo violin, sped up and run through a kaleidoscope of romantic harmony. That is very possibly how Chopin conceived it. Robert Schumann and quite a few others hated the piece.

Read more »

The Case of Chopin

I avoided getting to know the music of Chopin for a long time, largely because, as a guitarist, I never played any of his music. The Spanish guitarist Francisco Tarrega did a great transcription of one of the nocturnes in the late 19th century and an American guitarist recently did the mammoth job of transcribing all of the mazurkas for guitar, a couple of which I have played in concert. Some composer's stars rise and fall, but Chopin's music has been loved ever since it was first heard and on the occasion of his two hundredth anniversary last year, there were many piano recitals featuring Chopin. For some background, have a look at the Wikipedia article.

I finally got acquainted with his music a couple of years ago when I was asked to give a pre-concert talk on Chopin before a piano recital. I gave myself a graduate seminar in Chopin to prepare. I got a complete recording of his piano music--Chopin wrote almost exclusively for piano--and did a lot of listening. I also got several volumes of the scores and read a couple of books on him, one an excellent collection of essays by musicologists. After all this I realized that I had been missing one of the great composers of the 19th century. Chopin was one of the architects of Romantic music and was a huge influence on later composers.

A very few composers in music history create entirely new forms or genres or so utterly transform existing ones that it has the same effect. Chopin is one of these. He completely transformed the scherzo, prelude and nocturne and more or less invented forms like the ballade and impromptu. In his over fifty mazurkas he took a folk tradition and revitalized it. The polonaises are a greatly expanded version of another tradition.

Chopin is a complex figure—he was born on the periphery of European high culture so was less bound by its forms than composers like Bach or Beethoven who spent their entire lives in the heart of the great European traditions. Chopin absorbed these traditions and made them his own but did so very freely. 

A virtuoso pianist, during his short life Chopin only played some thirty public concerts, nearly all of them with other artists. He preferred the ‘salon’, which refers to the interesting social phenomenon, characteristic of Paris, of intimate gatherings of like-minded people to discuss, banter, socialize and experience things of shared interest which would certainly include poetry and music. Chopin was the great master of the salon. Counted as one of the great romantic composers, Chopin himself had little regard for his contemporaries, reserving his admiration for the great classic masters Bach, Handel and Mozart.

Chopin grew up with Bach’s monumental collection of preludes and fugues in all the keys, the Well-Tempered Clavier—as have all classical musicians for the last 250 years! What Bach did was to go beyond all his models both in quality and in the variety of different styles he used. Similarly, Chopin, while owing much to his models, also went far beyond. The main influences on Chopin besides Bach are the melodies of Italian opera, the music of Poland he heard in his youth and the 'brilliant' piano style popular in the early 19th century. We find Bachian counterpoint lurking everywhere in Chopin's music along with operatic melodic decoration, Polish rhythms and brilliant figuration. But he united these things into an absolutely distinctive musical style.

Chopin was a great harmonist: he left behind the Classical clarity and tension between dominant and tonic, substituting instead more ambiguous relations for the sake of color and atmosphere. Here is a magical example:

But in the Berceuse in D flat major, he takes a different approach, contrasting the 'painful simplicity' (in the words of Charles Rosen) of the accompaniment with the freedom of the right hand:

This is my favorite--quite untypical--mazurka:

Let's close with one of Chopin's larger works, the 4th Ballade in F minor. It combines all the elements I have been talking about: the shifting harmonies (it starts by deceiving the listener about what key it is in), imitative counterpoint, brilliant passages, soaring melodies and even a hint of polonaise texture. The opening creates a dreamlike, floating atmosphere through a harmonic ambiguity that previous composers would have avoided. Themes return almost without being noticed and are varied mysteriously—this is a rare blend of complexity hidden within simplicity. The 4^th Ballade is one of the greatest piano works of the 19^th century.

Read more »