Chopin Preludes/Mazurkas (Etudes)

Chopin..hmm…what to say about Chopin. He revolutionized piano playing…arm weight, wrist motion, angled the hand outward…yadda, yadda. He was also a mostly piano composer, meaning he stuck with what he knew. Yeah, the piano trio and the cello sonata and some concerti and all, but mostly, his output is limited to the piano. And, not that this is a bad thing. His writing is fantastically pianistic, and with the forward-looking views that he had on technique, also tricky to play.
The 24 preludes are a clear allusion to J.S. Bach. I guess if you compose something in all the keys–twice–then everyone wants to be like you. However, they do not go in chromatic order; instead, they follow the Circe of fifths, pairing the relative major to its minor. These preludes are beautiful, and there is a wide range of styles. Some range from 16 bar beautiful choral-like writing (A major), to the Bb-minor madness that you find later on.  One of my favorites is in g minor…with the octaves? You know which one I mean. If not, Julian can sing it to you. 🙂 When Cataldi played them all for his junior recital, I loved the glissando(i) he added. If you don’t already know, thats what you do when you know a scale you’re about to play is going to suck….make it a gliss. Another cool piece is the Rachmaninoff variations on a theme of the C minor prelude. Awesome piece. The preludes are usually recorded as a set, but they were probably not meant to be played as such, due to the way music was being performed in Paris at the time. Small salon gatherings probably presented two or three at a time, instead of the set in its entirety.

The mazurkas are strange. Most students don’t want to play them, and yet those professionals that do, LOVE them. Horowitz, Zimmerman, Rubenstein…and a whole bunch of other old/dead people. They are rhythmically as well as harmonically eclectic, ranging from slow to fast and consonant to chromatic. For a great Neo-Riemannian analyses worthy mazurka, turn to the last F minor (op. Posth?) Anyways…a mazurka is a polish dance, which is why polish dancing never caught on like Bollywood did. Incidentally, Slumdogmillionare was a GREAT movie. And, I saw it before the Oscar noms came out, thank you very much.  They follow a rhythmic pattern sort of that varies, but are usually in three with the last two beats being quarter notes and the first beat being one of a variety of things including a triplet, a dotted eight/sixteenth, a tremolo, or a set of 16ths.

Clara S. and her Notturno/ and Felix M. and his Serious Variations

Clara….what a minx. She sure knew how to drive the guys wild. Sad times for her, though. On one hand she had Robert, the cukoo. On the other she had J. Brahms, the misogynist. What a choice! Anyways…

Her Notturno is beautiful and lyrical – a stark contrast to most of the writing by Liszt, the other grand pianist of her time. This piece is in the Norton Scores and studied in Survey of Music Lit. It’s a nice piece and while maybe not particularly representative of her technique or compositional abilities, I love it.

The Mazurka is also cool and having just heard kofi Agawu’s presentation on topics its interesting to hear them in this piece. The military topic and the brilliant style being the two main examples. While it looks seemingly easy, this piece has some tricky parts.

Felix M. was a cool cat. He often times let his sister use his name to publish her music so that she could save face in society and still get her creativity out there. His Serious Variations are, in fact, very serious. My favorite is No. 7.  Much a traditionalist, his writing is a times “old-fashioned”. Surely, one can say that it harks back to Classic and Baroque traditions. Much of that may come from his love of Bach and his studies with Zelter. Incidentally, Zelter wrote a really cool setting of the Erlkonig. Check it out.

I also learned, and this ingtrigued me, that Felix was as talented as Mozart when a child but just never improved like Mozart did. That would be an interesting social study to see why. I mean, the genius is evident in the music and the intensification of the variations is very much Classical in style, but I think thats cool.

Schumann: Symphonic Etudes and Fantasy

I have to say, I think the Symphonic Etudes are wonderful. However, I think that I am more fond of the supplementary set than the compiled ones. I also love them for another reason. Schubert and Schumann, in my opinion, are better at writing shorter pieces and sticking to the smaller genres. This may be due to their extensive writing of Lied, but who knows. Anyways, each short piece has its own melody, texture, structure, yadda yadda. However, with these etudes that is the case, but they all share a common theme. Thus, Schumann is able to make use of his talent for writing short pieces and at the same time create a larger work that does not sound repetitive or drawn out. I think it would be fun to insert the additional 5 variations and not tell people where they were being inserted, like leave them out of a program to see what would happen. And then, change it up every time.

Also, Schumann manages to–like many other composers–get away with not writing their own theme. He takes the theme from a different piece that was written for the flute and composed by the father of a woman he was once engaged to. However, the rest is all Schumann. Displaced metric feelings, no big scales or arpeggios, thick fat chordal writing, and so on. The firs time I heard about this piece was two summers ago and there’s a really funny story related to that so ask me if you would like. With every listening, it gets more and more fun.

The Fantasy, which I always want to spell “Fantasie”, is a huge work by Schumann written for Clara in 3 movements. It also maintains her name as thematic material. Interestingly enough, Beethoven and Clara are both quoted in the work and a small quatrain at the top of the score lets the player know that there are deeper compositional “easter eggs” within the work. Why does Schumann love to do this? Arabeske, Fantasy, Carnaval….

3 movements long, the Fantasy is awesome. I have two recordings, but the one of Richter is my favorite. I would describe it, but if you know Richter’s playing you probably already know what it sounds like. However, when John k. Parker came and played it at FSU, I remember not being a big fan.

Schumann: Papillons and Carnaval

Listening to Schumann’s Papillons always reminds me of Chopin, specifically his first Ballade in G minor. The openings, with the same crawling introductions and then the quick shifts into waltzes always sound similar to me.  Even though in Carnaval Schumann directly points towards Chopin, I think that the Papillons do the same thing.

I love the stories both pieces tell, down to the smallest detail. I can often hear the shuffling of feet, or the whirling of cloth during some of the dances. Another thing that stands out is the blurring of the beat that Schumann is so prone to do. This is the kind of thing that could and probably would happen in a real dance setting. With all the commotion, someone enjoying the party and dancing along is prone to lose the beat of the music, however they would just keep dancing until they heard it again, or reestablishes the beat again, which is something Shummann inevitably does.

Another aspect of Carnaval that I can really relate to is the use of the Commedia dell’Arte characters that form the basis for some of the pieces.  These are also very common in the vocal accompaniment world, as they make appearances in numerous songs, especially in French Chanson. Hearing different composers bring these characters to life musically is not only interesting, but educational.

Listening to the recordings, it was funny to see who took what repeats when. During the final movement of the Papillons, Andre Gavrilov adds a repeat in during No. 11 that is not written into the score. And, in Carnaval, repeats were often taken by various performers almost arbitrarily. Comparing who took what repeats yielded little consistency. This is unlike classical music, where the repeats are an integral part of the piece and the formal design, and thus must be adhered to a bit more uniformly.