Chopin - Etudes of Op. 10 & 25

Chopin - Etudes

Twelve Etudes, Op. 10

dedicated to Franz List

These set of twelve etudes were published in a single volume in 1833, when Chopin was 23 (four of them had already been completed as early as 1829). Chopin's genius is evident from first note to last, which the world of music had never before known any etudes as original, as musical, or as difficult.

No. 1 ripples from one end of the keyboard to the other, with it's extended arpeggios requiring a stretch of as many as six notes between adjacent fingers and the use of the index finger as a pivot. It has a musical reality that of a 4/4 chorale, the harmonies of which are spread from bass to treble.

No. 2 with its chromatic scale for the weak fingers 3, 4, and 5 of the right hand whose two other fingers are occupied with simultaneous chord tones. It may have been the inspiration for Rimsky Korsakoff's Flight of the Bumble Bee. [This is probably the most difficult of the set]

No. 3 "Tristesse" (Sadness): was subtitled "Tristesse" by one of its publishers, displays a melody so beautiful that Chopin said he had never written another to equal it. "A study in expression" (von Bülow), it never fails to move it's listeners, particularly when the haunting theme returns after the middle section's dramatic outbursts composed of fourth's and sixth's. The music must have had a special, private meaning for the composer for, when one of his pupils played it at a lesson, Chopin sighed sadly, "Oh, my homeland."

No. 4 - a whirling dervish of closely packed pianism - is meant to follow almost immediately,

for Chopin wrote in the manuscript Attacca il Presto. This requirement, suppressed in most
editions, means that, uniquely among his etudes, these two were conceived as a pair, for
performance together. So, the latter sweeps away the sentiment of the former in a cloud of fury.
    No. 5, the celebrated "Black Key" etude, features entirely pentatonic right hand triplets (that
is, on the black keys only) with ingratiating effect. How exotic it must have seemed to audiences
in the 1830s! Although Chopin considered it insignificant, posterity has found it irresistible.
Early in the 20th century, Leopold Godowsky transcribed it for the left hand alone and even
made a contrapuntal combination of it with its counterpart in Op. 25, the 'Butterfly" etude.
    No. 6, like No. 3, is almost a nocturne, its elegiac character resulting from a long-line melody
being poised above a melodic counterpoint whose 'insistent, recurrent fluctuations...which are
like human breathing or a gentle throbbing ... constantly envelop the melody like an aura"
(Schmitz). Striking harmonies, subtly conceived, underline the prevailing mood. Time stands
still during the few minutes of its duration as Chopin conveys feelings for which there are no
words.
    No. 7 is a toccata, or "touch piece," based on the technical problem of alternating right-hand
thirds and sixths, the lower note of which requires changing fingers, while the left hand occupies
itself with an underlying accompaniment as melodic as it is witty and charming. Again, Chopin
proves himself a magician, as he directs our attention away from the technique and toward the
music. No wonder that Huneker asked, "were ever Beauty and Duty so mated in double
harness?"
    No. 8 once more marries two dissimilar ideas, one fluid and sparkling in the right hand, the
other rhythmical and lyric in the left. This piece unfurls like a ribbon in the breeze, to flutter
exuberantly before disappearing with a bravura flourish.
    No. 9 has a character so agitated as to suggest a dramatic situation built around the experience
of frustration. Its insistent repeated notes call out like cries of yearning and anxiety which are
never assuaged. "The conveyance of such emotional content," Schmitz tells us, "cannot be
realized by mere variations of finger touch; it requires also a very careful phrasing and pedal
use."
    No. 10, composed with No. 9 as a pair, alternates sixths with broken octaves in an intricate
and bewildering variety of manners of articulation (usually ignored by most pianists). Close
attention reveals how "modern" the writing is and how it anticipates the future via a flirtation
with the wholetone scale (bar 54) and its cross-accents. Chopin intended it as an expression of
sweetness and lightness. Von Bülow said of it, 'He who can play this etude in a really finished
manner may congratulate himself on having climbed to the highest point of the pianists'
Parnassus."
    No. 11 is a major study in widespread chords, to be broken simultaneously in both hands. It
develops extensions of the hands, suppleness of the wrists and the ability of the little fingers of
each hand to balance and project melody and bass. Harplike, spacious harmonies and an elegant
theme disguise its formidable challenges for the pianist - as Chopin, one more time, directs us
with great originality into the music and away from the technique.
    No. 12, paired by Chopin with the preceding study, is known to all as the "Revolutionary"
etude. Supposedly inspired by news that the Russians had invaded Chopin's Polish homeland, its
dramatic, martial sweep results from a reversal of the technical demands of No. 8: arpeggiated
figures now roar up and down the bass of the piano while impassioned, sharply rhythmic motives
in the right "cry out in revolt ... animated by a mysterious and terrible force" (Cortot). So
suggestive is this music that listeners have no difficulty in imagining it as an expression of
patriotic pride, defiance and rage. Certainly, it ends the set of etudes with a degree of bravura
dynamism beyond the capabilities of any other 23-year-old composer in the Romantic Era.

Source:

Frank Cooper. Program Notes for the Garrick Ohlsson, Piano Recital: Saturday, October 26, 1996 at 8:00 pm. at the Ford Centre For The Performing Arts. 1996.

Twelve Etudes, Op.25
dedicated to Madame the Countess d'Agoult

The Twelve Etudes, Op.25 were published in a single volume in 1837, when Chopin was 27 (although seven of them had been completed by 1834). Here the word genius again is aptly applied, since the only precedent for etudes as original, as musical and as difficult was provided by Chopin's Op.10, written at the age of 23! Curiously, the new set was dedicated to the Countess Marie d'Agoult, mistress of the dedicatee of the first set, Franz Liszt. Although intensive scholarship has failed to discover the reason why, it is amusing to note that the recent motion picture Impromptu (with Bernadette Peters as Marie) implied a liaison between Chopin and the titled lady - these Etudes being her reward.

No.1 "Aeolian Harp" - with its murmuring arpeggios and pastoral melody - has been known variously as "The Shepherd Boy" and "The Aeolian Harp," with authentic stories to support each. Chopin told a pupil, "imagine a little shepherd who takes refuge in a peaceful grotto from an approaching storm. In the distance rushes the wind and the rain, while the shepherd gently plays a melody on his flute." Schumann, who heard Chopin play the piece, wrote, "imagine that an Aeolian harp possessed all the musical scales and that the hand of an artist were to cause them to intermingle in all sorts of fantastic embellishments, yet in such a way as to leave everywhere audible a deep fundamental tone and a soft continuously singing upper voice, and you will get an Idea of Chopin's playing. When the etude was ended, we felt as though we had seen a radiant picture in a dream which, half awake, we ached to recall."

No.2 "The Bees" - a tiny toccata in understated, whirring triplets - has always been known in France as Les Abeilles (The Bees), yet Schumann heard it "as the song of a sleeping child," an observation which Huneker supports with this beautiful thought: "No comparison could be prettier, for there is a sweet, delicate drone that sometimes issues from childish lips, having a charm for ears not attuned to grosser things."

No.3 takes a novel pattern of capricious, almost jerky gestures-in-opposition between the two hands and makes music with it which is so bravura an expression of happiness that we scarcely notice its technique. When viewed closely, a marvel is beheld - four differing little motives occurring simultaneously on every beat!

No.4 is, in E. Robert Schmitz' opinion, a "very modern composition; a brilliant predecessor and forerunner of a syncopated age." A fundamental rhythm in the left hand sets off staccato melodic chords placed strategically between the beats - for a curiously restless effect. Huneker tells us that "Stephen Heller remarked that this study reminded him of the first bar of the Kyrie - rather the Requiem Aeternam of Mozart's Requiem."

No.5, being a study - leggiero and scherzando - of grace notes (on the beat, then ahead off the beat) and accented passing tones, sounds even odder than No.4 until relief is provided by a ravishingly beautiful melody that appears in the middle part (under a pattern of rich embroidery in the treble). At the end, only the grace notes remain. We hear them struck six times insistently before they turn into a trill and are swept away by a loud, slow arpeggio up the keyboard. Some people have heard the outer parts as suggestive of a mazurka and the central one as reminiscent of a barcarolle.

No.6 treats the technical problem of executing rapid right-hand thirds not for brilliant display but, rather, for poetic melodiousness (there being no tangible melody). Louis Ehlert recognized Chopin's achievement thus: "He deprives every passage of all mechanical appearance by promoting it to become the embodiment of a beautiful thought, which in turn finds graceful expression in its motion." This is one of the greatest of Chopin's alchemical transmutations of the etude-idea for, in it, the lead of mere physical prowess has become pure musical gold.

No.7 gives vent to a magnificent display of expression via an impassioned duet - molto cantabile - in the treble and bass lines while, somehow, a soft accompaniment murmurs in between. It is as though a flute and a cello of supernatural range were, in Chopin's mind, the protagonists of this drama - with a sting quartet in the background. Heller wrote of the work, "It engenders the sweetest sadness, the most enviable torments, and if in playing it one feels oneself insensibly drawn toward mournful and melancholy ideas, it is a disposition of the soul which I prefer to all others. Alas! How I love these sombre and mysterious dreams, and Chopin is the god who creates them."

No.8 takes the pianist's right hand into virtuosic combat with sixths. Hans von Bülow considered this surging piece to be "the most useful exercise in the whole range of etude literature." Certainly, its perpetual motion can only be rendered by a fully developed master of the keyboard, one whose ears are as sensitive to Chopin's daring harmonies as his fingers are to its technical demands.

No.9 "The Butterfly" is known as The Butterfly, although Chopin gave it no name. Perhaps its graceful right-hand flutterings suggested to someone sunlight flashing on the iridescent wings of certain diurnal insects. In any case, the pianist faces the problem of flicking from his wrist a broken chord and two leggiero octaves on every beat (except two - when his musical lepidopteran alights ever so delicately, one imagines, on a flower).

No.10 empowers legato chromatic octaves-in-unison with the force of Nature, unleashing tumultuous surges of tone. Schmitz likened it to "a powerful surf with its overlapping onrushes and its sudden breaking turns." Poised between the work's two such tidal waves is the exquisite lyricism of the central section, also in octaves for the right hand and containing an embryonic chorale tucked into an inner voice. Frederick Niecks, a late 19th century biographer of Chopin, describes the piece as "a real pandemonium; for a while holier sounds intervene, but finally hell prevails."

No.11 "The Winter Wind" - known to everyone as The Winter Wind - is really a magnificent march based , as we hear from a pair of quiet phrases that introduce the work, on a motive almost identical to Chopin's Funeral March. This cortège-like theme is ever present, proceeding grandly and implacably against icy gales of figurations hurtling across the treble. Huneker is right when he says, "It takes prodigious power and endurance to play this work, prodigious power, passion and no little poetry. It is open air music, storm music, and at times moves in processional splendor. Small souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should avoid it." Chopin warned a pupil that such music "can be treacherous and dangerous for the uninitiated."

No.12 "The Ocean" - often called The Ocean - employs parallel arpeggios in both hands uup and down the keyboard with an effect suggesting the mighty waves of an ocean. Huneker, never at a loss for good descriptive phraseology, felt in it "the thunder and spray of the sea when it tumbles and roars on some sullen and savage shore." Essentially a study in pianistic resonance, the music is at base a chorale which Chopin has expanded into what Schmitz reckoned as "a gigantic play of chimes." Others have heard in it "the sound of great guns." Whatever Chopin's intention, this epic of pianism - with its triumphant major-key ending - never fails to sweep away its hearers' imaginations as it sweeps them to their feet.

Under Construction

Source:

Frank Cooper, Program Notes for the Garrick Ohlsson, Piano recital: Wednesday, March 20, 1996 at 8:00pm at the Ford Centre For The Performing Arts 1995/1996 season.

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