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Chopin
Valéry Afanassiev, pianist
Borges said once that readers should enjoy themselves.
In other words, the chief goal of writer is to provide enjoyment for his readers.
The same goes for other creative artists, I imagine: painters, composers.
What kind of enjoyment are they supposed?
Borges was talking about the pleasure he derived from Oscar Wilde's books,
if I remember nightly. I also enjoy reading Oscar Wilde,
disregarding many a disparaging remark aimed at this hedonist by some of his fellow writers.
My love for Oscar Wilde does not prevent me, however,
from enjoying Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Musil and Beckett,
who are my favorite writers of the twentieth century.
In the realm of music,
this mixture of diametrically opposite pleasures could be personified by Chopin and Schoenberg,
for instance. I love both of them,
and sometimes I can't even distinguish between the pleasures I experience when listening to their respective works.
What I actually experience is pure musical joy accompanied by all sorts of bodily reactions:
beatific smiles, shivers of ecstasy, tears, etc.
In those moments of bliss I don't really care about consonances and dissonances,
tonality and atonality.
I forget that many people find Chopin nice and charming and Schoenberg abrasive,
if not intolerable - for the simple reason that I have never agreed them.
Chopin is neither nice nor charming.
It is true that his music was admired in the Parisian salons and other intimate halls where he played his nocturnes and mazurkas in order to make his living and air his grievances.
But the nineteenth-century salons had nothing in common with today's supermarkets where one can hear soft music or a Beethoven symphony interpreted by Karajan.
(Not by Furtwängler or Klemperer, mind you.)
In those salons and castles the best music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was born and performed
(Oscar Wilde owed a great deal to salons and castles.)
There used to be a vital link between aristocratic and artistic élites which combined their efforts to offer the world the highest achievements of the human spirit.
Nowadays, alas, this link is not vital any longer despite the linguistic similarity between the words 'aristocrat' and 'artist'.
What is more, neither of those élites can be found anywhere except in the past, in the glorious, enviable past.
(Not even in backward countries do they exist nowadays.)
But, for all technological novelties,
time machines are not on the market yet.
Chopin should not be compared to the composers who supply soundtracks for contemporary movies:
nice, charming, nondescript music.
Unlike most artists, struggling for life and universal renown in our business-oriented world,
he never pandered to public taste,
whatever lay people might think when listening to broadcasts of his works.
He was far more influenced by the Polish language in which the words 'honour' and 'sadness' play such an important role -
to the detriment of the word 'vulgarity'.
(In Eugine Onegin,
Pushkin apologises for his inability to translate the word 'vulgar' into Russian.)
Like Beethoven and Webern, he was an enigmatic figure.
His works have been analysed in Kabbalistic terms by one of the most prominent musicologists,
Alexey Kandinsky.
(He also applied Kabbalistic methods to Liszt's Sonata in B Minor and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition -
with amazing results.
Oddly enough, Schumann's music seems impervious to these mathematico-linguistic methods.)
Besides, even those who are not acquainted with the Kabbalah can fully enjoy the texture of Chopin's works.
Whenever I play his nocturnes, mazurkas, polonaises and ballads,
I am reminded of Dickens whose sentences are so rich, so intense,
so full of echoes, modulations and transitions that no plot is required to prop them up,
contrary to the view some literary critics seem to hold.
Chopin's works are a 'fixed improvisation',
to use the definition that a friend of mine coined during one of our discussions.
In this respect Chopin reminds me of Gogol, especially when he indulges in wonderful,
fioritura-like cadenzas which are in a way similar to Gogol's comparisons,
to those stories within a story.
Chopin also reminds me of Dante's Purgatorio which is full of sadness and nostalgia.
Of course Schubert was a more assiduous explorer of the Inferno.
But even Schubert and Dante himself would have been surprised by the sheer despair resounding throughout Chopin's Sonata in B Flat Minor,
the last movement being the tempest that carries Paolo and Francesca around their vicious circle (ombre portato da la detta briga).
No wonder that the third movement became the soundtrack for funerals all over the world.
(And yet we continue to enjoy the Sonata in B Flat Minor.
A masochistic enjoyment, in a sense.
Heidegger thought that awakening Angst was the chief goal of philosophy.
And in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 books considered dangerous and irresistible because they make people unhappy.)
As a mater of fact, Chopin reminds me of everybody. And of nothing.
It is true that even those who never listen to classical music may occasionally shed a tear during broadcasts of his works.
(I wonder whether we shed the same tears on those occasions.)
In this respect he resembles Beethoven whose Pathetique was admired even by such a narrow-minded and narrow-hearted individual as Vladimir Ilich Lenin.
On the other hand Chopin's works resemble nothing and nobody.
And I am not sure they are mirrored by the expression 'Music of the Spheres'.
Perhaps 'Music of the Souls' would be a better definition.
Copyright 1999 Mito Arts Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Created by TK.
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