Part 7: Notes II (pp. 154-183)

Part 7 of chopin-pianist-and-teacher-as-seen-by-his-pupils (pp. 154-183).

Question this unit answers

Where does Chopin’s style of playing actually come from, and what precisely did he mean by the terms his pupils reported — cantabile, portamento, spianato, and above all rubato? Eigeldinger’s endnotes to the chapters on style and interpretation argue that Chopin belongs less to Romantic pianism than to a late-Baroque and Classical lineage: eighteenth-century declamation theory, Italian bel canto, and the vocal-instrumental treatise tradition of C. P. E. Bach, Quantz, Leopold Mozart, Türk and Hummel. A second question runs alongside: how many kinds of rubato did Chopin practise, and how can the annotated pupils’ scores be used as evidence for them?

Key terms

• Affektenlehre (theory of affect) — the eighteenth-century doctrine of the affections out of which the principles of musical declamation arose; Eigeldinger names it as the direct link between Chopin and the Baroque/Classical aesthetic (p. 154).
• Musical declamation / oratory — the analogy between musical performance and the punctuated speech of an orator, expounded by Bérard, Lacassagne, Quantz, Leopold Mozart and especially Türk’s Klavierschule, then practised by Clementi and Beethoven (p. 154).
• Bel canto and the Théâtre-Italien singers — Rubini, Pasta, Malibran, Cinti-Damoreau, Lablache, Nourrit, Grisi, Tamburini; catalogued with dates and repertoire as the models Chopin absorbed on arriving in Paris, Rubini being his standing model for pianistic declamation (pp. 155-157).
• Wrist as breath — Chopin’s dictum equating wrist action with taking breath in singing, surviving on a detached sheet of the Projet de Méthode (PL-Wtifc M/613); realised in the Dubois score’s oblique strokes marking breathing points (pp. 158-160).
• Portamento vs. portando vs. parlando — the improvised chromatic filling of an ascending interval (Tosi, Agricola) versus the nineteenth-century misuse of the term for articulated repeated notes; Eigeldinger separates them and assigns Karasowski’s remark to the latter (pp. 160-162).
• Cercar della nota — a vocal ornament defined by Johann Walther, an auxiliary note repeating the first note just before the second sounds, which Chopin notates as a crossed appoggiatura (p. 162).
• John Field (1782-1837) — inventor of the piano Nocturne, with Hummel “the master of cantabile”; Chopin’s playing was compared to his by Kalkbrenner, and Chopin gave Field’s works a large place in his teaching (p. 163).
• Repeated fingers and finger substitutions — two catalogues drawn from the OFE and the Stirling, Dubois, Jędrzejewicz and Franchomme scores, showing how Chopin obtained legato cantabile through fingering rather than mere finger-linking (pp. 164-166).
• Tempo rubato (“stolen time”) — Tosi’s 1723 compensation system: a note’s value prolonged or shortened to the detriment or gain of the next, over an imperturbable bass (pp. 168-169).
• The three rubatos — (1) Italian Baroque compensatory rubato in broad cantilenas; (2) agogic fluctuation of whole phrases, periods and sections; (3) the “national” rubato derived from the mobile rhythm of the Mazur (pp. 171-173).
• Spianato — “levelled”, hence equal, smooth, simple; traced to Bellini’s cantilena via Blaze de Bury, and to Paganini’s Cantabile spianato e Polacca brillante (pp. 177-178).
• Aesthetic of suggestion — Chopin’s answer to Lenz that he merely “indicates” and the listener completes the picture, which Eigeldinger reads as an opening toward musical impressionism and Debussy (p. 183).

Propositions

• Chopin subordinates melodic/grammatical accentuation to continuity of the cantilena, in direct contrast to the Beethovenian practice reported by Schindler, where rhythmic accent was brought out most strongly (p. 154).
• The comparison of music to oratory places Chopin in the eighteenth-century declamation tradition; his complaint that Beethoven is no longer properly understood is a complaint about the loss of that tradition (p. 154).
• Kleczyński’s writing on phrasing cannot be cleanly attributed to Chopin, because Kleczyński himself admitted the influence of Mathis Lussy; Eigeldinger quotes it anyway because the area is otherwise sparsely documented (p. 155).
• Mikuli’s claim that only Chopin’s pupils knew him in his full greatness is plausible but over-generalized; non-pupils tended to share Berlioz’s view that Chopin had to be heard close by, in a salon rather than a concert hall (p. 154).
• Chopin’s aesthetic sense remains that of an eighteenth-century pianist da camera, for whom the Romantic concert disturbs the listening conditions and the musical message itself (p. 154).
• The cantabile keyboard tradition, codified by Türk and Hummel and practised by Mozart and the reformed Clementi, declined as the Romantic piano was exploited for orchestral effects; Thalberg’s L’Art du chant appliqué au piano tried and largely failed to revive it, and Chopin continued it instead through composition rather than transcription (pp. 157-158).
• Adopting bel canto did not compromise Chopin’s pianism: he absorbed vocal models inside a pianistic aesthetic already shaped by Field and especially Hummel (p. 158).
• Chopin’s legato cantabile came as much from original fingerings, refinements of touch and discreet pedalling as from finger-to-finger linking in the Classical manner; Lenz’s story of Chopin adopting Liszt’s fingering for the Beethoven op. 27/2 Allegretto documents this (pp. 163-164).
• The oblique strokes unique to Mme Dubois’s scores are a performance notation: they mark hand-lifts before new motives, lengthened rests, and breaths before key notes in a bel canto line (pp. 158-160).
• Chopin’s technical thinking is inseparable from musical and stylistic reality — the wrist/breath analogy is a stylistic proposition disguised as a technical one (p. 160).
• Almost no one who actually heard Chopin criticized his rubato; the critics were non-Poles (Berlioz, Mendelssohn), and Moscheles reversed his own initial objection (p. 167).
• Mikuli’s attack on rubato abuses is aimed not at Chopin’s contemporaries but at later generations; the pupils’ denunciations all date from 1879-1910, and the pseudo-rubato only faded after roughly 1930-40 with the return to respecting the letter of the score (pp. 167-168).
• Independence of the two hands is a structural trait of Chopin’s writing, not merely a performance manner: two of his three Etudes in the Fétis-Moscheles Méthode des méthodes are polymetric, and op. 25/2 is built entirely on rhythmic exchange (p. 167).
• Mozart’s boast to his father that in tempo rubato the left hand goes on unperturbed shows the practice was already codified in the Classical era; Eigeldinger claims Mozart thereby “anticipated Chopin” (p. 169).
• Rubato in its original sense was in decline or already abolished in other piano music by Chopin’s time; his attachment to it is explained by his training under Żywny and Elsner (both pre-Classical, Italianized) and by his youthful immersion in the Italianized Warsaw National Theatre (pp. 169-170).
• Chopin stops writing the word “rubato” after op. 24, part of a general thinning-out of mood, character and metronome markings; Liszt’s explanation — that the word was insufficient and misleading — is convincing (pp. 171-172, 174).
• Where Chopin does mark “rubato”, the “national” element seems to take precedence: nine of the twelve works examined are in triple time, three-quarters belong to Polish folk-derived genres, and the marked passages in op. 21 derive from the Mazur (p. 173).
• Polish folk musicians independently practise the same compensation system as Baroque bel canto while stamping strict triple metre with the foot, so “national” and Italian rubato are compatible rather than rival explanations (p. 173).
• Liszt’s rubato is a different thing from Chopin’s: Lachmund records it as a sudden light suspension of rhythm on a significant note, “entirely different from Chopin’s give-and-take system” (p. 174).
• Chopin improvised ornaments precisely in the two genres where his rubato was most characteristic — the Nocturnes (Baroque-type rubato via fioritura) and the Mazurkas (“national” rubato) — and the surviving variants in pupils’ scores confirm this distribution almost exclusively (p. 175).
• Small-note ornaments should not be read as automatically improvisatory; Chopin also uses them for gruppetti and irregular groupings, and mixes typographic sizes, so no dogmatic system can be read into his melismatic script (p. 176).
• Chopin’s aesthetic quarrel with Liszt by 1840 was about transcription: he thought a great talent was being frittered away on adaptations whose difficulties detracted from musical clarity, and he could not bear anyone altering his own text (pp. 176-177).
• Chopin never fixed an interpretation: he played the same piece differently according to the inspiration of the moment, and Eigeldinger locates the variation mainly in agogic rhythm, ornamentation, dynamics, tempo and pedalling (pp. 178-180).
• Chopin’s dynamic range extends beyond Mikuli’s reported limits to ppp and fff, but all such markings occur in works published up to 1840; the indications are relative to his instruments and his personal range, not absolute (p. 180).
• Eigeldinger rejects Badura-Skoda’s implied ban on fortissimo, citing Mikuli’s and Mathias’s categorical statements and the fact that Chopin handed the Scherzo op. 39 to Gutmann when too weak to play it as he wished (pp. 180-181).
• Authenticity in Chopin goes beyond the instruments he had: Michałowski’s argument that a modern Bechstein or Steinway would give the forte that once required forcing is judged well founded, though playing an 1840 Pleyel remains highly educational (p. 181).
• Chopin’s “small sonority” was a deliberate choice from the start, not a symptom of illness: he was already criticized for it at his first Vienna concert in 1829 and preferred that reproach to being told he played too loudly (p. 182).
• Chopin’s art of nuance rests on an aesthetic of suggestion that opens the way to musical impressionism, evidenced by his later textures and by Debussy’s veneration, his 1914-15 Durand edition, and his 1915 Etudes dedicated to Chopin’s memory (p. 183).

Arguments

Chopin as a late-Baroque/Classical musician, not a Romantic one. The argument is cumulative rather than single-shot. Eigeldinger repeatedly shows that a reported Chopin precept has an exact precedent in an eighteenth-century treatise: declamation in Bérard, Lacassagne, Quantz, Leopold Mozart and Türk (p. 154); singing as the basis of instrumental playing in Telemann, Bach’s Cantable Art, Türk and Hummel (pp. 157-158); rubato in Tosi, C. P. E. Bach, Leopold Mozart, Quantz and Türk (pp. 168-169). Two biographical facts anchor the chain: Chopin’s teachers Żywny and Elsner were products of the pre-Classical era formed in Italianized Prague and Vienna, and the Warsaw National Theatre of his adolescence was thoroughly Italianized (pp. 169-170). The conclusion is that Chopin preserved a practice that was dying elsewhere.

Three components of rubato. Eigeldinger builds on Kleczyński and Higgins, who inferred two forms of Chopin’s rubato from the Mathias and Mikuli texts, and adds a third derived from the mobile rhythm of the Mazur (p. 171). He then tests the hypothesis against the notation itself: he classifies every occurrence of the marking “rubato” by position (start of piece, start of a cadence-directed motif, repetition of a phrase, second half of a phrase) and by genre, tempo and metre (pp. 172-173). The distribution — mostly triple time, mostly Polish-derived genres, with the accompanying parts keeping the beat — supports assigning the explicit markings chiefly to the “national” type while reserving the Italian type for broad cantilenas. Crucially he argues the three are not rivals, because Polish folk monody uses the same compensation system as Tosi’s rubato (p. 173).

Pupils’ annotated scores as primary evidence. Rather than argue from testimony alone, Eigeldinger converts the Stirling, Dubois, Jędrzejewicz and Franchomme scores plus the OFE into bar-by-bar catalogues: breathing strokes, repeated fingers, substitutions, ornamental variants, octave displacements, dynamic alterations (pp. 158-166, 175, 179-180). The method lets him distinguish traditional legato-seeking substitutions from “really innovatory” ones intended to exploit a particular finger’s tone (p. 166), and to identify which variants remain unpublished (p. 175).

Deliberate delicacy, not invalid weakness. Against the natural inference that Chopin’s small sonority was a product of tuberculosis, Eigeldinger assembles a chronological chain of independent witnesses running from the Wiener Theaterzeitung and Chopin’s own 1829 letter through Fétis in 1832, Le Pianiste in 1835 and Marmontel, to the British journals of 1848 (p. 182). Since the reproach precedes the collapse of his health by two decades, the delicacy must be a choice.

Evidence

• Schindler’s summary of Beethoven’s planned method and of Clementi’s discovery that positive rules of performance lie in the art of singing (BLB, pp. 452, 468) — pp. 154, 158.
• Chopin’s letters on the Théâtre-Italien singers: Rubini’s true notes and incomparable mezza voce, the shifting preference between Pasta and Malibran, Cinti-Damoreau’s chromatic scales (SC, pp. 100-101, 104) — pp. 156-157.
• The autograph sketch of an accompaniment to Casta diva from Norma, probably intended for Pauline Viardot, transcribed by W. Nowik (p. 157).
• The detached ruled sheet PL-Wtifc M/613 bearing the wrist/breath statement, originally part of the Projet de Méthode and separated before Cortot bought the manuscript in 1936 (p. 160).
• Victor Gille quoting Anna de Lichocherstoff on the Luft-Pause and the wrist’s suppleness independent of the forearm (p. 160).
• Tosi (pp. 81-82, 99, 105) on rubato as a compensation system over an imperturbable bass; Agricola’s definition of portamento; Johann Walther on cercar della nota (pp. 160-162, 168).
• Mozart’s letter from Augsburg, 24 October 1777, on the left hand going on unperturbed in tempo rubato (p. 169).
• Louis Adam protesting against the trend of playing out of time, and insisting that the bass strictly maintain the beat while the melody is altered (p. 169).
• Hummel in 1828 denouncing manufactured feeling and slowing the beat “at every possible opportunity to the point of satiation” (p. 170).
• Mme Peruzzi on Chopin calling his left hand his maître de chapelle, and Moscheles’s account of Chopin’s ad libitum playing (Moscheles II, p. 39) — p. 170.
• Nine listed sources for the maître de chapelle metaphor (Lenz, Peruzzi/Niecks, Kleczyński, Dubois, Franchomme, Mikuli/Koczalski, Alkan/Bertha, Karasowski) — p. 170.
• Lachmund’s diary (p. 62) contrasting Lisztian rubato with Chopin’s Eilen und Zögern — p. 174.
• Karasowski (II, p. 92) and Marie Roubaud (Ganche, DSFC, p. 86) on the Polish element escaping French pupils — p. 174.
• Mathias (p. 5) on Chopin’s rage over the fermata in Liszt’s Adelaïde transcription (RGMP 1840/12, 9 February); Marmontel (PC, pp. 11-12) on Chopin’s intolerance of textual alteration — pp. 176-177.
• Blaze de Bury (p. 112) on Bellini introducing spianato singing after Rossini’s ornamented method (pp. 177-178).
• Ludwika Ostrzyńska’s report of six months of lessons on the Nocturne op. 15/2, each time played “completely differently” (p. 180).
• Badura-Skoda’s dynamic table (p. 19), and Michałowski (p. 75) on Chopin’s naturally deep and resonant touch (pp. 180-181).
• Chopin’s 25 December 1831 letter caricaturing Sowiński’s banging as charlatanism in art (SC, p. 107) — p. 182.
• Chopin’s 1829 Vienna letter on playing “too delicately”, Fétis (1832), Le Pianiste 1835/9 p. 69 on his part being lost in the duo with Hiller, and Marmontel (HP, p. 254) on his suave, hazy sonority (pp. 182-183).
• Lenz (GPV 1872, p. 39) recording Chopin’s “I indicate” reply, and Durand (II, p. 21) describing Debussy’s playing (p. 183).

Quotes

• “Concerts are never real music; you have to give up the idea of hearing in them the most beautiful things of art” (p. 155)
• “Whoever plays an instrument must have some knowledge of singing” (p. 157)
• “One should sing more at the piano, an advantage for the most mediocre voice. If we were to hear one evening, on a deserted beach, the singing of a Chopin Nocturne, what an emotion!” (p. 158)
• “the Luft-Pause which gives the hand the elegance of a wing … The suppleness of the wrist, independent of the forearm, was the virtuoso’s prime consideration” (p. 160)
• “In any methodical teaching […] Field’s Nocturnes should definitely precede those of Chopin.” (p. 164)
• “They all are amazed that I play accurately in time. They can’t grasp that in tempo rubato in an Adagio the left hand goes on unperturbed; with them the left hand follows suit” (p. 169)
• “allowing his right to wander about ad libitum” (p. 171)
• “small groups of added grace notes, falling like tiny drops of speckled dew over the melodic figure” (p. 176)
• “He does have to put his stamp on everything; well, he may, he plays for thousands of people and I rarely play for one!” (p. 177)
• “Over six months I played this Nocturne at Chopin’s and every time I began to play it as Chopin had shown me at my previous lesson, he would sit down at the piano himself, saying “But it’s not that at all!”, and he would play it completely differently from the time before.” (p. 180)
• “The general opinion is that I play too quietly, or rather too delicately for those accustomed to the banging of the Viennese pianists […] It doesn’t matter. There must always be some kind of “but …” and I should prefer it to be that one rather than have it said that I play too loudly” (p. 182)
• “I heard Chopin during his first year in Paris, and his playing already had an exquisite beauty, a natural sensitivity, a suave, hazy sonority based essentially on the delicacy of his touch and his quite individual use of the pedals.” (p. 183)

Tensions and links

• Continuity vs. accentuation. Chopin’s precedence for unbroken cantilena is set directly against the Beethovenian practice of strong rhythmic accent (p. 154), yet Chopin also praised a pupil for understanding Beethoven better than anyone. The tension is resolved only by distinguishing declamatory punctuation from metrical accent.
• A reviewer who missed that distinction. The Wiener Theaterzeitung faulted Chopin’s “inobservance of the accent marking the beginning of new musical ideas” (p. 178), which Eigeldinger attributes partly to the accentuation of Mazovian folk music.
• Attributing precepts to Chopin at all. Eigeldinger openly admits that Kleczyński’s phrasing doctrine may be Lussy’s (p. 155), that Koczalski’s rubato explanation is unconvincing enough to be excluded (p. 172), and that Gutmann’s claims about force need balancing against Mathias (p. 181). The source-critical apparatus repeatedly qualifies the very testimony the book is built on.
• Terminological drift. Portamento had already been corrupted into portando by Liszt and even Thalberg (p. 161), so Karasowski’s use of it cannot be read at face value; Eigeldinger has to reconstruct the intended meaning from Chopin’s own remark on Sontag (p. 162). The same drift afflicts “rubato”, which is precisely why Chopin abandoned the word after op. 24 (p. 174).
• Historical instrument vs. modern piano. Badura-Skoda’s dynamic table would banish fortissimo from modern instruments; Eigeldinger declines, arguing that authenticity “goes beyond the instruments he had at his disposal” while still commending the 1840 Pleyel as educational (pp. 180-181). An unresolved compromise rather than a settled position.
• Links. This unit is the annotative backing for the chapters on style and interpretation in earlier parts of the book, and it points forward to the eye-witness accounts (Berlioz p. 272, Mendelssohn p. 267, Lenz on Beethoven op. 26 pp. 277-278, Wiener Theaterzeitung pp. 288-289, Fétis p. 290) and to the fingering appendices (pp. 248-249, 255-256). Related wiki topics: bel canto, tempo rubato, ornamentation, historical performance practice, Mazurka rhythm, the Projet de Méthode.

Open questions

• What exactly did Karasowski mean by “portamento” — the improvised Baroque ornament or Thalberg’s pianistic portando? Eigeldinger argues for the latter but calls it a suggestion, not a demonstration (p. 162).
• What does “rubato” mean in each of the thirteen works where Chopin wrote it? Kamieński, Kreutz and the Sobiescys give three different answers, and Eigeldinger’s contextual classification arbitrates without closing the question (p. 172).
• Was Chopin genuinely disenchanted on hearing Field later in life? The sources allow it but do not settle it (p. 163).
• Is the pencilled Largo in Jane Stirling’s score of the Prelude op. 28/14 in Chopin’s hand, and is it a general alternative or an instruction for that one pupil? Eigeldinger favours the latter against Ganche’s editorial decision (p. 179).
• How far does the line from Chopin’s aesthetic of suggestion to Debussy’s impressionism actually run? Explicitly deferred as “a vast subject, impossible to pursue here” (p. 183).
• What would a full account of Chopin’s operatic knowledge and bel canto formation look like? Also deferred, with a bibliography in place of an argument (p. 157).