Part 8: Notes III + start of Appendix I (pp. 184-213)

Part 8 of chopin-pianist-and-teacher-as-seen-by-his-pupils (pp. 184-213).

Scope correction: this range contains no Appendix I material. Pages 184-213 are still Eigeldinger’s editorial Notes (notes 121-172), continuing the commentary on pedalling, ornamentation, and teaching repertoire. Appendix I (“Sketch for a method”) begins at PDF p. 270; see ## Open questions.

Question this unit answers

Two questions run through these notes. First: how did Chopin actually notate and intend the expressive apparatus of his music — pedal, una corda, trills, gruppetti, appoggiaturas — and what does the surviving evidence (autographs, first editions, pupils’ annotated scores) let a modern performer reconstruct? Second: what repertoire did Chopin put in front of his pupils, and what does that curriculum reveal about his aesthetic allegiances (Bach and the Classical school) and his exclusions (Schumann, virtuoso fashion)?

Key terms

• una corda / u.c. — the soft pedal. Chopin used it constantly but essentially never wrote it into his scores.
• demi-teinte — half-tint; the perpetual soft middle register in which both Chopin and Debussy were said to play.
• l’alchimie sonore — Debussy’s phrase for pedal-based tone chemistry, presented as Chopin’s legacy.
• half-pedal — the modern workaround for adapting Chopin’s autograph pedallings to louder, longer-sustaining instruments.
• auxiliary note (upper / lower) — the note a trill starts on in Chopin’s normal, pre-Romantic practice.
• Doppelt-Cadence und Mordant — J. S. Bach’s ornament name (from the Clavier-Büchlein for Wilhelm Friedemann) that Eigeldinger matches exactly to Chopin’s commonest trill notation.
• gruppetto — turn figure; Chopin overwhelmingly writes it out in full rather than using the ~ sign.
• cercar della nota — the vocal portamento stylized pianistically as an appoggiatura.
• appoggiatura, long (uncrossed) vs. crossed — the uncrossed small crotchet in slow tempi generally takes half the value of the note it precedes.
• the ‘48’ — Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Chopin’s “daily bread” and the core of his teaching.
• OFE / OGE / CW / PM — original French edition, original German edition, the Polish Complete Works, and Chopin’s Projet de méthode.
• Dubois / Stirling / Jędrzejewicz / Franchomme scores — annotated copies used as the primary evidence base for performance practice.
• Kujawiak, Mazur (Mazurek), Oberek — the three distinct folk dances collapsed under the generic name “mazurka”.
• Krakowiak, Polonaise — Polish dances with, unlike the mazurka family, a fixed accent.
• agogics / agogic rubato — timing flexibility; the pedal is treated as an agogic as well as coloristic device.
• Charakterstück — the programmatic genre Chopin’s aesthetic rejected, explaining his coldness to Schumann.

Propositions

1. Chopin’s warning against pedal abuse is not anti-pedal: he used the pedal constantly and with great refinement. The caveat targets pedal used to disguise absent finger legato, or belongs to a practising stage rather than the final result (p. 184).
2. Chopin’s pedal markings are instrument-specific: they were calculated for an 1840 Pleyel, whose sound clears faster, and so cannot be transferred literally to modern pianos (p. 185).
3. Absence of pedal markings in Chopin means one of three things — the pedalling is self-evident, it is too subtle to notate, or the passage is to be played virtually without pedal (p. 186).
4. Chopin deliberately omitted una corda from his scores because he regarded that coloration as the performer’s personal interpretation — a Classical editorial reticence, not indifference (p. 186).
5. Chopin’s use of pedal as timbral registration, rather than mere softening, opened the road to Debussy (pp. 186-187).
6. In the majority of cases Chopin’s trills begin on an auxiliary note (upper or lower), struck together with the bass — Baroque and Classical practice, against the more modern Hummel who preferred the principal note (pp. 187, 190).
7. Chopin’s commonest trill notation corresponds exactly to Bach’s Doppelt-Cadence und Mordant, which is direct evidence of his Baroque affinity (p. 188).
8. Chopin prefers to write ornaments out in full — gruppetti in particular — because the standard signs would license clipping; full notation forces every note to be sung its full value (pp. 190-191).
9. Appoggiaturas in the Dubois score are repeatedly linked by a vertical line to the bass note, i.e. played on the beat — a bel canto/Baroque aesthetic that also increases harmonic tension (pp. 191-192).
10. Bach was the constant substrate of Chopin’s playing, composing, and teaching: the ‘48’ was his concert preparation, his sole score in Majorca, and the work he set pupils returning to the instrument (p. 195).
11. Chopin taught adults, not children: as a rule he took neither children nor beginners (p. 195).
12. Mme Dubois’s repertoire list is the more reliable document; Mikuli’s catalogue is contaminated by his own later teaching repertoire (pp. 194-198).
13. Chopin excluded contemporary virtuoso fashion from his teaching, but would bend for a pupil who wanted a novelty (Herz, Pixis, Hünten, Thalberg turn up in obscure documents) (pp. 197-198).
14. Chopin’s rejection of Schumann was aesthetic, not personal: literary programmes and self-mythology were foreign to a musical ideal opposed to explicit programme music and the Charakterstück (pp. 199-200).
15. Chopin’s taste was narrow even within the Classical canon — Lenz claims he did not know late Beethoven, and Chopin called op. 31/3 “very vulgar” until Hallé’s performance changed his mind (pp. 198-199).
16. In piano duets Chopin invariably took the bass, the seconda part (p. 201).
17. Carl Filtsch was Chopin’s only pupil of genuine genius, and the one case where the normally exacting composer let interpretation diverge from his own (pp. 203-205).
18. Chopin’s public career with orchestra was minimal — after the 1830 premières he played the concertos in public very rarely, continuing instead in two-piano form with pupils (pp. 206-207).
19. Chopin’s mazurka accentuation derives from real Polish folk practice (shifting accents to second and third beats), not from an asymmetrical 7/8 metre as Belotti proposed; modern Polish ethnomusicologists hold the mazurka to be essentially in triple time (pp. 210-213).
20. Chopin almost never quotes a folk tune literally — only in the trios of opp. 68/2 and 68/3, both unpublished in his lifetime; the Mazurkas are stylization and synthesis (p. 211).
21. The Etudes’ physical dangers were real enough that Chopin cautioned about practising op. 25/1: it demands lateral hand movement, free wrist, passive elbow — “bow strokes” transferred from the violin — and a purely digital approach produces stiffness (p. 208).
22. The Etudes op. 25/1 and 25/2 were habitually paired by Chopin in that order for their tonal relationship, mirroring the op. 10/3-4 pairing (p. 209).

Arguments

Pedal reconstruction argument. Because the pedal markings in Chopin’s most careful engraver’s manuscripts are precise and instrument-specific, and because modern critical editions do not always reproduce them faithfully (Henle and Wiener Urtext being the most accurate), exact knowledge of the autograph pedalling is indispensable — not to copy it, but to adapt it. Eigeldinger demonstrates the problem with Prelude op. 28/15: the pedal is marked for bar 1 and its returns at bars 5, 20, 24, 80, but at bar 76 it is to be raised on the fourth beat. Chopin plainly intends two different treatments. On an 1840 Pleyel the sound clears fast enough that the melodic move to B♭ colours without clouding; on a modern piano it blurs. Renewing the pedal before the fourth beat would destroy the distinction Chopin reserved for bar 76, so the honest solution is a half-pedal.

Trill argument. Eigeldinger builds his three-category classification (upper auxiliary / lower auxiliary / principal note) not from theory but from converging documentary evidence: Chopin’s own notation, fingerings in the original French edition, and annotations in pupils’ scores (Dubois, Stirling, Jędrzejewicz). The clinching move is the Dubois score’s vertical line joining the trill’s first note to the bass in the Nocturne op. 32/1, which reproduces exactly Bach’s own tabulated ornament. Koczalski’s recording of op. 9/2 plays it this way, showing the tradition survived through pupils of Chopin’s pupils. Eigeldinger then warns against hard-and-fast rules: comparison of Chopin’s similar notations across contexts is what decides which category applies.

Repertoire-source argument. Two witnesses conflict. Mikuli names sixteen composers; six of them (Mozart, Handel, Scarlatti, Dussek, Ries, Hiller among them) are corroborated by nobody else. Eigeldinger’s test is external corroboration plus documentary trace, and he concludes Mikuli’s memory blurred his own teaching repertoire into Chopin’s. Mme Dubois’s list wins because it is detailed, matches her surviving annotated scores, carries Tiersot’s posthumous confirmation, and comes from a pupil taught for five years. But he closes with the caution that any list underdescribes a teacher who adapted repertoire to each pupil.

Mazurka accentuation argument. Hallé, Lenz, and Moscheles/Bülow independently report that Chopin’s mazurkas sounded to non-Polish ears as if in duple metre. Belotti explains this by positing 7/8 folk models, importing Bulgarian analogies. Eigeldinger rejects this on evidential grounds: Belotti ignores the vast documented Polish heritage (Kolberg’s sixty volumes of collected melodies and dances), and Polish ethnomusicologists do not accept the conclusion. The alternative explanation is a combination of effects — chiefly the constant shifting of accent inherent to the Mazur — which reads as duple to a listener expecting a fixed downbeat.

Evidence

• Emma Debussy-Bardac on the shared demi-teinte and the required nuance range from triple piano to forte “without ever producing confused sounds where the subtlety of the harmonies is lost” (p. 184).
• Debussy’s recollection, via Mme Mauté de Fleurville, that Chopin made pupils practise without pedal (p. 184).
• Higgins’s ten-point summary of Chopin’s pedal usage, drawn from PWM autograph facsimiles of opp. 28, 31, 38, 47, 54 — which Eigeldinger flags as neither exhaustive nor free of over-generalization (p. 185).
• Barcarolle op. 60 and Polonaise-Fantaisie op. 61 named as the most completely pedal-marked works (p. 185).
• Works where pedalling is presumed too subtle to notate: Etudes op. 10/2, 6, 7; op. 25/10 outer sections; the A♭ Nouvelle Etude; Preludes op. 28/2 and 14; finale of the Sonata op. 35 (p. 186).
• Works Eigeldinger reads as intentionally near-pedal-less: Andante spianato op. 22 bars 67-95; outer sections of Nocturne op. 15/1 (p. 186).
• No autograph or original edition carries una corda, apart from annotations in Nocturne op. 15/2 — contrasted with the abundance of such marks in late Beethoven (opp. 101, 106), written for pianos with more complex pedal assemblies than post-1830 Pleyel grands (p. 186).
• Chopin’s letter describing Konstancja Gładkowska’s Rossini: she does not clip the figure but gives every one of the eight notes full value (p. 190).
• Dozens of Nocturne passages with the gruppetto written out in full against only four instances of the ~ sign (op. 9/2 bars 2 and 26; op. 27/2 bar 7; op. 32/2 bar 5 and similar) (p. 190).
• Delacroix’s Journal on the counterpoint conversation, and Chopin arguing against the school that locates musical beauty in sonority — effectively Bach set against Berlioz (p. 195).
• Chopin correcting misprints in his Parisian edition of the ‘48’ at Nohant; Friederike Streicher hearing fourteen Preludes and Fugues played from memory, answered with “Cela ne s’oublie jamais” (p. 195).
• Mikuli grades Cramer first in difficulty order, i.e. reserved for less advanced pupils — an index of the general standard of Chopin’s students (p. 194).
• Mathias: Chopin started him on Moscheles’s Etudes and Hummel’s A minor Concerto (p. 194).
• Legouvé: Chopin said only Camille Pleyel knew how to play Mozart, and playing a duet sonata with him was “a lesson for me” (p. 196).
• Chopin’s letter mocking the German reviewer of the Variations op. 2 who read them as a “fantastic tableau” — “I could die of laughing at this German’s imagination” (p. 200).
• Mathias’s anecdote of Schumann’s Carnaval on the bedside table in 1840, met with unusual coldness; Heller recalling Chopin’s claim that “the Carnaval was not music at all” (p. 200).
• Brzowski’s diary (13 December 1836) and Moscheles’s own memoirs (Saint-Cloud, 29 October 1839) both placing Chopin at the bass in duets (p. 201).
• Filtsch: three lessons weekly from December 1841 to April 1843; Liszt offered to teach him free; Chopin’s rapture recorded in Der Humorist, 22 February 1843 (p. 205).
• Eigeldinger’s source-critical doubts about the nine Filtsch-brothers letters published by Hedley: no facsimile, untraceable concerts, and suspicious verbal similarity to already-published texts (Moscheles, Marmontel, Mikuli, Lenz, Denis, George Sand) (pp. 205-206).
• Rellstab’s notorious quip about the Etudes and the Berlin surgeons Gräfe and Dieffenbach, offered as partial explanation for Chopin’s caution over op. 25/1 (p. 208).
• Programme and press evidence for the op. 25/1-2 pairing: Paris 21 February 1842; London 23 June and 7 July 1848; Glasgow 27 September; Edinburgh 4 October; Guildhall 16 November 1848 (p. 209).
• Victor Gille on Paderewski’s Fantaisie op. 49, counting to twenty in each fermata — and Gille’s father, who had heard Chopin, being surprised because Chopin’s fermatas were shorter (p. 209).
• Metronomic and metrical specifications for the folk dances: Polonaise 3/4 moderato, accent on beat 1; Krakowiak 2/4 at ♩=104 (Chopin’s own marking for op. 14 and the op. 11 finale); Kujawiak ♩=120-160; Mazur ♩=160-184; Oberek 3/8 at ♩=180-240 (pp. 210-211).
• Zofia Lissa’s summary of the metric/rhythmic traits Chopin transposed directly from folk music (p. 211).
• The forged Delfina Potocka letters, established as forgeries by graphological examination by the Polish criminal police (p. 208).
• The last music Chopin heard, two days before his death: the B minor Largo “Dignare Domine” from Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum, sung by Delfina Potocka at his request (p. 208).

Quotes

1. “Chopin, on the contrary, while making constant use of the pedal, obtained ravishing harmonies, melodic whispers that charmed and astonished” (p. 184)
2. “[Chopin] wanted his pupils to practise without the pedal, and, except on very rare occasions, to avoid its use altogether.” (p. 184)
3. “The way he used the pedal was a revelation” (p. 184)
4. “produces piano with the pedal instead of with the hand” (p. 186)
5. “The passages in which Chopin has not marked the pedalling are most often explained by the fact that the required pedalling is very simple, and is therefore self-evident; or, on the contrary, that it is so subtle as to be too complicated, if not impossible, to indicate.” (p. 186)
6. “Chopin probably considered the coloration provided by una corda a matter of personal interpretation, and judged it better not to specify it in his music” (p. 186)
7. “Generally one has to be wary of hard and fast rules for trills in Chopin, but keep in mind that in most cases they should begin on an auxiliary note struck together with the bass.” (p. 190)
8. “not rapid gruppetti, but everyone of the eight notes fully sung” (p. 190)
9. “In his piano practice Chopin regarded the ‘48’ as his daily bread.” (p. 195)
10. “For a fortnight I shut myself up and play Bach. That’s my preparation, I don’t practise my own compositions” (p. 195)
11. “I started with some Bach Preludes, as he always advised” (p. 195)
12. “As a rule Chopin did not teach children or beginners.” (p. 195)
13. “Of the virtuoso music of the kind that was running pianistic riot at the time, I hardly ever saw any on his desk.” (p. 197)
14. “we both understand that in different ways, but play it your way, do as you feel, it can go like that as well” (p. 205)
15. “I do not mean that Liszt is not an excellent teacher: he is the best possible – until one has had the good fortune of knowing Chopin, who is, in the matter of method, far ahead of all other artists” (p. 206)
16. “A purely digital approach to this Etude can only result in stiffness.” (p. 208)
17. “Metric division into three parts, specific displacement of accents to the second and third beat of the bar, their variability, then the typical triplet motifs alternating with dotted rhythms and equal divisions of note values: these are the characteristic traits of the metre and rhythm in the popular music which Chopin transposed directly to the piano” (p. 211)
18. “It would have revived me a little and pulled me out of the wide ruts of the modern mostly commonplace school” (p. 212)

Tensions and links

• Pedal: constant use vs. warning against it. Marmontel’s “constant use of the pedal” sits against Chopin’s own injunction and Debussy’s report of pedal-free practising. Eigeldinger resolves it developmentally (practice stage vs. final result) and temperamentally (a Classical anxiety that his own iridescence not be exaggerated), but the resolution is inference, not documentation.
• Notational silence as meaning. The same absence of a marking is read three incompatible ways (obvious, too subtle, deliberately none) — a hermeneutic freedom that makes the argument hard to falsify. It links directly to the una corda case, where silence is read as delegation to the performer.
• Baroque Chopin vs. Romantic Chopin. The trill, appoggiatura, and gruppetto findings all pull Chopin backwards toward Bach and bel canto, against the Romantic reception of him. Note that on this axis Hummel — Chopin’s own teaching staple — is the less conservative party.
• Chopin’s exclusive taste. The Bach devotion and the Schumann coldness are the same trait seen twice; the Beethoven op. 31/3 anecdote shows it operating even inside the canon he revered.
• Source authority is graded, not given. Mikuli is doubted on repertoire but trusted on trills; Hedley’s Filtsch letters are set aside entirely on internal evidence. This is the same evidential grading applied throughout the book to pupils’ testimony.
• Filtsch as the exception that defines the rule. Chopin was “normally so punctilious about the exact interpretation of his music”; his licence to Filtsch marks the outer boundary of that punctiliousness.
• Instrument-dependence undermines literal fidelity. If Chopin’s markings were calculated for an 1840 Pleyel, then a faithful modern performance must deviate from the text — a tension that runs through the whole performance-practice project.

Open questions

• Scope correction — Appendix I is NOT in this range. Pages 184-213 are entirely Eigeldinger’s Notes (notes 121-172). Verified section boundaries in the PDF’s page numbering:
  • Notes continue through PDF p. 234.
  • “List of Chopin’s pupils” begins at PDF p. 235 (referenced forward from notes 140-142 as “pp. 164-178 below” in book pagination).
  • Appendix I — “TRANSLATED TRANSCRIPT OF CHOPIN’S ‘SKETCH FOR A METHOD’ (PROJET DE MÉTHODE)” begins at PDF p. 270.
  • Appendix II — “Annotated scores belonging to pupils and associates of Chopin” begins at PDF p. 280. So the unit plan needs revision: the next unit (pp. 214-234) is still Notes, then pupils’ list, and Appendix I falls much later than assumed. Appendix I is short (roughly pp. 270-279) and should be given its own dedicated unit given its primary-source weight.
• The “Appendix I / Appendix II, p. 200” and similar references inside these notes use the book’s own printed pagination, not PDF pagination — a systematic offset of roughly 35-40 pages that any later unit cross-referencing notes to appendices must account for.
• Which of Chopin’s pedal markings can be realized literally on a modern instrument and which require half-pedalling is left open beyond the single op. 28/15 example.
• The authenticity of the Filtsch-brothers letters published by Hedley is explicitly deferred: Eigeldinger calls for a search for the autographs and a comparative study “beyond the scope of the present book” (p. 206).
• Why no pupil except Mikuli reports studying Mozart with Chopin remains unresolved — Eigeldinger raises veneration, fear of stylistic betrayal, and collective forgetfulness without deciding.
• Whether the pedal-as-respiration that Debussy noticed in Liszt was also Chopin’s practice is suggested but not evidenced.