Chopin's popular Waltz in D-flat, Op. 64, No. 1 is commonly known today as the "Minute" waltz and is commonly pronounced "min' it." A publisher gave the waltz that nickname because it was short, and therefore minute (meye' noot), not because it can or should be played in a minute. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying.

It was one of the last pieces Chopin wrote, as his health was already failing – and he included it in his final concert in Paris in 1848, the year before he died.

Chopin as a rule didn’t like the nicknames that became attached to his works, and this waltz actually has two. It’s also known as the “Little Dog” waltz. George Sand had a dog named Marquis, who – the story goes – was chasing his tail on the garden terrace when Sand said to Chopin: “If I had your talent, I would compose a fortepiano piece for this dog.”

It’s a small piece that can be played by piano students and virtuosos. It was a staple of Liberace’s recitals in the 1950s and 60s. According to a “Jeopardy” question, he “cut out the dull parts, and played the Minute Waltz in 37 seconds.” - Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr

“I'm a revolutionary, money means nothing to me.” – a famous quote by Chopin.

So, just how much was a franc worth in Chopin’s? Debatable, but estimates range from $2.50 to $4.80.  That would put the price tag on a piano lesson with Chopin between $50 and $96. Sound reasonable for a piano lesson with the man about whom Robert Schumann shouted, “Hats off, gentlemen — a genius!”?  Hats off is right. Dinner’s off, too, considering the average daily wage for an unskilled laborer in Paris was one franc. That’s three weeks’ wages to pay for one lesson if you don’t eat.

In 1982 Chopin and the first two bars of this Polonaise in F Minor appeared on the Polish 5000 z?oty bill. This year, The National Bank of Poland is adding their two cents’ worth with a release of special, collectible Chopin banknote valued at 20 z?oty - about $6.77. Fourteen of the new notes if you want a lesson from the old poet of the piano!

Fryderyk Chopin said this about his Op. 41 Mazurkas: “They seem as lovely to me as only youngest children can to an aging parent.”   
MUSIC  [Mazurka in A Flat Major, Op. 41 No. 3]

 TEASE: [TAKE start of “thank You.”] A jazz diplomat finds his Polish roots in Fryderyk Chopin’s home…and all he can say is Dziekuje – “Thank You.”

I’m Joe Brant with another edition of  RadioChopin: 200 stories to mark the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth.   Today, “Dave Digs Fryderyk.”

[MUSIC: take five vamps]

Long before Take Five topped the charts, pianist Dave Brubeck,he of the horn rims, skinny tie, and infectious sound, seemed to be everywhere: People were bopping to the Dave Brubeck Quartet in clubs, college campuses, and outdoor festivals around America.   Soon the State Department took notice, and Brubeck and his band were American jazz ambassadors to the world.  And it was a trip to his mother’s Polish homeland that spurred the creation of one of Brubeck’s most personal songs:

[TAPE IN: 1:23]  “We were on tour, and they say we were the first group to go behind the Iron Curtain.  In 1958, we did 12 concerts in Poland.  And that day, earlier, I had been in Chopin’s house, a statue of him that was in the square, and on the train, I kept thinking of Chopinesque kinds of melodies, harmonies.  That night, I’ll just take a chance…and play this Chopineque theme…2:18]   :55

2:19….and there was a few seconds of silence…, and I thought, oh, I’ve ruined the w hole tour, they don’t like this at all…and then the place really accepted it. 2:31   :12

50 years later, Dave Brubeck was in Washington, DC, to receive the Ben Franklin Award for Public Diplomacy from Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.  Overcome with emotion, the 88-year old Brubeck played just one piece: “Thank You.”

The “Catalogue Aria,” a breathlessly sung rapid-fire list of humorous items, was a staple of 18^th-century comic opera.   Chopin never wrote an opera, but reading all of the likes and dislikes in his letters creates a “Catalogue Aria” all of its own. 

They called her "Louisette". Chopin doted on her…and the work she inspired is the composer’s most tender.

Chopin never made it to the New World.  But the “Chopin of the Creoles” – American composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk – came to him.   

...Lyricist Joseph McCarthy likely didn’t know when in 1917 he wrote the words…My life is a race, just a wild goose chase…that he was pointing at exactly what it takes to sing the song in the faster portions of Chopin’s piece...

A footnote. Fourteen bars. Can a fifty-five second composition be a key to unlocking Chopin’s life-long aesthetic?

“Could It Be Magic.” The pop song begins and ends with a solo piano playing the prelude: a very short, funereal march that becomes an ever-softer hymn.

But Barry Manilow was neither the first, nor the last to use those 13 measures as a starting point. Jazz pianist Bill Evans reworked it as a tune called “Blue Interlude”. Donna Summer put “Could It Be Magic” on the charts a second time, as a disco hit...

What words would you use to describe Chopin and his music? Odds are “boisterous” isn’t one of them. But the “poet of the piano” who wore silk cravats, required a cushioned saddle for his donkey and purchased train tickets for his feet knew a thing or two about cutting loose...and he composed a song that proves it.

Chopin never wrote for the bagpipes. And there wasn’t a drop of Scottish blood in him. But even as a teenager he was a dedicated follower of fashion – and dances. And in those days, you were as likely to hear the Écossaise – French for “Scottish” – as you would a Mazurka or a Waltz.

He called them “little stories,” and Chopin’s three Opus 56 Mazurkas use the dance form of his native Poland to evoke the past and to dream of the future.

When you think of Chopin, what first comes to mind? A nocturne? An etude? Or...that waltz. You know, THAT one...

Chopin composed an etude – or study – meant to teach you to use your right hand in a new way. Instead of just the melody, your right hand has to play two ways at once:  some fingers emphasize the melody while others voice notes that are part of the accompaniment. It’s a technique you’ll need once you start playing the good stuff, only...

“A stranger I came, A stranger I depart…” These opening lines of “Good Night”, the first song in Franz Schubert’s cycle, Winterreise, or Winter Journey resonated with Chopin. So much so that they spilled over into the manuscript for his Sonata for Cello and Piano.

A dead ringer, so to speak! In Schubert’s song cycle the anti-hero is a dying poet. Themes of banishment, lost love and icy despair pervade. Just as they did in Chopin’s life at the time he composed his Cello Sonata. It was winter. His health was in rapid decline. He was twice exiled: he’d left his native Poland for good, and George Sand had just evicted him from their nest with the publication of an exposé thinly-veiled as a work of fiction.

Which brings us back to the first movement of Chopin’s Cello Sonata. It’s problematic. It puzzled even his closest allies. Was it too intimate? Wasting in his deathbed, Chopin asked to hear it, only to find he could bear no more than the first few measures. He omitted the movement from the sonata’s 1848 premiere. Clearly, it had profound personal significance. Most likely because he turned to—and quoted—Schubert’s song at the time of his separation from George Sand, which she had publicly portrayed as entirely his fault. Was it regret? Or, as in the final stanzas in Schubert’s song, did the ailing Chopin recognize his fate was sealed?

These are the last words spoken
Soon I’ll be out of sight
A simple farewell message
Goodnight, my love, good night.

“The emotional satisfaction can’t be equaled in any of the other arts. Forgive me, I sound as if I’ve just discovered music.”

Claude Debussy had just RE-discovered the music of his favorite composer: Fryderyk Chopin. The year was 1915, and Debussy, desperately ill with cancer, and devastated by the first World War, lost the ability to “think in music,” as he called it.

Out of money and ideas, Debussy agreed to edit a new complete edition of Chopin’s works. Debussy had always worshiped Chopin. His first piano teacher in Paris was a Madame de Fleurville, who was hired by the Debussy family on the strength of her claim that she once studied with the Polish piano master. Chopin is the greatest of all,” Debussy later said. “For with the piano alone he discovered everything”

Not QUITE everything.

Debussy, it turned out, still had a few pianistic discoveries of his own to share with the world. Just as editing the Preludes and Fugues of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier inspired Chopin’s 24 Preludes, so too did studying Chopin’s works prompt Debussy to compose his own set of Twelve Etudes. Technically demanding and tremendously musical, just as Chopin would have it…filtered through the unique prism of Claude Debussy.

As he grew more ill Debussy remarked, “Should I someday reach heaven I would wish to be seated either at the left hand of Chopin or the right hand of Schumann.”

The element of surprise. Haydn used it to play a little joke on his audience in his 94th Symphony.

A school-boy’s trick. Lower your voice, whisper, cup your hand around one side of your mouth…your buddy leans in to hear what you have to say (it must be juicy, after all) and then you shout just to watch him startle.

The story goes Chopin delighted in this sort of prank as a lad. Seems he had an understanding of the power of sforzando – sudden accent – from an early age.

Fast forward. Chopin is 32. He’s with George Sand at Nohant, their summer estate outside of Paris. A different kind of unpredictable: he’s composing a set of Mazurkas, a dance form he’s taken from the Polish countryside and transformed into the vehicle for some of his most expressive and original writing.

He composed 57 Mazurkas in all. Most are grouped in sets of three or four. Most take under three minutes to play. But not the third Mazurka in the set published as Chopin’s Opus 50. It’s nearly twice as long as the rest. Right off the bat, there’s something different about it. Pianist Garrick Ohlsson describes how “Chopin provides a touch of canonic imitation a la Bach to launch a form of great originality.”

I congratulate you Mummy, on your name-day!
May the heavens fulfil what I feel in my heart
That you should always be well and happy, and
Have the longest and most satisfactory life.

Fryderyk Chopin, Tekla Justyna's second child and only son, wrote those adoring words to his mother on her name day in June of 1817 – the same year he wrote his first piece of music – the little Polonaise in G minor. Tekla Justyna Chopin was by all accounts utterly devoted to young Fryderyk. She sang and played music to him as an infant, and first sat him down on a piano stool at the age of four. By the time Chopin was six, he was improvising at the keyboard – and a year later writing ditties to his mother…both in prose and at the piano.

It was fitting that Chopin’s first piece would be a polonaise, for it was not his French father, but his Polish mother who passed on to Chopin “the soul of a Pole” - or zal – that peculiar mixture of longing, sadness, and regret.

In fact, the last time Justyna Chopin saw her son was a characteristic mix of joy and sorrow. Five years after he’d left Warsaw for good, Chopin and his parents were reunited in the spa town of Karlsbad. Chopin declared he was “at the height of my happiness.” Though when it came time to go, both mother and son were despondent: Justyna “barely kept her tears,” and Fryderyk “spent his day in his room, unable to come out and join us” – according to his hosts. Chopin was 25 years old; he would never see his mother again. But they never ceased corresponding, and his mother assured him, “God will send you friends who will take my place."

"Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!" Says who?

Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni included the duet “La ci darem la mano” – inspiring a set of piano and orchestra variations by a 19-year-old Chopin. He performed the work at the Imperial Opera House of Vienna in August of 1829…

Two years later, in the December 7^th, 1831 edition of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, Leipzig’s music journal, Chopin’s Opus 2 prompted Robert Schumann’s famous line “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!”

But by the time the review appeared in print, Chopin had already written two piano concertos, many mazurkas, etudes and nocturnes, and was an up-and-coming composer. Schumann, on the other hand, was younger than Chopin, had published only 2 works for piano, and this review was his first piece of music criticism.

The review was so unorthodox – describing an imaginary conversation between Schumann and his two alter-egos, Florestan & Eusebius – that the Musikalische Zeitung saw fit to include a disclaimer before the review, and to follow it with a more traditional, old-school critique of the piece’s shortcomings.

“An interpreter must give his blood to the work interpreted.” The words of one of the great “Chopinists,” Claudio Arrau.

Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau’s late-career recordings of Chopin, particularly his Nocturnes and Ballades have been called “the peak of his art.” Perhaps there was a kinship. Like Chopin, Arrau showed preciocious promise – he could read music before words, thanks to his piano-playing mother. And most like Chopin, Arrau left his native land at an early age to pursue his artistic career.

Claudio Arrau left the Southern Hemisphere in 1911. He was eight years old, bound for Berlin to study with Martin Krause, former pupil of Chopin’s friend (and sometime rival) Franz Liszt. Krause became the father Arrau never had…and instilled in him a rock-sold discipline and quest for perfection that became the hallmarks of his eight-decade career, during which he performed an estimated 5,000 concerts.

But not before emerging from a melancholic despair Chopin would have recognized. It happened after his teacher Martin Krause died when the pianist was just 15. It took years of therapy to pull him out of a deep depression. And a dash of self-reliance: Arrau was famous for practicing in front of a mirror to streamline his technique – squeezing the maximum effect from every note, movement, and gesture.

Claudio Arrau once said “It is pointless to play a work until you are sure of the meaning of every single bar. Any musician...who is not also an interpreter of a divinatory order … is somehow one-sided, somehow without spiritual grandeur.” Claudio Arrau: A great Chopinist.

Chopin's Opus 10. It's a set of twelve etudes. Studies - to push and polish pianists' skills…."but in my own style," Chopin emphasized. A la Chopin, Schumann added.

And how.

All of the Opus 10 etudes are what this Twelfth is described to be: Revolutionary.

Before Chopin, etudes were about technique. Music was about emotion. Etudes, by definition were not music. But Chopin didn't just play the piano, he thought about the piano. No one was pondering pianism the way Chopin was when he composed these studies. He approached the instrument and the human form that sets it into motion like Darwin approached mockingbirds on the Galapagos Islands. There was something there--more than had met the eye or ear to date--and he was driven to figure out what.

The results are radical. Chopin's etudes are some of the most evocative, compelling and demanding pieces in all of piano literature. They're...music. It seems unfair only one of them should be labeled, "Revolutionary". The name has been attached to Chopin's twelfth Opus 10 etude because it was written just as his Polish compatriots were getting crushed by the Russians in the failed November Uprising of 1831.

But the real revolution is this: No serious student would ever play the piano according to former standards again. With this first collection of etudes, Chopin emerges in full bloom. He is no longer the student; he has become the teacher.

Is it any wonder, then, that this final etude in his first dozen doesn't end?

Fryderyk Chopin called his mazurkas Little Pictures - paintings of the folk dances and the rural heart of his native land. In other words, says pianist Garrick Ohlsson, impressions – not faithful reproductions:

"Mazurkas contain no folk music at all. But they are thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the dance, and its peculiar rhythms… They’re not just, you know, sort of eccentric waltzes.”

Ohlsson should know - he's the only American to have won the Chopin Competition in Warsaw.

"They’re really difficult to capture the flavor of and the mood of. As a matter of fact, the great Russian teacher Rosina Levine with whom I studied advised me perhaps not to go to the Chopin Competition, because she said 'the real stumbling block for pianists is the mazurkas, because mostly Poles really get it. Russians, at least we’re Slavs, we sort of get it,' she said. And the farther away you go from the center, you know, that’s one thing… So I was very proud that when I went to the Chopin [Competition], I got the special prize, in addition to the first prize, I got a special prize for Mazurkas, don’t ask me how."

"They… change their moods even faster than most Chopin pieces. They really are emotionally of unbelievable volatility. And they’re evanescent in that way… sometimes you can play a mazurka and think 'whoops, I missed it entirely,' and then you sit down and do it again, and say 'there, I got it.' And there’s not one IT to get, necessarily."

Pianist Garrick Ohlsson. American master of the oh-so-Polish Mazurka.

“Avoid late nights in the salons of nobility, and look after your health… everything depends on that.” Motherly advice…or a veiled threat?

The writer of those words, Teresa Wodzinska, sometimes referred to Fryderyk Chopin as her “fourth son.” And he nearly became her son-in-LAW. It was a match seemingly made in heaven. Maria Wodzinska was a dark-eyed Polish beauty. She sang, painted watercolors, and played Chopin’s Ballades on the piano. And they were old family friends: “I used to chase her through the rooms at Pszenny in days gone by,” wrote Chopin; Maria’s older sister recalled, “Of all the boys he was the most willing to joke and play.”

And, when Chopin was 25 and Maria was 16, the girl next door had become the living embodiment of the land he’d left behind. He was lonely, homesick, and living in Paris. She was wealthy, beautiful, and thoroughly and delightfully Polish. Chopin could stand it no longer. Visiting her family on holiday in 1836, Chopin made his first – and only – proposal of marriage. “At the Twilight Hour,” snippily noted Teresea Wodzinska.

Maria was thrilled; Mom and Dad weren’t so sure. There was the matter of Chopin’s ever-fragile health. And his whirlwind social life. And his suspect status as a composer. The Wodzinskas made a counter-offer: A one-year waiting period to see if Chopin’s health, fortunes, and habits would improve. Hence the warnings, buried in motherly advice.

But it was not to be. Chopin’s life only got messier, once George Sand entered the picture. The following summer, Chopin receives a “Dear Fryderyk” letter from Maria Wodzinska. He wraps Marie’s correspondence and the rejection letter in a bundle and labels it My Sorrow. And writes this “Farewell” Waltz in A-flat major, inscribed “To Mademoiselle Maria.”

Picture Fryderyk Chopin’s face. Chances are your mind’s eye is recalling apainting by Eugène Delacroix. There are actually plenty of Chopin portraits left to us, but it’s Delacroix’s image that demands attention. It captures “the image of the Romantic hero at its purest,” as art historian H.W. Janson put it. It’s also an image of Chopin as seen by one of his closest friends.

Delacroix was 12 years older than Chopin and already famous, thanks to his dynamic, richly colored painting “The Massacre of Chios” from 1824. It established Delacroix as a leading Romantic artist.

Chopin’s lover, George Sand, introduced the painter to the pianist not long before Delacroix began his iconic portrait of Chopin in 1838. (He included both Chopin and Sand in the painting, which he never completed, but after his death the two depictions were cut apart and sold separately. You can see Sand’s portrait here.)

Chopin and Delacroix became fast friends. Frequenters of the Paris salons, they shared an interest in fashion,cultivating the image of a “dandy.” Most of all, they shared a passion for music. Sand once described Delacroix standing alongside the piano as Chopin played: “He embarks on a sort of casual improvisation, then stops. ‘Go on, go on,’ exclaims Delacroix, ‘That's not the end!' 'It's not even a beginning…. I'm trying to find the right color, but I can't even get the form. You won't find the one without the other....'”

Chopin was genuinely touched by his friend’s appreciation of his art. But, similar to his relationships with other composers, he did not seem capable of returning the favor. To quote Sand once more: “Chopin does not understand Delacroix. He has esteem, affection and respect for the man, but he detests the artist…. He has much wit, tact and malice, but he understands nothing of pictures or statuary.”

If Delacroix knew how Chopin felt, he didn’t let on. After the composer’s death in 1849, Delacroix inscribed a sketchwith the words “Dear Chopin.” Delacroix’s final tribute to his friend, the great poet of the piano.

Fryderyk Chopin gave the title “funeral march” to only one of his compositions. And it wasn’t the one you’re probably thinking of.

It’s the third movement of the Piano Sonata No. 2 that’s commonly known as THE Chopin funeral march. It was played at his burial in 1849 at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Earlier, during his funeral, the three-thousand mourners at the Church of the Madeleine heard two of Chopin’s preludes as well as Mozart’s Requiem.

But the only piece Chopin chose to CALL a “Funeral March” did not appear in print for more than 35 years after his death. He wrote it while he was a teenager studying at the Warsaw Conservatory—perhaps as early as 1826, the year Polish philosopher Stanislaw Staszik died. Chopin participated in his funeral. The next year, Chopin’s sister Emilia died of tuberculosis.

But it probably was not a particular event that inspired this early Funeral March in C Minor. The genesis could have been purely musical. Writer Jim Samson notes that “Chopin was attracted to this genre perhaps more than any other composer.” After the C Minor march and before the famous 1844 piano sonata, specters of the funeral march form appeared in a prelude, a fantasy and several nocturnes.

Biographer Tad Szulc locates the impulse in Chopin’s obsession with his own mortality. He calls this early piece, theFuneral March in C Minor, the product of “a precociously death-haunted sixteen-year-old."

Picture yourself in a Paris salon. The room is small; the setting is society-elegant. There is an expectant hush—broken only by the sound of the ladies’ fans—and the odd throat-clearing—as we wait for the next selection to come from the finely dressed, slight young man at the Pleyel piano. Casually, dreamingly, his hands fall to the keyboard…and suddenly the room is filled with notes, seemingly plucked out of thin air.

The notes may be coming from the lower voice…the left-hand side of the keyboard, but the pianist has a little surprise for you…the dreamy baritone melody starts with the right hand, before the left hand drops down for a bass chord. For several minutes he spins out this “impromptu,” as he calls it, and you are carried along.

And then you hear him arrive at a natural stopping point – a cadence – a logical place to go back to the beginning. Sure enough, we’re back to the opening lines….

Only…

This time, the right hand drifts back to the bass line, and stays there, and spins a whole new thread of melody. Chopin has crossed hands, and crossed us up. The result is magical. Thought up on the spot, or crafted and cultivated after countless hours at the keyboard? The dictionary’s definition of “impromptu” is: “Spoken, performed, done, or composed with little or no preparation.” Chopin’s definition of impromptu still keeps us guessing. 

Fryderyk Chopin’s circle was not a mutual admiration society. Take the case of Ignaz Moscheles.

Pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles managed to ingratiate himself with some of the major players in early 19th-century music. He was an early champion of Beethoven. Mendelssohn was a close friend. But his relationship with Chopin was a bit ambivalent.

Ignaz Moscheles was born in Prague, 16 years before Chopin. If Chopin was an early Romantic, you could call Moscheles a late Classicist. Chopin got to know Moscheles’ etudes as a student in Warsaw. Later, he heard Moscheles perform in London, and wrote admiringly about it. But on other occasions Chopin dismissed Moscheles, at one point calling his playing “frightfully baroque.”

Moscheles gave Chopin’s music similarly mixed reviews, finding it charming, but occasionally “mawkish.” He warmed to the younger man’s original style when he heard Chopin himself play for the first time—at a Parisian salon in Paris in 1839. He called the improvisation “simply bewitching.” But after Chopin’s death Moscheles again tempered his praise. Chopin was “not a Classic,” Moscheles wrote, but “he possessed utterly exceptional qualities: feeling, sensitivity and originality.”

Not long after their first meeting, Moscheles and Chopin had two memorable collaborations. They played together before the French royal family. And Chopin contributed a set of pieces to a book of piano studies Moscheles was putting together. They’re known as the “Three New Etudes”—restrained, refined and original.

He won the Warsaw International Chopin competition at age 18—the youngest competitor to ever do so. Then Maurizio Pollini went back to the practice room.

Maurizio Pollini gave his first concert at age eleven, in Milan. Then he studied at the Milan Conservatory. Next, he won the Ettore Pozzoli Piano Competition in his homeland. In 1960 he went on to beat out a field of 89 other competitors to win First Prize at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw. At just 18, he felt he had triumphed before he had really toiled. He didn’t believe he was ready to play on the world’s great concert stages, so he returned to the practice room. It was another eight years before he made his American debut….though it WAS in Carnegie Hall. And his first recording came in 1971, when Pollini was nearly 30.

Pollini’s Chopin reputation was sealed, however, with the 1973 release of Chopin’s complete etudes, a recording that left critics searching for superlatives: “flawless technique;” “steely precision,” “probing intellect,” “uncanny insight.” It was a prize-winner on four continents.

Since then, Pollini has recorded all of Chopin’s works and the prizes continue to pile up, most recently a 2007 Grammy award for his recording of Chopin’s nocturnes. Pollini says: “My love for the music of Chopin has become greater and greater for years, perhaps because I understand better this music… Chopin is an innately seductive composer.” Gino Pollini, Maurizio Pollini’s father, was an architect by profession and a violinist by avocation. Structure, line, and style inform the critical reputation of his son, who’s earned lasting fame as a great Chopinist for his impeccably crafted recordings and performances.

Robert Schumann’s critical praise introduced the name Fryderyk Chopin to Europe. His wife Clara’s performances secured a place for Chopin’s music in the piano repertoire. In return, Chopin had very few kind things to say about Robert’s compositions. But he described Clara as “the only woman in Germany who can play my works.”

Chopin’s Variations on the Mozart aria “La ci darem la mano” inspired Robert Schumann to write his rave review— “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius” —in 1831. And who better to play it than a young piano prodigy named Clara Wieck, barely 12 years old at the time. It’s the first Chopin piece she performed.

By then Clara was already on her first European concert tour, which included a stop in Paris. Chopin didn’t attend. But when Chopin visited Leipzig in the fall of 1835, Felix Mendelssohn introduced them. Clara played some of her own music, a piece by Robert and two Chopin etudes. The performance reportedly moved Chopin to tears.

This was a time of transition for the piano recital in Europe. Audiences and critics had a taste for light, showy repertoire. After a recital she gave in Hamburg, Clara’s father Friedrich Wieck wrote that one reviewer called Chopin’s music “musical nonsense.” He added later, “How people must wonder at Clara, who plays such crazy things by preference.”

In HIS critical writing, Robert Schumann dismissed that sort of response as philistinism. And Clara only increased her focus on the new Romantics: Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin, turning recitals into a more serious musical platform. All of these composers would die young, but Clara carried on as an eloquent champion of their legacy. Robert said his wife was “a greater virtuoso” than Chopin: “Clara…gives almost more meaning to his composition than he does himself.”

Tracing the legacy of Fryderyk Chopin is an exercise that leads along many diverse paths. One of them goes through Catalonia.

Like Chopin, Federico Mompou chose Paris as the place to build his career as a pianist and composer. He moved there in 1911 from his native Barcelona to work with a teacher who’d studied with one of Chopin’s pupils. Also like Chopin, Mompou composed mostly for piano. Chopin remembered Poland when he wrote mazurkas and polonaises; Mompou flavored his compositions with Catalonian folk influences.

The clearest connection of all is Mompou’s set of Variations on a Theme by Chopin. He started in 1938 with some sketches for cello and piano. But it took nearly 30 years for him to finish the piece—in solo piano form.

Mompou’s inspiration was Chopin’s Prelude No. 7. But he also nods to another prelude and to Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu. True to the theme and variations form, Mompou starts by quoting Chopin faithfully. But soon, Mompou’s own voice takes over.

As the variations reveal, there was plenty of time in the decades separating Chopin and Mompou for other influences to intervene: Debussy and Satie, for instance. Maybe even a little Gershwin. In other words, the salon where Mompou is most at home is furnished with art deco, not Louis-Philippe. But his music speaks with the sincere, direct emotion that also formed the center of Chopin’s musical world.

He is a great pianist, but not a Chopin specialist. Does that mean he can’t be a great Chopinist?

Let’s not leave the question hanging too long. Vladimir Ashkenazy IS a great Chopinist. Even partisans of an older, highly Romantic style would place Ashkenazy among the foremost recorded interpreters of Chopin’s music.

If there’s such a thing as objective evidence in discussions like this, it would be his performance in the 1955 Chopin Competition. He took second prize, displaying a gentler approach than we tend to associate with Russian pianists. In 1984, Ashkenazy became the first to record all of Chopin’s solo piano works.

One of the knocks on Vladimir Ashkenazy is that he does too many things. His piano repertoire ranges from Bach to Rachmaninoff. And he’s not only a pianist. In the 1980s he launched a conducting career, leading the Royal Philharmonic, the Czech Philharmonic and, currently, the Sydney Symphony.

By picking up the baton, some critics say Ashkenazy became less invested in the piano bench. And in 2007, physical problems forced him to give up keyboard concerts. But Ashkenazy hasn’t been forgotten in the bicentennial sweep of Chopin picks by the critics. Gramophone magazine cites his “convincing details” and “virtuosic flair”; The New York Times calls Ashkenazy’s Chopin “passionate and fiery,” but adds that ”you always have the sense of a keen intellect at work.”

Vladimir Ashkenazy has found a LOT to think about in late Chopin. “Towards the end of his life,” he says, “he discovered more potency in his mind and soul.” And, “in going even deeper into his intimate expression, he…embraced all humanity.”

If you pay close attention to Mozart’s music, you know about the “K” numbers that accompany his compositions. Well, Chopin can do Mozart one better. He’s got K times two--“KK” numbers.

As Ludwig Köchel was to Mozart, so Krystyna Kobyla?ska was to Chopin. They were both musicologists who created catalogs that place these composers’ works in logical order.

Why was that necessary for Chopin? His works have always had opus numbers to help us keep track. Well, some but not all. Opus numbers were assigned only to Chopin’s published pieces.

In the 1950s and 60s, Krystyna Kobyla?ska was a curator for the Chopin Museum in Warsaw. She went on to compile all of Chopin’s known manuscripts, published and unpublished. That led to a thematic catalog of his music. In addition to the pieces with opus numbers, Kobyla?ska accounted for Chopin’s 39 published pieces that were not numbered, as well as his unpublished sketches, arrangements and lost or inaccessible works.

She gave these pieces numbers—now known as KK numbers, for “Krystyna Kobyla?ska.” So, for example, we can now refer to the Sostenuto in E-flat, written in 1840 and published in 1955, as KK 1237.

If only Krystyna Kobyla?ska had replaced Chopin’s opus numbers too. They are often WILDLY out of chronological order. Sorting through that numbers game sounds like a good job for someone whose last name begins with K.

“Let me remind you that even if you do possess friends and admirers worthier and closer to you, none is more sincere than I.”

Those words close a letter the Parisian Fryderyk Chopin sent to the Berliner Felix Mendelssohn in early October of 1845. Chopin generally had a low opinion of his fellow composers; his letters contain withering statements about Liszt, Berlioz, Robert Schumann, and dozens of lesser names.

But Chopin was sincere about Mendelssohn. At the age of 18, a starstruck Chopin traveled to Berlin. He heard Mendelssohn play – but was too shy to meet him. But four years later, Mendelssohn returned the favor, traveling to Paris to attend Chopin’s first public recital. He instantly recognized Chopin’s talent…to the extent that at a subsequent concert with half-a-dozen of the best know pianists in Paris, Mendelssohn “applauded furiously” for just one: the diffident Pole he called “Chopinetto.”

Chopin biographer Tad Szulc asserts, “both Chopin and Mendelssohn were more mature composers before the age of 20 than Mozart" may explain their connection. Two decades into their friendship, at Mendelssohn’s request, Chopin composed a piece for Felix’s wife. The work was not published and the manuscript has since vanished. However, a work survives that echoes the Felix-Fryderyk connection. It’s Chopin’s Piano Trio in G minor, composed in 1828, days after Chopin heard, but didn’t dare meet, Mendelssohn for the first time.

Young Felix’s influence on Young Fryderyk is audible in Chopin’s chamber work [post], but vanishes in later compositions. And that might also explain their friendship – they were colleagues, but not competitors. Mendelssohn was a conductor, and wrote everything from songs without words to grandiose symphonies. But Chopin’s singular approach and devotion to the piano fine-tuned a sound describable only as “Chopin.”

Or James Huneker concludes, “Play him as you play Mendelssohn and your Chopin has evaporated.”

"You feel this with Chopin, that’s there’s this vice-like grip over what’s going on in the music." - Orion Weiss

In earlier episodes of this series, we’ve noted the contrasts in Chopin’s music. The sweet and the salty. The dreamy aria... broken up by a fiery interlude.

But there’s ONE series of pieces in Chopin’s output that follow a different path, and where Chopin’s attention to piano pedagogy can turn into quasi-sadistic physical – and psychological pain. They are, according to pianist Orion Weiss, the Preludes.

"They’re so obsessive on the way the focus on one little thing – very small motifs and very small applications of technique. So many of them have this almost minimalist repetition of figures. Just one figure for an entire accompaniment. Sometimes, like No. 15 in D-flat major, it has just this repeated A-flat the entire time... It goes back and forth between being calming – sort of a soft, reassuring maybe throbbing of your loved one’s heart – to becoming... this terrifying , repeated, and insistent and frightening thing.

In this Prelude, sometimes called the “Raindrop,” Chopin gets stuck on one note. Sometimes it's called an A-flat, sometimes it's a G-sharp…but it beats on and on and on: no fewer than 492 drops in a five and a half minute shower.

You can really see how it might’ve been orchestrated in the future…the colors and textures that are there in the opening writing.

Fryderyk Chopin arrived in Paris with two piano concertos in his portfolio. And somewhere along the way he started a third. First, it was going to be for TWO pianos. Then he settled for one. Until Chopin’s father suggested he put it away. “Don’t bother too much,” Nicholas Chopin wrote to his son, “your health might sustain an injury through the worry entailed in its completion.”

Seven years later, Chopin recycled what he’d done into one of the oddest – and hardest – of ALL his works: the Allegro De Concert, Opus 46. It’s essentially a concerto for solo piano.

It’s incredibly difficult…There are some really gnarly passages that are…just…you know, a pain, a real pain.. but it’s pretty cool.

Pianist Orion Weiss is one of the few pianists who’s taken up Chopin’s strange creation:

There are clear distinctions between orchestra and piano in that there’s a long orchestra introduction…and then there’s a little bit of a woodwind solo and the piano comes in above that, and then when the piano comes in it’s very much this kind of improvisatory-sounding piano solo entrance.

It’s beautiful… It’s got some great tunes. Maybe not AS great as the concertos that were orchestrated, but it’s got a real charm to it.

Charming, bold, expressive, and in the words of one biographer, “a powerful and more manly composition than either of his two concertos.” Maybe so, but it was premiered by a woman – Chopin’s start pupil Frederica Mueller. Forever after dubbed “Mademoiselle opus Quarante-Six” - that is, “Forty Six” - by Franz Liszt.

They're minting Mahler coins in the Czech Republic and Chopin bills in Poland. Mahler is 150; Chopin, 200.

Other than currency and anniversaries, what connects Gustav Mahler — the composer of vast, sprawling orchestral travelogues — with Fryderyk Chopin, a specialist in finely-wrought, dense-as-diamond compositions for just one instrument?

Exile. Perfectionism. Mozart. Mortality.

Exile. “I am three times homeless: a native of Bohemia in Austria; an Austrian among Germans; a Jew throughout the whole world,” lamented Mahler. Chopin, a Pole in Paris, felt twice exiled—from his native land and his mother tongue.

Perfectionism. Mahler: “All that is not perfect down to the smallest detail is doomed to perish.” Chopin: “"Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on."

“Mozart” was among Mahler’s last words. Though Mahler’s funeral was silent, Chopin requested, "Play Mozart in memory of me." And they did.

Mortality. It is hard to imagine two composers more closely linked with the Funeral March than Mahler and Chopin. Both composers were obsessed with death – and their own mortality, to the extent that Mahler used his own irregular heartbeat in the requiem-like last movement of his 9th Symphony.

This may explain their ultimate connection…a serene, otherworldly musicality that seems to float from this life to the hereafter…

The French have a saying: "Chopin's heart is in Poland, but his soul is in France."

Arriving in Paris in 1831, Fryderyk Chopin was enthralled by his new home. "Paris is whatever you care to make of it. You can enjoy yourself, get bored, laugh, cry, do anything you like. Everyone goes his own way."

Chopin quickly discovered that if he were going to make anything of Paris, he had to find his own new way.

His first public concert was a box-office flop. The Salle Pleyel was only one-third full. Those who did come complained about Chopin's soft touch: "he brings little sound out of the instrument," said one review. Clearly, a career as a big public virtuoso would not be a fait accompli for Chopin. So, in a land known then as it is now for nuance and shades of meaning, he blazed a new trail through the salons of Paris society, where the Polish exile exuded an utterly French persona.

"Chopin," said one writer, "was the ideal guest. Perfect in manners, a little aloof, and with the enviable capability to cast a magic spell on the company as soon as he sat at the piano."

And for all of its Polish roots, Chopin's music began to sprout some Gallic branches. The Nocturne in F Major, Op. 15, No. 1, was among the first works to emerge from Chopin's newfound surroundings.

Marcel Proust, perhaps the ultimate French author, heard similar French accents in Chopin's music:

"The long, sinuous phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by reaching out and exploring far beyond the point which one might have expected the notes to reach, and which divert themselves in those by-ways of fantasy, only to return more deliberately, with a more premeditated reprise, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl that reverberates to the point of making you cry, striking at your heart."

"Chopin is ‘hand-feeling’ first. Like Couperin made for the keyboard. It’s a sensitivity of the finger, and it gives you the harmony and the polyphony, everything at the same time." - Jean-Frederic Neuberger

Yes, Chopin’s admiration of Johann Sebastian Bach is well-documented. But French pianist Jean-Frederic Neuberger looks to an even earlier Baroque forebear to explain Chopin’s unique touch to his Preludes andEtudes: Francois Couperin, author of a 1717 book called “L’Art de Toucher” – literally, “The Art of Touching” – that is, playing – the keyboard. A treatise containing both a series of preludes – and suggestions for fingerings, touch, trills. and other aspects of keyboard technique.

Neuberger explains, "Chopin music – you feel it in your finger right away. And when you read Liszt, and Prokofiev and Bartok music, you cannot feel it in your finger right away. It’s a little bit more intellectual and less sensitive. Everything goes in the same time..in your finger, in your. .mood, when you hear it, when you create it, when you rehearse.. you will hear it. It’s a quite wonderful thing.. like magi

One can learn a lot about Chopin from Chopin's own words.

"Simplicity is the highest goal, achievable when you have overcome all difficulties…Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on."

"The Official Bulletin declared that the Poles should be as proud of me as the Germans are of Mozart; obvious nonsense."

Vain and opinionated as Chopin could be, what recurs in his comments about his own art is the high standard he set for himself, and his own doubts about his true worth as an artist:

"I don’t know how it is, but the Germans are amazed at me – and I am amazed at them for find ing anything to be amazed about!"

"In a word, finished artists, take lessons from me and couple my name with that of John Field. In short, if I were still stupider than I am, I should think myself at the apex of my career; yet I know how much I still lack to reach perfection."

Chopin’s letters are chock-full of other composer’s names; but one in particular comes up again and again – as a source of inspiration, education, and perhaps..a kindred spirit:

"Having nothing to do, I am correcting the Paris edition of Bach; not only the engraver’s mistakes, but also the mistakes ‘hallowed’ by those who are supposed to understand Bach (I have no pretensions to understand better, but I do think that sometimes I can guess)."

"Never Forget Bach. Practice Bach constantly – this will be your best means to make progress."

Even the short list of pianist Alfred Cortot’s accomplishments is impressive: He’s the man who introduced Wagner to the French, formed the original “power trio” with cellist Pablo Casals and violinist Jacques Thibaud, and taught a generation of great pianists at the Paris Conservatory.

But all that pales in comparison to Alfred Cortot’s enduring legacy: As the original Great Chopinist.

Alfred Cortot was born in Switzerland in 1877 and studied piano with Emile Descombes, a former student of Chopin himself. Which made Cortot a performer, scholar, and advocate of Fryderyk Chopin right up until his death in 1962. Cortot edited and published new versions of Chopin’s scores, and authored a demystifing book called In Search of Chopin.

Cortot’s gift was to combine pianistic technique with unabashed poetic interpretation. His Chopin editions of thePreludes, for example, contain such evocative titles as "Homesickness" for No. 6 and "Blood, Passion and Death." for 24.

Cortot believed in such imagery, he said, for "the possibility of grasping more surely . . . the eloquent or sensitive expression of emotion, the understanding of picturesque details, the creation of the real atmosphere proper to the works."

Thanks to digital remastering, Alfred Cortot’s recordings of Chopin – even as far back as the 1920s and 30s - are still revelatory..both for the insight – AND for their occasional wrong notes. Despite the inaccuracies, Gramophone magazine said, in Alfred Cortot’s hands, “Chopin's elusive essence emerges unscathed.”

You know the one, that groaner of a pun, "Chopin Liszt," printed across the tops of memo pads? Well, suppose we put Chopin on that "Liszt?" Grab your cart – let’s go “Shopping for Chopin!”

Chopin liked fine things. So why not start with a splurge? Behold, theMontblanc Chopin Fountain Pen. $399 worth of black precious resin, garnished with a hand-crafted 14K gold nib topped off with platinum inlay. (What's "precious resin?")

Do you "love the interplay of soft, smooth leather and natural elements?” asks Nine West. “Who wouldn’t?” I reply. “Then you should examine the trend-right Chopin ankle strap sandal,” they advise. In the cart, size nine. $88.95.

This is too wacky to resist. Chopin for Cats. Pando Music promises the CD will "...stimulate your pet’s senses and create an overall sense of well-being…special sound effects such as purring, birds chirping, and household noises have been added to captivate your pet…” Throw it in. $14.95.

Company’s coming, so let’s hurry up: For her: Chopin Nocturne Ring No. 47 for $153.50 and the Chopin Mazurka Necklace No. 55 at $253.50. For him: the "Chopin Portrait Tie." Chopin's face in gold silk Not bad. $24.95. Wait, there’s more: The Chopin T-shirt. Coffee mug. Chopin clock. Chopin cufflinks???

Here’s a set of Composers Christmas Ornaments: Mozart, Bach, Brahms and Chopin. Sort of. Original retail, $40. Your price, $14.98. Grand total: $1,033.63.

Yikes! Someone get me a drink! Better throw in a liter of Chopin Vodka. $44.95.

Better yet, let’s listen to some of Chopin’s music to sooth our shopping-frenzied nerves. At last check there are20,590 individual Chopin downloads available at Amazon.com. I plunked down my 99 cents to get this nocturne.

Bewitched. The idea has been around as long as love itself. Potions, incantations, magic spells…

It seems Chopin — and Polish poet Stefan Witwicki — knew the sleepless nights of the enchanted and the love-stricken. In 1830, Chopin set Witwicki’s poem on the subject in a song called Czary or "Witchcraft":

It must be witchcraft
It must truly be magic
I see her image always before me
Her gentle voice is everywhere. Surely, this is witchcraft!

Chopin’s song has a folk-like feel. It’s strophic. There are repeated elements. There’s talk of nature, love and magic. The piano provides levity and the voice, anxiety.

But Witwicki’s tale and Chopin’s setting take an unusual turn. Rather than suffer another sleepless night, the poor smitten one declares:

I have a cunning plan!
I’ll gather herbs by moonlight to make a potion;
I’ll cast my own spell upon her
And she will become my wife!

Selling seashells poses no tongue twister in French, but “Je vends des scapulaires,” (“I Sell Seashells”) a popular melody from a comic opera by Ferdinand Herold, did inspire Chopin to test his chops and charms with a set of variations on the tune.

No more sideways, yet heartfelt a compliment can be paid the piece than what Jeremy Nicholas writes to accompany Garrick Ohlsson’s recording:

"Many commentators pour scorn on it, but it is an effective and sparkling display piece well up to contemporary standards of tasteful superficiality. Most remarkable is that anyone could take such a dull theme and make it so entertaining."

Chopin biographer James Huneker is less generous in his assessment:

"[it] is the weakest of Chopin’s muse. It is Chopin and water, and…eau sucrée at that. The piece is written tastefully, is not difficult, but woefully artificial."

The Variations—a lucrative form of entertainment at the time--were published in 1833 and dedicated to a Miss Emma Horsford. They were the last work of this kind Chopin was to compose.

In Polish, it’s called “Zal.” A special kind of melancholy that pervades Chopin’s music. We recognize it as the Blues. Which might explain why, from Art Tatum to Joe Zawinul, if you scratch a jazz pianist, you’ll invariably find a student of Chopin.

Tatum played a Waltz, modern-day jazzman Jacque Loussier prefers Nocturnes. But the vast majority of jazzmen are drawn to the catchy riffs and bluesy chords of Chopin’s Preludes and Mazurkas. Dutch jazzman Peter Beets has a new disc called “Chopin Meets the Blues”. He says, “Melodic embellishment is at the heart of everything that Chopin wrote.” Beets hears blues and be-bop in Chopin; a jazz group called the Burgstaller Martignon 4 hears the Brazilian rhythms of Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Polish Pianist Leczek Mozdzer finds the blue note and short motivs – he calls them “loops” – in Chopin’s Mazurkas great source material for his bluesy improvisations. And Mozdzer thinks that’s a tradition that truly faithful to Chopin’s style:

“He was one of the biggest improvisers of that time. So I’m sure if he were alive today Chopin would be a jazz musician.”

“They incorporate a range of moods from melancholy to effervescent but retain an air of sophistication suited to aristocratic salons.”

There is something irresistible about a Chopin Waltz. Perhaps more than any other type of piece that Chopin wrote, they seem to step right out of a Parisian drawing-room.

The Chopinmusic website calls the Waltz in F minor, Op. 70, No. 2 “a gloomy song of failed entreaty. Its melody glances slightly at that which it temporarily enjoyed. The central section is one of absolute beauty, characterizing its style almost perfectly.”

Failed perhaps, but “entreaty” may be what lies at the heart of this little Waltz. Where some bachelors might present a card or fresh bouquet of flower, Chopin’s gift of choice to a passing fancy was a manuscript, tied up in brightly-colored ribbon. He had no problem recycling, either…This Waltz in F minor, composed in 1842, was dedicated to “Madamoiselle Elise Gavard.” At least, that’s what the manuscript says in the French National Library. But a few sheaves down, there’s another copy, presented to “Mademoiselle Marie de Krudner.” 20 miles away, in the archives of the Royaumont Abbey, the very same manuscript turns up, dedicated to “Mademoiselle La Casse Esterhazy.” Yet another one is in Vienna, which Chopin presented to Madame Caroline Oury, along with the words, “As for this little Waltz which I have the the pleasure of writing for you, please, I beg you, keep it for yourself: I should not like it to be made public.” In his scholarly collection “Chopin: Pianist and Teacher,” editor Jean-Jaques Eigeldinger speculates: “Chopin knew well which of his compositions would suffer worst by being oversentimentalized – a fate from which these Waltzes certainly have not escaped.”

Or was Chopin merely trying to keep it dark to escape from jealous girlfriends?

Zelazowa Wola. A 16th –century Baronial estate. A serene and peaceful park. A national historic site. A musical museum. A concert destination. And the place where the world beats a path to see where the ‘poet of the piano’ was born.  Zelazowa Wola – Chopin’s birthplace.

A spot with special. almost superstitious pull to Poles. Chopin was indeed born in a wing of the manor house owned by Count and Countess Skarbek, though a few months later Chopin’s parents moved their growing family to the heart of Warsaw, 35 miles away. But the Chopins – and their precocious son - were frequent holiday guests. According to Polish historians, “In the summer, the piano would be taken out into the garden, where under the spruce or linden trees Fryderyk gave concerts.” A local peasant recalled: "It was resounding all over the orchard so that the people from the neighbouring villages came running and, as it happened, stood by the fence to listen to the guest from Warsaw".

Today, trees – and pianos – remain the story of Zelazowa Wola. The park surrounding the manor includes more than 500 species of trees and shrubs. Piano teachers make pilgrimages here to put “Chopin acorns” in the pockets of their promising students. Inside, there are three 19th-century pianos; outside, there’s a modern grand, where every summer, there is a daily Chopin recital, from soloists ranging from greenest amateur to the most established pro.

For Chopin’s 200th birthday, Garrick Ohlsson was broadcast live on Polish television, performing on the Pleyel piano in the manor house. For the ONE hundredth birthday, Russian composer Sergei Lyapunov wrote a symphonic poem titled Zelazowa Wola. Lyapunov said he wished to conjure up the "folk and musical atmosphere, surrounding the great musician in his childhood, perceiving his native land’s image in its purity and simplicity.”

Of all the composers in Paris, Fryderyk Chopin admired one above all: Vincenzo Bellini, renowned for the beautiful flowing bel canto style of operatic writing. And upon Bellini’s untimely death in 1835, Chopin and five fellow composers honored their lost colleague with one of the true musical oddities of the 19th century.

Think of it a Parisian-salon version of We Are the World. Only instead of Bruce Springsteen trading vocals with Dionne Warwick and Bob Dylan, theHexameron featured contributions from six great piano virtuosos, including master showman Franz Liszt, the dazzling Sigismund Thalberg, the dextrous Carl Czerny…and Fryderyk Chopin.

The word "Hexameron" itself refers to the Biblical six days of creation. It took a little longer for Liszt to round up his fellow pianists for what ultimately became a twenty-minute work. In the style of the day, it begins with a big bombastic opening, followed by a theme, six variations, and a rousing finale, all based on the March from Bellini’s last opera, I Puritani.

Chopin’s contribution, the sixth and final variation in the set, is a nocturne of calm in a swirling sea of bravura virtuosity.

Not unlike We Are the World, the Hexameron was commissioned for a concert to benefit the poor two years after Bellini’s death. Legend has it that all six composers playing six different pianos were present for the performance on March 31st, 1837. Only they weren’t: this Hexameron was only half-finished! Today, you might hear Variation VI pulled out of the curio cabinet of Chopinists. But the full Hexameron is better known for its historical inspiration than for its musical execution. 

Chopin cared for only two composers: Bach and Mozart. Chopin cared for only two instruments: The piano and the human voice. It was the human voice that drew Chopin to Mozart.

Opera was popular and profitable in Chopin’s Europe. He was under enormous pressure to compose one. As much as Chopin adored opera-going, he refused to enter the house as a composer. Mozart provided Chopin an escape hatch. His operas earned Chopin’s devotion, but Mozart’s brilliant writing demonstrated any instrument could sing—Chopin’s goal of goals for solo piano.

Fold in counterpoint—melody introduced while melody’s engine is already running. Song on top of song. Pianist and music writer Charles Rosen declared, “Chopin was the greatest master of counterpoint since Mozart.”

In 1832, Chopin gave his first concert in Paris. Two works: His Variations on Mozart’s “La ci darem la mano” and this, his Piano Concerto No. 2. The reviewers declared it “the rebirth of piano music.”

Ten years later, too sick to get out of bed, Chopin had Mozart on his mind. He mused he might only have three years left to live. He had seven. At Chopin’s request, the three thousand people who attended his funeral gained comfort from Mozart’s Requiem as it filled the Madeleine.

Early bloomings, untimely deaths, prolific output, profound originality, the cursed blessing of genius…Chopin must have gained comfort from Mozart as well.

"Many a beautiful eye left the High Altar of the Cité d’Orleans, Rue St. Lazare bedewed with tears, without bearing the dearly-beloved master the least grudge." – Friedrich Niecks, Frederic Chopin as a Man and Musician

They called it “les leçons orageuses” – “Stormy Lessons” at the home of one of the most demanding – and in-demand - piano teachers in Paris: Monsieur Chopin. Known for “irritably snapping pencils into bits” as his charges struggled at the keyboard . Fit to bursts of rage and belittlement: Once, explaining his concept of rhythm to a student, Chopin blew on a candle. As it flickered he explained: “That is MY rubato.” He then blew OUT the candle and declared: that is YOURs.”

But Chopin, by all accounts, was also a dedicated teacher. When his health permitted he spent four to five hours per day with students. One student recalled, “A holy artistic zeal burnt in him” – single lessons could last hours at a stretch.” Another claimed: “Only Chopin’s pupils knew him the pianist in the fullness of his unrivalled height.”

So what did Chopin’s students learn? Usually they began with scales. Only Chopin started in B – and not C major. Better for the fingers, he explained. Chopin also had innovative suggestions for how to use the thumbs. He Encouraged his students to study singing and attend the opera to understand ornaments and trills. As for music: Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Studies by Johann Baptist Cramer. Lots of Clementi. A little Hummel. Maybe even some Beethoven….but Mozart was off limits.

And if the student showed exceptional promise…perhaps some Chopin. Etudes. Nocturnes. Preludes. And why not? As pianist and author Abram Chasins noted in his book Speaking of Pianists, “Great interpretive dangers lies in every bar of Chopin’s music. In matters of phrasing, touch, tone, pedaling, and dynamic relationship, it is treacherous terrain.” Who better to show the way than the renowned Polish professor of the piano?

According to Chopin Project pianist Arthur Greene, there was a dance party almost every night in Chopin’s Warsaw. “The star of these events was usually Chopin. He was both a great dancer … and he played for the other dancers. He would improvise … and if he really liked [what he came up with], he’d go home and write it down.”

A century later, Chopin became the perfect partner for the emancipated Ms. Isadora Duncan. He: “the boldest, proudest poet soul of his time,” according to Robert Schumann. She: “adventurer, revolutionary and ardent defender of the poetic spirit.” A match made in heaven. Daringly clad in free-flowing gowns, bare feet and loose hair, Duncan twirled to Chopin’s twenty-four wildly fluctuating Preludes, virtually inventing modern dance.

More traditional ballet practitioners have also long bellied up to the Chopin barre. Mikhail Folkine, aiming for “the high-noon of Romanticism,” began choreographing Chopin in 1907. His plotless ballet suite Chopiniana soon unfurled in a moonlit park on the stage of the Mariinsky Theater. Soon after, Sergei Dhiagilev presented the ballet in Paris. Same music, new title: Les Sylphides.

The Choprancing goes on. Look on YouTube and you’ll find slow motion flamenco , toddler free style, poser animation, and even Woody Allen with Goldie Hawn…all dancing to the dandy from Warsaw

Conductor Keith Lockhart and the Brevard Music Center Orchestra offer a concert of great orchestral colors:  Wagner's tour-de-force Overture to the opera "Tannhauser," followed by Aaron Copland's at-turns moody, evocative, and propulsive Concerto for Clarinet, Strings, Piano, and Harp, featuring BMC alum Steve Cohen as soloist, as well as Beethoven's transformative "Eroica" Symphony No. 3.    We'll also hear commentary from Lockhart, the Boston Pops director who serves as Brevard's Artistic Director, as well as a profile of "Brevard After Dark," and a performance of the Hungarian Dances Nos. 10 and 5 performed by the all-student Brevard Sinfonia, led by guest conductor Andres Cardenes (CAHR-deh-ness).