Page 203 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

The preceding example comes from one of Liszt’s etudes. An etude is a short, one-movement composition designed to improve a particular aspect of a performer’s technique (more rapid note repetition, surer leaps, or faster chro- matic scales, as in this example). These works require almost superhuman tech- nical skill. Ironically, such “study pieces” by Liszt are not useful for the average pianist—to practice them you must already be a virtuoso!
Yet Liszt’s reputation as a supremely gifted performer and a flamboyant stage personality does not diminish his importance as a composer. His novel approach to musical form, as best heard in his Piano Sonata in B minor, and har- monic progressions (chord changes), most evident in his late works of the 1880s, foreshadow musical practices of the twentieth century. His piano piece Nuages gris (Gray Clouds), for example, was composed in 1881, not 1930 as it sounds.
Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849)
Frédéric Chopin (Figure 11.9) was a very different sort of person than his close friend Franz Liszt. Whereas Liszt was virile and flamboyant, Chopin was physi- cally slight and somewhat sickly. He was also introverted and hated performing in public. Like Liszt, Chopin was a composer and a piano virtuoso, but he did not create moments of technical display merely for their sensational effects. In Chopin’s music the physical challenges for the pianist grow out of, but never overshadow, the composer’s intrinsic musical ideas.
Chopin was born in Warsaw, Poland, to a French father and a Polish mother. The father taught French—then the universal language of the aristocracy—at an elite secondary school for the sons of Polish nobility. As a student there, Frédéric not only gained an excellent general education but also acquired aristocratic friends and tastes. Fearing that Warsaw was too small and provincial, the young composer moved first to Vienna and then, in September 1831, to Paris. That very year Poland’s fight for independence was crushed by Russian troops—such ten- sion still echoes today in Poland’s neighbor Ukraine. Although Chopin spent the rest of his life mainly in France, the expatriate composer became a voice for Pol- ish musical nationalism (for nationalism, see Chapter 14). He died in Paris of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-nine.
Chopin was a rarity among Romantic composers—he wrote only works for solo piano or ensemble pieces (including songs) in which the piano fig-
ures prominently. His works for solo piano include those in the Polish na- tional style (called mazurkas and polonaises), three piano sonatas, a set of twenty-four preludes (one in each of the major and minor keys), twenty-
four etudes (technical studies), and twenty-one nocturnes. Far better than the other genres for piano, the dream-like nocturnes embody the essence of musical Romanticism.
Nocturne in E♭ major Opus 9, No. 2 (1832)
Can music be painfully beautiful? If so, such music surely can be found in this
Chopin nocturne. A nocturne (night piece) is a slow, dreamy genre of piano
LiSTeN TO . . . a wonderful example of Liszt’s virtuosity applied to Schubert’s art song Erlkönig in what is a called a “piano transcription,” online.
romantic piano music 181 Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
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Figure 11.9
A superbly Romantic portrait of Chopin by the famous French painter Eugène Delacroix (1799–1863) who, like Franz Liszt, was a friend and admirer of Chopin.
56797_ch11_ptg01.indd 181 29/08/14 3:36 PM
Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY
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