Piano Music - Frédéric Chopin

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Chopin

📖 "Chopin is the bard of the pianoforte, the rhapsodist, the spirit and the soul of it. I do not know whether this instrument inspired him and he the instrument. But only a thourough identificaiton of both could produce these compositions. Tragical, romantic, lyrical, heroic, dramatic, fantastic, soulful, tender, dreamy, brilliant, grand, simple, - all possible ideas are contained in his compositions for that instrument, and find in it expression most sublime."

&

"Chopin was the soul of the pianoforte."

Anton Rubinstein

📖 "Only one man knew … how to compose quasi-improvised music, or at least what seems such. That is Chopin. He is a charming personality, strange, unique, inimitable."
Georges Bizet

📖 "He [Chopin] is the truest artist i have ever met."
Eugène Delacroix

📖 "Hats off, gentlemen - a genius!"
Robert Schumann
reviewing Chopin's Op. 2 in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (December 1831)

📖 POEM: From CHOPIN

It was low and long,
Ivory white, with doors and windows blotting blue upon it.
Wind choked in pomgranate-trees,
Rain rattled on lead roofs,
And shuttered along twisted conduit-pipes.
An eagle screamed out of the heavy sky,
And some one in the house screamed
"Ah, I knew that you were dead!"

So that was it:
Funeral chants,
And the icy cowls of buried monks;
Organs on iron midnights,
And long was winding-sheets
Guttered from altar candles.
First this,
Then spitting blood.
Flights of arpeggios confused by blood,
Flute-showers of notes stung and arrested on a sharp chord,
Tangled in a web of blood.
"I cannot send you the manuscripts, as thetyare not yet finished.
I have been ill as a dog.
My illness has had a pernicious effect on the Preludes
Which you will receive God knows when."

Amy Lowell

Frédéric Chopin

1810 - 1849
Frédéric Chopin was a Polish-French composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic period.

📖 “It is dreadful when something weighs on your mind, not to have a soul to unburden yourself to. You know what I mean. I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.”
Letters

📖 “Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.”

📖 “When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher.”

📖 “Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”

📖 “How strange! This bed on which I shall lie has been slept on by more than one dying man, but today it does not repel me! Who knows what corpses have lain on it and for how long? But is a corpse any worse than I? A corpse too knows nothing of its father, mother or sisters or Titus. Nor has a corpse a sweetheart. A corpse, too, is pale, like me. A corpse is cold, just as I am cold and indifferent to everything. A corpse has ceased to live, and I too have had enough of life…. Why do we live on through this wretched life which only devours us and serves to turn us into corpses? The clocks in the Stuttgart belfries strike the midnight hour. Oh how many people have become corpses at this moment! Mothers have been torn from their children, children from their mothers - how many plans have come to nothing, how much sorrow has sprung from these depths, and how much relief!… Virtue and vice have come in the end to the same thing! It seems that to die is man’s finest action - and what might be his worst? To be born, since that is the exact opposite of his best deed. It is therefore right of me to be angry that I was ever born into this world! Why was I not prevented from remaining in a world where I am utterly useless? What good can my existence bring to anyone? … But wait, wait! What’s this? Tears? How long it is since they flowed! How is this, seeing that an arid melancholy has held me for so long in its grip? How good it feels - and sorrowful. Sad but kindly tears! What a strange emotion! Sad but blessed. It is not good for one to be sad, and yet how pleasant it is - a strange state…”

📖 “Youth is an obligation; that is to say, you have an absolute duty to be happy and to preserve a good memory of yourself for one who loves you.”
Letters

📖 "Nothing is more odious than music without hidden meaning,"
Frédéric Chopin
Quoted by Maurice Ravel in Le Courrier Musical, (January 1910)

Quotes by Chopin

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