Well, I'm sort of glad to know I'm in the mainstream on something.

I don't hear it the way you guys do. I think the sonata has some interesting aspects and moments, and it's "OK" -- but that's all. To me, it's not anything close to great Chopin, and not even close to what we'd consider average Chopin. IMO others of his lesser known works are much better, like the Op. 4 Variations, the Rondos, and the Tarentelle to name just a few. And also the Allegro de Concert which was such a favorite of our old member Steven.

Holy moly....it's over 5 million views!!

I've mentioned that not only does this thread have such a huge number of views, but it also has an unusually high ratio of views/posts -- more than 600 views per post.

I find this extremely interesting. I've said that I think this thread must be one of the most comprehensive collections of info and thoughts on Chopin that has ever existed anywhere, and that maybe it's truly #1 ever. Whether or not that is quite so, clearly there are a great many people who have found it of interest, and who continue finding it of interest, since this ratio of views/posts continues to be sustained. And we pretty much know that the readers must be far more than the active participants, and probably much more than our membership too. Which of course is great.
Not that we'd mind, though, if some of you readers out there would maybe also drop in now and then and say hi!

Thanks again to Kathleen for starting this thread, to Dr. Kallberg for lending it such an extra level of authority and knowledge, and to everyone who has been participating.

Happy Birthday to Wolfgang. (Fryderyk would no doubt want us to notice.)

Elene

Has anyone here seen this video before?

I hadn't seen this video, though I'd seen the "Horowitz in the sun" photo before. Gosh, it's fast for a polonaise, isn't it?

How are you folks in Poland and other cold spots getting along? We've been hearing about how many people have died from the severe weather. Last year at this time we had a bizarre episode of subzero cold here, but right now it's pretty average.

Your Zen koans for the day:

Think about the middle section of the slow movement of the 3rd sonata–

What is the melody?

Where do the phrases begin and end?


Elene

Great great questions!!
And would you believe, I've played it thousands of times without ever worrying about them.

Which I'm not sure is a good comment or bad.

But seriously folks.... ....if I were singing it, I'd sing the R.H., so I guess I'd say that's 'the melody.'
Sort of.

BTW, a slightly similar thing: The middle section of Schubert's A-flat major Impromptu from Op. 142.

Yeah, the whole RH part is sort of the melody! And the first notes of the measures are sort of the melody. And I hear some of the other notes in those sextuplets as melody, too. But not all of them, and I don't know why my ear picks out some of them and not others.

And look closely at the notation. Puzzling. (At least to my poor little brain.)

There is (are?) a lot of smoke and mirrors in this piece.

"Great great questions!!
And would you believe, I've played it thousands of times without ever worrying about them."

I would totally believe that, because I hadn't worried about those things either (though I had only played the piece maybe dozens of times). I have a useful teacher who makes me look at things I wasn't seeing.

At my last lesson I realized I had broken the First Rule of Playing Chopin: Never assume that anything is easy.

Elene

Really?
What made the question really complicated and interesting to me was, what about the left hand!!!

Chopin was a ****ing genius.

P.S.....


I don't think it is -- I think it's pretty clear what he's saying.
(Which of course doesn't mean I'm right about what it is.)

I think those extra stems are.....let's see, how to put it.....I think they're basically "finger-pedal" signs.

I think they're a way of telling us there should be sort of a 'sustained' sound throughout but without heavy pedaling. Take it this way: Forget, for the moment, that they have anything to do with indicating 'melody notes' (which indeed I think they don't), and just let your fingers do what those stems tell you -- i.e. hold those notes. In fact, I'd say, hold them not just for their indicated values, but in all cases as long as you possibly can. And all the while, don't be thinking of them as melody notes. Think of all the RH notes as being equally 'melody'; view the stems as only telling you to hold those keys down.

OK.

And now, with the benefit of holding down those keys, use as light pedaling as possible when playing the passage. Holding those keys enables you to make do with very light pedaling.

It's beautiful, isn't it?

That's how I think the passage 'goes' -- and that's what I think those stems mean. They enable very light pedaling, which in turn is what enables all the RH notes to be 'melody'! Because with 'normal' pedaling, if you tried to make all those notes melody, it would be mush.

If I try to hold down all those notes with stems (which I had already tried, thinking that must have been what he meant), my hand is stuck and uncomfortable, and I can't create a beautiful shape with that melody. Maybe you can, but I can't.

"Normal" pedaling doesn't turn it to mush (perhaps meaning that my "normal" pedaling is rather light). I'm not trying to play every note of the sextuplets as melody, by any means. In most of those measures I'm hearing and playing the first note of the sextuplet and often the last (leading to the next first-- is this confusing or what) as melody, emphasizing those.

BTW the sextuplet notes that have extra stems are those that fit into chords. No surprise there. Bronarski and Turczynski, in the Paderewski edition, said they would have done the notation differently (using ties) but theirs would look more confusing and busy on the page.

When I asked about the RH of this section intuitively, I was told that I shouldn't be thinking of it as a line, because it's three-dimensional. Actually it's four-dimensional, of course.

Elene

Yes -- and that's what gave me the idea of what I described, and what makes it work.

Yes. Maybe that's why it is not part of any commercial recordings...

After thinking about and playing this some more: I don't honestly think all the RH notes are the main melody, but the notes I don't hear as the main melody are still a melody.

Elene

How complicated this seemingly simple thing is!
(In a good way, I mean.)

....and the way I see it is, 'all the RH notes' are the main melody -- really I'd say the melody -- and then there are layers of extra melody around it: some highlighted notes in the RH (but not at all the ones with the extra stems!) and the melody of the LH. But of course there are different ways to see it. And I'd be sort of curious what a 'poll' of concert pianists who play the piece would show....

Monday morning I had the good fortune to attend a lecture on the mazurkas given by William Wellborn and hosted by our local music teachers' association (of which I was a very active member back in the Pleistocene or so). Wow! I really liked his playing as well as himself.

www.williamwellborn.com

I'd never heard of him before, but I immediately thought that a person who not only knows but cares what year Chopin first heard a Bellini opera is somebody I need to meet! (I turned out to be conspicuous myself because I was the only person in the room who was familiar with the Eigeldinger book.)

Dr. Wellborn gleefully read those anecdotes from Hallé and von Lenz regarding Chopin sometimes sounding like he was playing in duple meter on the mazurkas. Although he didn't reach any clearer conclusion about that than we have here, he made a valiant stab at it, and I thought he got further than most. What he did was to show us some of the dance steps-- very brave of him!-- and demonstrate how the dance generates the rhythm and articulation of the music. Which I'd say is the way we should always be thinking of these matters. (As you know, I made a large effort in 2010 to learn as much as I could about the dance movements, but was unable to get all the information I needed in my local area or online. Dr. Wellborn was taught about this in Poland. Guess I have to go back.)

He had also picked up a book of earlier mazurkas while in Poland, and played some of those for us, representing composers who were active when Chopin was a kid. What a treat to get to hear them. Someone asked what made Chopin's mazurkas so much better than the earlier models. There was no definitive answer available, though many things could be said. (I'd like to find a more quantifiable answer than "genius.")

Dr. Wellborn asked, "When you play Chopin, don't you feel like the piece is just for you?" Everyone nodded. "Whereas Beethoven, for example, is for EVERYBODY." Everyone nodded again. "Chopin was self-centered," Wellborn continued. "Which is a good thing for us." I'm trying to think of a better word than self-centered. He didn't mean that Chopin didn't care about others or was not a good person, only that he was working within his own personal world as an artist. That's absolutely true, but I haven't come up with a better way to express it.

Elene

Frycek suggests the word "intimate" in answer to my question above, but says she has not been able to post here or even log in for months. She's requested new passwords but it hasn't helped. Moderators, any ideas?

Elene

Poli (2010) also suggested that Chopin intended finger pedaling here. Since Chopin was often quite careful about the notation of pedal marks (including release points), Poli believed that an understanding of the interaction between the finger sustains as indicated by the unusual stemming and the placement of the explicit pedal marks was the best way to interpret the notation in the opening measures of this section:

"In the Largo from his Sonata in B Minor, Op. 58, for instance, the opening of the middle section shows that he painstakingly notated the duration of the pitches that should be physically held in the right hand. The pedal intervenes exclusively when the left hand would be unable to hold the fifth in the bass (E-B) while reaching the melody in the tenor register (last beat of measure 28 and first beat of measure 29). (Poli, 2010, p. 169).


Poli, R. (2010). The secret life of musical notation: Defying interpretive traditions. Milwaukee, WI: Amadeus Press.

Sounds like a weird little mystery.
Hopefully it won't take long to solve, and Frycek can come right back here.

(Maybe you want to send a message directly to one of the mods....?)

Interesting! I know Poli, and like him and his ideas a lot.


I don't agree with the last part, and in fact I think not taking the placement of those asterisks literally is a key to understanding Chopin's pedal markings.

BTW I didn't get that idea on my own.
It's a pet idea of my old teacher Seymour Bernstein. He wrote it up extensively in this little book.

Interestingly, Poli doesn't actually play it that way, or at least he didn't in this 2008 video, which is a treat because we get to see his hands close up and catch every detail: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWCW4RKifnU&feature=related

Mark, the pedal indications in this piece are giving me almost as much of a headache as the RH notation. Those asterisks so often seem to have wandered a bit away from where they would make sense. I wish Bernstein's book, "Chopin-- Interpreting His Notational Symbols," was still in print!

One thing that did help make sense of the piece: my teacher found a useful concept in a book by Charles Rosen, who said that the outer sections of the Largo imitate a Bellini aria. As soon as he said that, I understood the function of the incongruous introduction (at least more or less), and it was as if I could see the tenor on the stage as I played.

Elene

A poor choice of words. I only meant to suggest that Chopin's pedal markings usually seem quite meticulous. As Poli pointed out:

"Chopin meticulously marked almost every single release--and when he did not, it may have been an oversight that caused the omission, or an instance in which specifying a release could be superfluous, as at the close of piece." (Poli, 2010, p. 143)

Whether Chopin was actually careful and consistent is another matter. Poli acknowledged the difficulty in interpreting Chopin's pedal indications, particularly the release marks:

"Accuracy seems not to have been one of Chopin's greatest concerns when it came to notating pedal. His manuscripts attest to it: the markings they display vary greatly, depending on their purpose, the available space, the size of his handwriting and the figurations he employed. . . . The frequent irregularity displayed by Chopin's release signs has been the object of speculation for decades." (pp. 141-2)

Maybe she could try clearing the cache?

Could the reason also be that the effect was different on his piano? Bailie always highlights that many of Chopin's pedal markings sound different on our modern pianos. I always try to follow them, but when they don't sound good or make sense I follow my instinct.

It is! (Amazon has it wrong.)
You can find the info for getting it in the review on there.

In fact, why don't I put it right here:

Manduca Music Publishers
mark@manducamusic.com
(207) 773-7012

(BTW, that "mark" isn't me!)

But even before you might get it, I can help you out: What Seymour says about those asterisks (and which I believe 1000%) is very simple:

BASICALLY IGNORE THEM.
I'm serious.
They mean essentially nothing, other than just that at some point you release the pedal.

This horrifies some people. But that's not my fault.

This 'rule' immediately made Chopin's pedal indications make sense to me. And y'know, even to people who disbelieve this thing because they feel it's unfaithful to the score, many if not most of them just ignore many of Chopin's pedal indications, because they wind up feeling that they make no sense and therefore must just be mistakes. If they'd embrace this idea about the asterisks, they'd see that each and every pedal indication of Chopin does make sense, and that they can follow them.


IMO that answers it in some of the seemingly-problematic instances, but not in most. And IMO many of the asterisks, if taken literally, are problematic on any piano, including those of Chopin's time.

I think Poli, as much as I like and admire him, put that first part very, very, very badly.

(That's right -- 3 verys.)
Roberto, if you're reading this, you can always revise it for the next edition!

IMO the second part that you quoted absolutely belies how he put the first thing. That first thing is highly misleading, and I would say WRONG, and badly wrong, because it can be taken out of context and undo much of what people like he and Seymour Bernstein are trying so hard to achieve about Chopin's notation.

WOWSER.

I'm afraid "basically ignore them" (or "follow our instincts" as CA put it) is what we're more or less forced to do about those asterisks. Sometimes I've thought that there must be some secret language in Chopin's notation that only master pianists understand, and I'm not part of the club. It's a relief to know that yes, I am part of the club, so to speak-- the rest of the club is more or less as confused as I am.

It's hard to understand, though, why Chopin would (apparently, at least) be so meticulous about some things and not others. Sigh.

Sometimes it's clear that he is writing in pedal indications because it's a passage that we might automatically pedal a certain way, and he wants us to do something different from what we'd do automatically. Other times, well, it's just not so clear.

And yes, the effects of pedaling and so much else must have been quite different on the pianos of Chopin's time, but that doesn't give us enough of an explanation of his notation. Same for tempo indications, as we've discussed before.

(I guess I could have simply written, "I agree with Mark.")

Hey, if Mr. Poli does happen to read this, maybe he could explain why he wrote that the Largo should be played one way, while playing it a completely different way! But I'm not criticizing. It seems like just about everything related to Chopin and his work exists in that strange quantum-uncertainty state where opposite things are true at the same time. I've gotten used to it. I don't like it, but I've gotten used to it.

Elene

My guess:

He changed his mind between one and the other.

And he's entitled, as are we all.

And, BTW, he has perhaps changed his mind again since -- and to some extent may change his mind a little each and every time he plays it. Which, for what it's worth, is what happens just about every next time I play something.

Changing one's mind about the interpretation of a piece from day to day sounds perfectly reasonable. And it's very much in the spirit of Chopin, who it seems often couldn't make up his mind at all about the "final" form of a piece.

Elene

That's certainly how I see it. Maybe a better way is that he had different ideas at different times, rather than not being able to make up his mind -- but hey, that's probably exactly what you meant too!

Some people feel that Chopin's changes from one edition to the next generally indicated his having decided that the later thing was how it really should be, and therefore that the latest version is the most correct. I see it more as above.

Happy not-really-Fryderyk's-birthday.

This might be the best way to think about those pesky problems of interpretation:



Elene