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OK, I'm 0 for 1 already.....


OK, now it's 0 for 2.
Although.....maybe you can understand -- "minuzioes" is so odd (for German or otherwise) that I had to check to see if it's still April 1.


Cool -- you knew this story -- and more.


I did not know that either! I figured it was contemporaneous although inauthentic.


Undoubtedly the latter. Look, it's about Chopin!

Could it be "menuet" or "minuet" and someone mis-spelled it?

(Oh no, look what I started......)

good line, Jeff. And thanks for the mini-lecture. I remember them being MUCH longer.

Jim (W75)

It might look better if I stopped being lazy and spelled it properly with the umlaut:

minuziös

Jeff Kallberg

Jim: In Wharton they can afford 2-minute lectures.

Jeff Kallberg

I figured it was that.....and no, it doesn't make it look any less impossible!

The only plausible thing it could seem to be is a lyric from Carmina Burana.

Or maybe some tiny kind of pasta (first cousin to spaghettios).....

Kind of sounds like tiny pasta to me too.

Somewhere I saw a sign one could put on a door which said "Bach in a Minuet." But I don't think we're dealing with a "Minuet Waltz" here, LA. (Though the minuet in Chopin's 1st sonata is a kind of Minuet Mazurka.)

My music history teacher had a mat in front of his office that said "Dr. Spiro Will Be Bach in a Fugue Minutes." My automatic thought was always, "He'll never be Bach!" Not that anyone will be.

Dr. Jeff, it was great to see and hear you as something other than little marks as a screen. I really appreciate it when I have the opportunity to see folks from around here on video or hear their voices.

If the budget problems plaguing universities continue, perhaps one-minute lectures will become the norm....

The Friedman recording of the D flat waltz-- dang, that sure is fast. A minute and 34 seconds is obviously not nearly long enough to play this piece musically.

Elene

Maybe it's about fish. Maybe it's the minnow waltz - - - Chopin was a Pisces after all.

(-Frycek slinks back into cave)

One known to appreciate puns.

Elene

Well said....it's great when any of our beloved members 'come to life.'

I saw an all-Chopin student recital at a local college this weekend, which was excellent. There was a short lecture right before the piano playing. The speaker was pointing out the feminine aspect of Chopin's music, citing his small stature, weakness brought on by illness requiring him to play softly, the women who flocked to hear him, and the fact that he wrote short pieces, which are associated with dance pieces, which are associated with women. And then the gender confusion further emphasized because he was in a relationship with a woman who dressed like a man. I thought it was a little odd, but my companions thought it was okay, and the college student among us said that gender identity is a common topic in academia.

Glad I wasn't there.

It seemed like a tired old [and outdated] idea backed up by general surface facts you could find on Wikipedia - I had actually expected something a little more in-depth, even if I hadn't agreed with the conclusions.

Sigh. Too bad you weren't there, Frycek.

FCF, have you checked out Jeff Kallberg's book, Chopin at the Boundaries? It goes into a great deal of detail about how gender identity was seen in Chopin's time and how that affected people's views of him.

While this flavor of gender confusion is one of the things I find charming about Chopin, I honestly doubt that he felt such confusion within himself.

By the way, as far as we know, Chopin rather disapproved of Mme Sand's masculine dress, and she went back to dressing like a girl fairly early in their relationship. (I don't know exactly when, and I don't remember where I learned that, or thought I did.)

Dance music associated with women? I suppose the men who did all those social dances with them were only dancing under extreme duress.

I am on the trail of a lesser-known historical figure, one I can't find out much about so far, and I'm wondering if J.A.S., or anyone, can enlighten me. The personage is Stanisław Starzyński, a poet who wrote under the name of Stach Doliwa (NOT the later lawyer/politician). We're told he was the future Countess Potocka's first "adorator," when she was only 13. Her family apparently didn't take him very seriously. However, I'm thinking there's a story in this.

I did find a poem of his just now:

Dumka Podolska

Na wschód patrząc swym zwyczajem,
Czego płacze to pachole?
Tęskni pono za swym krajem,
A tym krajem jest Podole.
A w tym kraju jest włość skromna,
A w tej włości miły domek
I kochanka tam niepomna,
Że ją kocha tęskny ziomek.

Otarł oczy, westchnął z cicha,
PrzeklinajÄ…c swÄ… niedolÄ™,
CiÄ…gle za swym krajem wzdycha,
A tym krajem jest Podole.
A w tym kraju jest włość skromna,
A w tej włości miły domek
I kochanka tam niepomna,
Że ją kocha tęskny ziomek.

The estate of Delfina's family, the Komars, was in Podolia.

(I decided not to add a machine translation because they are so poor.)

Research continues.

Elene

You certainly don't pick that up anywhere in his letters or quotes.



In the lecture, the dance-tune aspect was tied into the belief of the era that women could only play short pieces because they were believed to have short attention spans and because they needed to conserve their strength for child-bearing, which may have been the case.

The lecturer brought up Mendelssohn, saying that he discouraged his sister from publishing her works and then regretted it after she died and spent the rest of his life working to get her works published. Would this be a different brother than Felix? Because I thought Felix had a stroke when he heard she died and died himself shortly after that.

I don't know much about the Mendelssohns, but Felix died six months after Fanny, so he probably couldn't have done all that much to promote her work after her death-- "the rest of his life" wasn't very long. They both died of strokes, as did several other relatives-- some familial defect? Felix didn't die directly after Fanny, though.

Apparently her husband did support her work and was not averse to having it published the way her brother was?

One question that vexes me is why Chopin was unwilling to meet Fanny despite her repeated entreaties.

Elene

I assumed it just wasn't high on his priority list, being so busy -- and I don't know if they spoke a common language.

Elene, it seems you are now one of the best specialists on Stach Doliwa in the world. I've never heard of him before, he is not mentioned in any printed or digital lexicon or encyclopedia I have at home and not even in the Polish Wikipedia.

There is little information available online about him in addition to what you've provided above. I've found only one another poem of him.

His nom de plume consists of the diminutive form of his first name and the name of a well-known Polish coat of arms (probably his own).


I prefer to not even think about a possible machine translation of this poem . This is my non-poetic translation of the first stanza:

Looking east, as always,
Why is this young boy crying?
It seems he misses his country,
And that country is Podolia.
And in that country, there is a modest village,
And in it, there is a nice small house.
And a paramour, not aware
Of being loved by her longing compatriot.

Of course in reality the kochanka lived in a big fine house and was quite aware of being loved by a man three times her age, it seems.

Thanks, J.A.S..

Elene