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Seabelle: You did not offend anyone. I happened to be very moved by that quote because it sums up how I feel when listening to "some" of Chopin's music---not all, of course.

I agree with you, Steven, totally. Your description of him is magnficent!! I just wish I had your way with words as I have often stated. But please don't deprive or deride your mother her impression of his music just because she heard him in a different way. (Yikes, cigarettes on the piano!) For some people his music is cathartic.

I believe that he was unable to express the real depths of his emotions in words, just as so many of us are incapable of doing. He spoke through his music and through this expression he has touched the hearts of millions. And I also believe that, while he was content and even quite happy for many of his years, he was still, basically, a troubled soul. His homesicknesses, his heartbreak, his health, his anger, his insecurities, his abandonment, his fears---all created the person he was. He even admitted that he rather enjoyed being depressed.

Steven, no where have I ever suggested the one should exaggerate rubato while playing his music.

Thank you for your most descriptive and insightful post. And maybe, just maybe, you loathe the author. Just a guess, that's all. And maybe Frycek might have meant "many" of us.

Kathleen

Yes, and if one practices scales regularly, even just 5 minutes a day, this shouldn't be anything to think about.

But for other tricky runs like the 48-note run in the Nocturne 27/2, besides slowly and evenly, I'd suggest lifting the fingers high up and evenly. Lifting up the finger is as important as striking down.

Us equals you, me, Kathleen, Seabelle and Oscar. Most is four out of five, a clear marjority.

Thank you for the hint. I'll keep that in mind when I get to that part by fluent playing. That is, a few months (at least) from this moment.

Hehe, I am actually pleased that the quotation is under discussion. Kathleen, I've respected your choice to use it, and, though I've always found it troubling, wouldn't otherwise have had an entrée even to broach the topic.

If the quotation is parody (and thus humorous precisely because it's so over the top), that's not so obvious; if meant and taken seriously, it's unbecoming and inaccurate. And when one questions whether such a quip has a plausible basis in reality, the truth is that for every piece or passage by Chopin that possibly evokes such dark emotion, there are more that are exuberant, vigorous, wholesome and happy.

Chopin lovers surely recognize that there are, and always have been, Chopin haters—those who would depict his music as feeble, decadent, frivolous, for the salon or for the sickroom. I believe Wilde's statement trivializes and disparages Chopin's music, reflecting not a deep knowledge, love and understanding so much as what its detractors are prone to saying—or at least thinking!

I don't loathe Oscar Wilde at all, and I certainly recognize his genius for expressing what others feel but might not dare to voice. And plenty of people in an earlier era did think Chopin's music was sickly, weepy, gushy, sentimental, sappy, maudlin. Though fewer people share those attitudes nowadays, they persist in some quarters—and don't, in my opinion, deserve tribute or even acknowledgment (unless to refute them ).

Steven

Truce

Kathleen

I knew there was a trick to it......

But seriously folks.... runs like that are sometimes the things that keep some of us from playing a piece.
That figure is it for me in that Nocturne (I mean, I do play it, but I don't let anybody hear it).

And I even get freaked by the scale in thirds near the end of the G minor Ballade. As soon as I get over that, I can consider playing the piece.....

OK, make it five out of six...

But I also understand and respect sotto voce's point....

Truce...

CA

Maybe you should consider starting to "warm up" that part right away? I mean, as long as it wouldn't intimidate you from even starting to learn the piece.

I always try to start working on the "hardest" part first. It really helps down the road.

Well, I do warm up for the run since I play the C#m scales everyday before I start working on the piece. But when I'm actually playing the Nocturne, I don't want to rush so far just yet.

Little by little I guess..

Not me. I generally consider this kind of intellectual elitism to be about as single-minded as the excessive rubato, wine and cigarettes example.

...

That's excellent. Add at least 1 more scale in some other key, and different key each day. No need to play fast. Play every note as evenly as possible is the goal.

I don't know that I'd call excessive rubato or wine single minded. Some people enjoy such things. As to intellectual elitism, you don't know Steven well enough to make that pronouncement methinks.

Firstly, I wasn't talking about cigarette's or wine, but the example that included them. I like wine and hate cigarettes as much as the next guy. Secondly, I don't necessarily think that whoever Steven is is intellectual elitism incarnate or anything, just that this particular strain of elitism is glib and tedious.

It wasn't very clear.

It's dangerous ground you are treading one by labeling Steven an elitist. It's neither true nor called for.

Seabelle,

Dated remarks that suggest Chopin's music is characterized by overwrought anguish are, in my strongly held and longstanding opinion, beyond distasteful. If you find that opinion elitist, or the way I express it glib and tedious, that's your problem.

Whatever point you attempt to make about wine and cigarettes, please don't presume that my commenting on my mother's lapses in judgment and good taste gives you the same license.

Perhaps you lack the perspective to appreciate that this is a friendly place and that people can agree to disagree. Getting defensive, expressing disrespect and using insulting language don't build credibility for someone who registered five days ago and has a blank profile. I recommend greater circumspection.

Steven

While we don't always quite manage it, we aspire to Chopin's level of politesse around here. So be sure to be nasty in a nice way.

One difficulty with some of those scary runs, including the one in 27/2, is that they aren't necessarily standard scales, or even scales at all. They can incorporate different types of patterns, shifting from scale to arpeggio to something else. Fortunately, the long one in the C#m nocturne goes smoothly up and down without doing anything crazy in between, and that helps.

You've all inspired me to go back to 27/2 and try to deal with that measure more effectively than I have in the past.

There are some Chopinesque fioriture in Barber's Nocturne, which I'm working on, but they are mercifully short; the longest is only 14 notes. (That is, they'd be Chopinesque if Chopin had spoken 20th-century-ese.)

Elene

We may tease but we don't attack. We don't do personal abuse either.



You see, that's not how I've interpreted that quotation up to now. I've read it to mean that Wilde found Chopin's music to be profound and moving on a very deep level - "sins" and "tragedies" as the stuff of great literature and art. I never interpreted it to mean that Wilde felt he'd been wallowing in bathos - now I can picture Wilde fastidiously shaking himself off like a wet cat - but it could mean exactly that. I tried to find it in context last night. It's apparently in a long dialogue that Wilde wrote called The Critic as Artist. I only skimmed it and never found the quote of contention but I'm intrigued now and may persevere. You've given me something to think about.

BTW the Icons of Europe people in their Dan Brown fashion are now somehow trying to link Wilde into with the Chopin/Jenny Lind business.

My solution to that measure is to pretend that I'm having a memory lapse and just leave it out and hope that nobody notices.

(Just kidding, but I might consider it.)