Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Just for those totally devoted to Chopin

Frycek you have very good artistic taste! I too am an admirer of John Keats as well as Frederic Chopin and have a Keats section on the bookcase next to my Piano. Piano is Edwardian- circa 1910, hence my sign in name. I've a late c.19th edition of Keats poems and some old books on my bookcase too.
The flower is a beauty by the way!

I've often felt Keats and Chopin would've had a lot to say to each other as they had similiar ideas about the role of the artist/composer.

The hibiscus bloom is only the second bloom from a foot tall baby plant I have on my glassed in front porch/greenhouse. Tropical hibiscus blossoms only last a day so I usually pick them and put them where they can be best enjoyed.

I think they would. I feel certain John Keats would have loved Frederic's nocturnes. I know he liked Mozart but he never mentioned Beethoven in his letters funnily enough.

What a shame the hibiiscus bloom lasts for such a short time...ah beauty is precious....

Oh and thanks for the photo of the Pleyel piano. I always assumed it was a grand!

I've got a CD of a British pianist playing one of Chopin's Pleyels- playing his music too- it's wonderful!

Violets were also Keats' favorite flower.

Frycek,
I envy you your vast knowledge of Chopin and his time.
Also like your taste in flowers.

So they were!

I celebrated his Birthday intimately because I was sick and I also had to finish some important projects and couldn't go on the net. We had a wonderful day together! He is still the Best and will always be.

Ah, CA, now I get it! He wasn't with me because he was busy visiting YOU while you were ill! I can totally support that.

Thanks for the clarifications on the Pleyel and the local piano in Majorca.

Things kept on top of pianos: I'm afraid that in my case it's a Frank Lloyd Wright- patterned throw, in addition to plastic folders covering the areas next to the music desk. Nowhere near as nice as a fresh hibiscus blossom. All that is to protect it from two of our cats, who are older and have bad kidneys and tend to throw up a lot. One of them hit the spot to the right of the desk and destroyed the finish (such as it was, in a well-used 64-year-old instrument). I also have to keep a cover over the very pretty harpsichord I'm still borrowing, for the same reason, so that I don't get to enjoy looking at it. The cats like to sit on the instruments and look out the window. Understandable but not OK!

Elene

It was at Nohant June 1841. Zamoyski says the tone was so poor he 'kept bashing it furiously'. He insisted Pleyel send another. Anybody got more info on this unsuitable instrument?

It's kind of hard to imagine Chopin bashing any piano furiously, no matter how bad it was....

Here's a little something in honor of today being his name-day:



I bought the scarf from a street vendor in Warsaw, while shivering in the cold wind and wanting to wrap up in as many layers as possible.

Elene

Don't remember this incident but am intrigued. Did you know that Pleyel (which has apparently recently ceased to exist) has (had?) all its records dating back to Chopin's time and before? That's how they were able to prove the "English" Pleyel that surfaced a couple of years ago was the one he actually bought (he usually leased) to take with him to England and sold rather than ship it when he returned to Paris.

Chopin's Pleyel was already in the collection at the country house museum below. But they never suspected what they had until an outside researcher checked its serial numbers against Pleyel's records. That's Chopin's Pleyel at the lower right corner. It's in reasonably good playing condition.
Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands

In a letter to Fontana 23 July 1841 he encloses a letter about the piano saying ' I am writing about a better piano, for mine is not good. Read his letter [the letter addressed to Pleyel], and seal it. You can see from it I am asking you for an answer' Do we think the letter to Pleyel still exists? The new piano duly arrives but in a letter to Fontana 16 August 1841 we get '(don't tell him he has sent me a very bad pianoforte).' Another dud?

Thanks. I'll have to refresh my memory about this. (How like Our Friend to pussyfoot around this via poor Fontana rather than confronting Pleyel himself!) (Sounds like he did get another dud though I wonder how well a piano could travel back then. Maybe he needed to let it settle in.)
Does the letter still exist? - maybe, maybe not. An awful lot of Chopin stuff got destroyed during WWII. If its in Pleyel's archives it may still be there. If it got sent to the collection in Warsaw at some point maybe not.

The best resource for any question around Chopin and Pleyel (but only if you read French) is now Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Chopin et Pleyel (Paris: Fayard, 2010). This is an amazing book, full of previously unpublished documents, photos of the original "Salons de Pleyel" where Chopin's Parisian debut recital took place (a surprise awaits you when you read about this venue!), photos of the extant pianos known to be owned by Chopin (by virtue of the Pleyel lists, also appended here). All that, and a really interesting story about the importance of Pleyel the man and Pleyel the instrument maker.

Anyway, on p. 176 Eigeldinger covers the territory relevant to this thread. The image of Chopin "boxing" the first bad Pleyel piano comes from a letter of George Sand. The letter to Pleyel that Chopin enclosed with the one from Fontana seems not to be extant. Chopin seems to have been so frustrated with his Nohant pianos that summer that he gave brief thought to switching to Erard.

Jeff Kallberg

Thanks Jeff, I saw that too. I'd really love to know what he disliked about them - I know he didn't like any innovations. Maybe they were the latest models. Sadly my French would not be up to the Eigeldinger. I'll have to wait for the English copy.

Thanks, Jeff. I'm be on it like a dog on a bone. Yum.

Ooh, I need to get that book-- to add to the rest of my stack of fascinating volumes I'm not getting around to reading [sigh]. I'm glad Eigeldinger is still with us as a resource.

I wouldn't be surprised if a piano shipped from country to country, even quite a good one, might have major problems. Before I bought my grand, it was being kept at a completely unrealistic level of humidity for our area, for a number of months, in the shop. I couldn't sustain that in my house, even humidifying assiduously. After the piano came to live with us, it took a whole year for it to stop going nuts. Many times I was afraid I'd made the wrong decision in buying this instrument, but at last it came around to being everything I had believed it to be.

I was interested to see that the picture of Chopin's 1848 Pleyel in the Cobbe collection was taken by John Challis, the maker of the harpsichord I'm using. So that must have been a good while ago.

I wonder about the effects of the low, sloped roof and the marble floor on the sound of that piano.

Elene

The picture on the website was taken awhile ago. When MaryRose and I visited Hatchlands about five years ago, the Pleyel had been moved into their small performance hall and there was one of Liszt's Erards in that spot, actually under a staircase. Picturesque but an acoustical nightmare. Chopin's Pleyel is the one I accidentally struck a muted chord on trying to measure my handspan on it, compared with my handspan on my "modern" (1937) Kurtmann. My reach was identical on the Pleyel. One neat thing about Hatchlands is that they aren't overly dragon like about the instruments. You're not allowed to try to play them without obtaining special permission, which I gather is big deal, but you can get close enough to really study them.

I have a been working on Chopin's Waltz in A minor post. for two weeks now and needless to say I adore it like all his compositions. My problem is with how to use the sustain pedal in this piece. I started out using in the standard places right after the 1 beat to sustain the lilt of the piece and then changing after the 3 beat in preparation for the next measure. This produced an okay sound not quite what I desired, as it sometimes got muddled if I didn't change the pedal correctly.

Now after my 2nd lesson, on this piece, my teacher suggested putting the sustain pedal down on 1 and then letting it off at 2 and not putting it down again till the next measure. It went okay in the lesson, but now on my own its going terrible, the waltz has no sway at all and it sounds the worst it ever has. If anyone has suggestions on how they use the pedal they would be greatly appreciated as I am lost on how to make this pedaling work.

Me too!