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.