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The Greatest Genius Of The Pianoforte
by Chris A. Mooney
There is hardly a composer concerning whom so many erroneous notions
are current as concerning Chopin, and of all the histories of music I
have seen that of Langhans is the only one which devotes to Chopin an
amount of space approximately proportionate to his importance. One of
the most absurd of the misconceptions is that Chopin's genius was born
in full armor, and that it did not pass through several stages of
development, like that of other composers. Chopin did display
remarkable originality at the very beginning, but the apparent
maturity of his first published works is due to the fact that he
destroyed his earliest efforts and disowned those works which are
known as posthumous, and which may have created confusion in some
minds by having received a higher "opus" number than his last works.
Another misconception regarding Chopin is that his latest works are
morbid and unintelligible. The same charge was brought by philistines
against the best works of Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner. The fact is
that these last works are of an almost matchless harmonic depth and
originality, as superior to his earlier works as Wagner's last music
dramas are to his first operas. I make this comparison with Wagner
advisedly because, although I have the most exalted notions of
Wagner's grandeur and importance, I do not for a moment hesitate to
say that in his own sphere Chopin is quite as original and has been
almost as revolutionary and epoch-making as Wagner. Schumann was the
first to recognize the revolutionary significance of Chopin's style.
"Chopin's works," he says, "are cannons buried in flowers;" and in
another place he declares that he can see in "Chopin's G minor
Nocturne a terrible declaration of war against a whole musical past."
Chopin, himself, modest as he was in his manners, wrote to his teacher
Elsner, in 1831, when he was twenty-two years of age: "Kalkbrenner
will not be able to break my perhaps bold but noble determination to
create a new epoch in art."
The views and opinions in this blog post are those of its author.
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