95208
Chopin Complete
Waltzes
A L E S S A N D R O D E LJ A V A N
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810-1849) ‘He knew how to divine the greatest mysteries of art with astonishing ease – he could gather the flowers of the field without disturbing the dew or lightest pollen. And he knew how to fashion them into stars, meteors, as it were comets, lighting up the sky of Europe, through the ideal of art. In the crystal of his own harmony he gathered the tears of the Polish people strewn over the fields, and placed them as the diamond of beauty in the diadem of humanity.’ Cyprian Kamil Norwid Half French, half Polish, Chopin was born in Zelazowa Wola, 1 March 1810. In Warsaw he studied with Wojciech (Adalbert) Zwyny, 1816- 22; then the Silesian Józef Elsner. ‘I go […] for strict counterpoint, six hours a week; I hear [anyone] on subjects in any way touching on music’. Against a background of concert giving, opera going, playing the organ at church, and spells of travelling, he completed his training at the Conservatoire, 1826-29: ‘amazing capabilities, musical genius’ (Elsner). He left Warsaw in 1830, a few weeks before the November Uprising, arriving in Paris eleven months later via unsuccessful, stressful spells in Vienna (‘Herr Chopin, piano player’) and Stuttgart. ‘The winds have driven me [...] Paris is everything that you could wish [...] I know of no place where pianists are more numerous’. In LouisPhilippe’s metropolis he befriended Bellini, heard John Field and Kalkbrenner, and concertized with Liszt and Berlioz. He became a leading voice of the Polish émigré community. He set up a lucrative teaching practice. ‘Healthy and strong, he enchants all the French ladies, and arouses jealousy in Frenchmen. He is fashionable [...] Only sometimes he longs for his homeland’ (Antoni Orlowski). ‘I have got into the highest society; I sit with ambassadors, princes, ministers’. Visiting Germany in 1834, he found a generous welcome from the Mendelssohn circle (‘Chopin [...] plays as Paganini does the violin’), Schumann and Clara Wieck 2
especially taking him to heart: ‘Chopin was here [...] he plays just as he composes, in a unique manner’. In November 1836 the writer George Sand – wife, mistress, older woman, cigar-smoking free-thinker – entered his life. The liaison – embracing, obsessive, finally sour, she ‘violently sensual’, he ‘her evil genius, her moral vampire, her cross’ (Mickiewicz) – took him through (hastened some said) his years of worsening health. The winter of 1838-39 was spent in Majorca; the seven summers of ’39 and ’41-46 en famille at her late 18th century ‘gentleman’s residence’ in Nohant between the Paris Basin and massif central. In April 1848, following their break-up the previous July, Chopin went to England and Scotland, acquiring a new entourage of students and admirers, and playing for Queen Victoria, Albert, and the Duke of Wellington. Morale though was low. ‘I feel alone, alone, alone, although surrounded by people’. ‘Where has my art gone to? Where have I wasted my heart? I barely remember how people sing back home. This world seems to pass me by’. He gave his last concert in ‘hellish’ London, 16 November 1848, at a ‘brilliant’ charity ball in aid of Polish veterans of the November Uprising – his contribution going unreported. Back in Paris, his tuberculosis at an advanced stage, unable to compose, kept company by old faithful’s and his sister Ludwika, he died 17 October 1849, at around 2.00 in the morning. He was thirty-nine. ‘If that autocratic, mighty monarch of the North knew what a dangerous enemy he has in the works of Chopin […] he would prohibit this music […] cannons concealed among flowers.’ Robert Schumann Chopin bewitched an epoch. To Balzac he was an ‘angel’. To Sand ‘divine’. To Liszt a ‘God’. Private person, rarefied artist, musician of the profoundest vision, the most refined sounds, master of the concentrated and the encapsulated. The essential Chopin is the poet of preludes, nocturnes, polonaises, mazurkas, waltzes, scherzos and 3
studies. The profound Chopin is the philosopher of ballade, fantasia and sonata. The public Chopin is the virtuoso of piano and orchestra. The fashionable Chopin is the ‘piano player’ of variation and rondo. The essential decided his life, the fashionable prefaced it. For many his cutting-edge modernism was shocking.
solid system of diatonic tonalism created by the Viennese classical masters’ (Gerald Abraham, 1939). ‘A twentieth century composer forced by a freak of nature to wander through the nineteenth’ (Alan Walker, 1966). ‘Chopin’s music was conceived not “by chance”, but with a conscious awareness of the overall organisation’ – structure before ‘picturesque externals’.
J.W. Davison, The Musical World, 28 October 1841: ‘Monsieur Frederic Chopin has, by some reason or other which we cannot divine, obtained an enormous reputation but too often refused to composers of ten times his genius. Mr Chopin is by no means a putter-down of commonplaces; but he is, what by many would be esteemed worse, a dealer in the most absurd and hyperbolical extravagances […] the works of this author invariably give us the idea of an enthusiastic schoolboy whose parts are by no means on a par with his enthusiasm, who will be original, whether he can or not. There is a clumsiness about his harmonies in the midst of their affected strangeness, a sickliness about his melodies […], an utter ignorance of design […] the entire works of Chopin present a motley surface of ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony […] M Liszt is reported to have said that there was ‘an aristocracy of mediocrity in England, at the head of which is Sterndale Bennett’. He might, with a vast deal more of truth, have asserted that there is an aristocracy of hyperbole and nonsense in Paris, of which himself and his philosophic friend Chopin are at the summit […] There is no excuse at present for Chopin’s delinquencies; he is entrammelled in the enthralling bonds of that arch-enchantress Georges [sic] Sand, celebrated equally for the number and excellence of her romances and her lovers; none the less we wonder how she […] can be content to wanton away her dreamlike existence with an artistic nonentity like Chopin.’
© John Rink
To later minds it was history-defining. ‘Chopin’s chromaticism marks a stage of the greatest [evolutionary] importance […] He is the forerunner of Liszt and Wagner, and hence of the modern atonalists, the first composer seriously to undermine the 4
5
WALTZES ‘To be fond of dancing [is] a certain step towards falling in love’ Jane Austen More so than Mozart, Beethoven, Weber or Schubert, Chopin was the first great composer to bring the dance-floor into the drawing room – taking music of physical embrace and earthy step to fashion refined romances of the imagination. With the waltz – that ‘indecent foreign dance’ fit only for ‘prostitutes and adulteresses’ (London Times, 1816) – he exchanged Poland for Europe, Warsaw for Paris. ‘The most objective of all Chopin’s works […] exquisite exemplars of social intimacy and aristocratic abandon’ (Huneker). Chopin, Samson says, ‘agonised’ over these pieces, ‘almost as much […] as over the ballades. They cannot be dismissed as hackwork, even the hackwork of genius. They are beautifully finished miniatures which accept the atmosphere of the salon and the conventions of the society dance and elevate both into a sophisticated art-form’ – the lyric dance-poem. Some suggest mazurkas. Others share elements and figurations with bigger canvases. Op.18 Grande valse brillante in E flat (1831). Not Chopin’s first waltz-chain, but the first he authorised for publication. Dazzling in its repeated notes and graces. Distinctive for its tonal descent by fifths from E flat through A flat and D flat to G flat. Dedicated to Laura Horsford, daughter of a former Lieutenant-Governor of the Bermudas. Op.34 Valses brillantes. Published 1838. No.1 A flat (1835): Spinning, spiralling, sonorous, sighing music vanishing in a coda of stolen images. No.2 A minor (1831): Melancholic Chopin in merry Vienna. The left-hand kujawiak belongs among the composer’s great baritone/tenor melodies. A dance to dance ‘in the privacy of the heart’ (Byron Janis). No.3 in F “Cat Waltz” (1838) ‘Such a wave of life [it] seems to have been improvised in the dancing-room’ (Schumann). Op.42 Grande valse nouvelle A flat (1840) ‘A salon piece of the noblest kind; if he 6
played for dancers, Florestan thinks half of the ladies should be countesses at least. And he is right, for Chopin’s waltz is aristocratic through and through’ (Schumann). The 6/8 theme against 3/4 accompaniment, two beats against three, especially teases – a cross-rhythm sampled also in the Fourth Scherzo. Op.64 (1846-47) The last group of waltzes Chopin published. No.1 in D flat “Minute Waltz”: A dizzy tale of a doggy tail – one of George Sand’s canines supposedly chasing itself. No.2 in C sharp minor: The heart of the set, for many the apotheosis of the 19th century piano waltz-poem – a ‘soul dance’ (Huneker) that lingers Slavonically before spinning off into sweeter/sadder realms of the spirit. No.3 A flat: Wreathed in warm nostalgia – notwithstanding moments of darker tension and one last ray of brilliance. Possibly of earlier provenance. Op.69 No.1 in A flat “L’adieu” (1835, published 1855) Written in Dresden one Thursday for Maria Wodzinska, the girl from Geneva Chopin loved then lost. No.2 in B minor (1829, published 1852). Composed for Wilhelm Kolberg. The darker, more pensive side of youth. ‘Reiterated nervous collapse’ (Jonson). Op.70 No.1 in G flat ([?1832] 1833, published 1855) High-spirited and mazurkakissed, with a trio of lush Italianate thirds. No.2 in F minor (1841 [?1840- 41], published 1852). A popular album-leaf with the composer. Like the more or less contemporary Fantasy Op.49, it opens in F minor but closes in A flat major. No.3 in D flat (1829, published 1855) ‘My own ideal (Konstancja Gladkowska) this morning [3 October] inspired the little waltz I am sending you,’ Fryderyk told Woyciechowski. The right-hand twopart texture looks forward ten years to the same-key Nouvelle étude. B21; KK Iva/13 in A flat (1827) Published 1902 A 3/8 number, without tempo marking, written originally in the autograph album of Emily Elsner (Józef’s daughter). B46; KK Iva/14 in E flat (1827 [?1829-30]) Published 1902 A piece to test the sonority of an instrument, ländler-like in places, with a magical wrong-chord start (A flat). From Emily Elsner’s album, destroyed during the Second World War. B44; KK Iva/12 in E (1829 [?1830]) Published 1871 Simple gestures, basic design, 7
but telling hand-shapes. B56; KK Iva/15 in E minor (1830) Published 1868 Popular and effective from school room to concert stage, the bravura anticipating Opp.18 and 34. B133; KK IVa/10 in E flat (1840) Published 1955 In the style of a waltz, though not so entitled in the manuscript, composed in Paris for possibly Emil Gaillard B150; KK IVa/11 “Walc” in A minor (?1843 or before) Published 1955. The simple manner and autograph Polish title, Walc, point to this coming from earlier rather than later in Chopin’s life. Poignant beauty. © Ates Orga
Born of an Italian mother and Persian father, Alessandro Deljavan began learning to play piano before the age of two and gave his first performances at age three. He has since performed around the world including in Austria, Belgium, China, Columbia, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Switzerland and the United States. Praise coming from the press and eminent pianists include: “Deljavan’s performance was revelatory in every respect.” “Everyone in the hall knew that they were hearing something special—something wonderful—from the very first notes. At the end, the spontaneous eruption of cheers was so different from the perfunctory ovation that any decent performance is awarded, that being a part of the thrilled crowd was a unique experience in itself.” —Gregory Sullivan Isaacs, Theater Jones (Fort Worth, Texas) “He is one of the most interesting pianists I have heard in my life.” —Fou Ts’ong, eminent pianist and pedagogue “His playing is full of intensive power and contagious artistry.” —Dmitri Bashkirov, eminent pianist and pedagogue
8
9
“He is one of the most major talents of his age that I have ever heard and one of the few pianists I would go out of my way to hear.” —John Perry, eminent pianist and pedagogue Alessandro Deljavan has won top prizes in competitions including “Concours musical de France” (1st Prize, Paris,1996), Hummel Competition (2nd Prize, Bratislava, 2005), Gina Bachauer Young Artist Competition (5th Prize, 2005), Cliburn Competition (John Giordano Discretionary Award, 2009), Isangyun Competition (2nd Prize, Tongyeong, South Korea, 2010), and Cliburn Competition (Raymond E. Buck Discretionary Award, 2013). Alessandro has performed with orchestras such as the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, Orchestra Sinfonica Leopolis, Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trento, and the Wuhan Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. Alessandro has a discography of over 30 albums with the Stradivarius, Brilliant Classics, Onclassical, Aevea, Naxos, Tactus and Piano Classics labels. In 2010, Alessandro became the youngest professor in an Italian conservatory. He is currently professor of piano at the Niccolò Piccinni Conservatory of Bari, Italy. www.alessandrodeljavan.com
10
Special thanks to Germano, Patrizia, Laura and Marco Sanguigni for their essential support.
Recording: 4 January 2015, Kulturni Center ‘Lojze Bratuž’, Gorizia, Italy Producer: Alessandro Simonetto (OnClassical) Piano technician: Giulio Passadori Cover image and photos: by Luca Centola at Parco Scultura “La Palomba” of Antonio Paradiso in Matera p & © 2015 Brilliant Classics
11