Program One
The Genius of Chopin

Program

Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49)
Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Op. 2 (1827)
Orion Weiss, piano
The Orchestra Now
Leon Botstein, conductor
 
From 17 Songs, op. posth. 74
Wojak (The Warrior) (1831) (Witwicki)
Moja pieszczotka (My Darling) (1837) (Mickiewicz)
Narzeczony (The Bridegroom) (1831) (Witwicki)
Smutna rzeka (Troubled Waters) (1831) (Witwicki)
Katarzyna Sądej, mezzo-soprano
Erika Switzer, piano
 
24 Preludes, Op. 28 (1831–38)
Ke Ma, piano
 
Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat Major, Op. 61 (1846)
Benjamin Hochman, piano
 
Songs
Śpiew grobowy (Leci liście z drzewa) (Hymn from the Tomb/The Leaves Are Falling from the Tree) (1836) (Pol)
Melodya (From the Mountains) (1847) (Krasiński)
Dumka (Dirge) (1840) (Zaleski)
Katarzyna Sądej, mezzo-soprano
Erika Switzer, piano
 
Piano Concerto in F Minor, Op. 21 (1829)
Maestoso
Larghetto
Allegro vivace
The Orchestra Now
Leon Botstein, conductor
 

Program One
The Genius of Chopin

About the Program

“Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!” Robert Schumann famously exclaimed in his 1831 review of Chopin’s Op. 2, the Variations on Mozart’s “Là ci darem la mano.” The review in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung marked Schumann’s debut as a music critic (his articles featured his imaginary alter egos Florestan and Eusebius, as well as Master Raro, the earliest of a cast of mostly fictional characters through whom he made his critical observations).
 
What about this youthful piece, which Chopin premiered in 1829 at his international debut in Vienna, might have prompted Schumann to call his Polish peer a genius? After all, Opus 2, composed by the 17-year old Chopin during his studies with Józef Elsner at the Warsaw Conservatory, is his earliest concert piece for piano and orchestra, and in many ways a very conventional one. Like hundreds of fashionable virtuoso variations of the era, Chopin’s piece takes up a favorite operatic number (in this case the much-loved seduction duet of Don Giovanni and Zerlina) and showcases the composer-performer’s technical prowess through a series of style brillante transformations of the theme. Chopin also includes a slow introduction, one lyrical variation in a minor key, and an operatic finale-like conclusion—all common features of contemporary variations.
 
Yet Schumann immediately recognized that Chopin’s piece stood above others in this genre. Using the voice of Florestan—the character Schumann described as having a keen ability to foresee “everything that is new, of the future and extraordinary”—the critic drew his readers’ attention to the remarkable dramatic skill of the composer, extolling the narrative twists and turns of the piece. Schumann had special praise for the Adagio (the fifth variation), in which he heard a “moral admonition to the Don,” and raved about the finale, which he viewed as channeling the raw force of nature. Painting anything so specific was clearly not Chopin’s intention: Friedrich Wieck’s outlandish interpretation of a purported narrative in Opus 2 elicited a laughing rebuke from the composer.
 
Flowery language aside, Schumann—attentive as he was to new concepts that proclaimed the divine as the source of genius and originality—did put his finger on the essence of Chopin’s compositional mastery heralded in his youthful concert works: the ability to take up lowly musical genres and elevate them by infusing them with operatic narrative, imaginative use of harmonic language, staggering pianistic challenges, and sublime poetry. Not only did the novel virtuosity of Opus 2 give audiences a foretaste of his études—especially in his ability to integrate virtuosity and drama in the cascading waves of sound of the alla polacca conclusion—but the poetry of the introduction and the Adagio’s fragmented rhetoric also prefigured the most dreamlike and dramatic of his nocturnes. Likewise, in the F-Minor Concerto (chronologically the first, but published as No. 2), Chopin followed models established by early Romantic virtuosos whose works he admired, studied, and performed throughout his youth. Chopin’s concertos, in the manner of Ferdinand Ries, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, whose concertos we will hear during this year’s festival, highlight melodic lyricism and dazzling virtuosity, and relegate the orchestra to providing understated accompaniment. Yet Chopin’s harmonies are bolder than those of his predecessors, his pianistic figurations more challenging, and his melodies simply exquisite. In the Larghetto, whose shimmering tenderness is interrupted by an impassioned recitative, Chopin succeeds in conveying an aura of the sublime.
 
Chopin’s genius is “of the future.” Some critics have allowed themselves to be fooled by his preference for the piano and frequent use of “pedestrian” small genres, such as the mazurka or prelude, into rejecting his compositional mastery. But therein lies the crux of his ingenuity. He took up an instrument that for most composers was a vehicle for didactic or virtuosic pieces and, following in Beethoven’s footsteps, gave it the ability to sing of poetry and tragedy. Likewise, he took up middlebrow genres, disdained by the cognoscenti, and imbued them with unheard-of profundity.
 
The Preludes, completed during the period when the composer found his mature voice, are an epitome of just such a transformation of a humble genre. Despite some similarities, Chopin’s preludes are neither the complete artistic utterances that introduce the fugues of J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (a copy of which Chopin took with him to Majorca where many of the Opus 28 pieces were composed) nor are they related to the brief, improvisatory gestures typical of 19th-century preluding, the practice of improvising before and between pieces. Chopin’s set, although organized through the circle of fifths progression, comprises a miscellany of heterogeneous, fragmentary pieces of diverse characters and lengths. Again, Schumann, while admitting his befuddlement as to the concept of this opus, offers an insightful observation, calling them “sketches, beginnings of études, or, so to speak, ruins, individual eagle pinions, all disorder and wild confusion.”
 
The idea of a fragment (and the related “sketch” and “ruin”) gained prominence in Romantic culture. For Romantic philosophers and writers, fragments were significant because of their potential for engaging the beholder’s imagination: the very incompleteness and vagueness of a fragment permitted one to imagine a whole universe of meaning from which it stemmed. The aesthetic of a fragment permeates Opus 28: in some we encounter openings in medias res; in others, weak, abrupt endings; in some, harmony comes to the fore—sometimes achingly beautiful, other times startling and strange—while melodic shapes are barely present. In most, the musical idea is indicated but never fully developed. While they are carefully crafted by the composer, they are meant to give the impression of sketches: kernels containing ideas for compositions—études, nocturnes, a mazurka, a funeral march, a recitative—each seed carrying the promise of a musical macrocosm to be conjured up in the listener’s imagination.
 
By 1846, when he completed the Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op. 61, the last of his large narrative works, Chopin fully understood music’s potential to engage with the Romantic imagination. Liszt, like many 19th-century listeners, initially found the piece perplexing and concluded that it agitated “the mind to a pitch of irritability bordering on delirium.” But he admitted decades later that at the time he “did not comprehend the intimate beauty of Chopin’s late works.” Indeed, in this masterpiece, Chopin summons the narrative techniques from his nocturnes and ballades and his astounding command of chromatic harmony to create a groundbreaking formal design. The polonaise is only vaguely suggested by the sporadic presence of the characteristic rhythm. We hear the returns of transformed yet recognizable themes, but are unsettled by the harmonic twists and turns that destabilize our sense of the work’s form. Through this hazy soundscape of deliberate discontinuities and fragmented (broken off or distantly remembered) melodic ideas, Chopin makes us experience the uncanny: the phantasmagoric mystic world of dreams and visions.
 
Interspersed in the program are two sets of Chopin’s songs. Derided by critics as simplistic and unworthy of performance, the songs bear ample witness to the composer’s genius. They are private music, unpublished during his lifetime, which Chopin contributed to keepsake albums of his friends. A careful listener, however, will find in them moments of sublime beauty. Two of them require further commentary. “Hymn from the Tomb” was not penned by Chopin: it is Julian Fontana’s record of Chopin’s private improvisation on Wincenty Pol’s poems about the November Uprising (1830–31). This piece gives us some sense of how, in his oft-described improvisations, Chopin might have responded with recognizable musical topics to specific poetic images, such as marching troops or a lament. “From the Mountains,” composed in 1847, is among Chopin’s last works. In this exquisite setting of Zygmunt Krasiński’s meditation, the composer creates a miniature operatic scena, in which the central bel canto section paints an angelic vision of a distant “promised land.” Within the framework of political messianism, which attributed to Poland the role of the “messiah of the nations,” the promised land would have been understood as a future, sovereign Poland. The dramatic recitative that opens and closes the song highlights the tragic aloneness of the “messianic messengers” (a role in which both Chopin and Krasiński were cast by their contemporaries). The poignant repetitions of the word “forgotten” that close the piece underscore the solitude and despair of the man whom others hailed as the bard of his nation and recognized as an immortal genius.
 
—Halina Goldberg, Indiana University; Scholar in Residence, Bard Music Festival 2017
 

Bard Music Festival Presents

Program One
The Genius of Chopin

7:30 pm Preconcert Talk: Leon Botstein
8 pm Chamber and Orchestral Performances
Katarzyna Sądej, mezzo-soprano; Benjamin Hochman, Ke Ma, Erika Switzer, Hélène Tysman,and Orion Weiss, piano; The Orchestra Now, Leon Botstein, conductor

Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49), Variations on “Là ci darem la mano,” Op. 2 (1827); Piano Concerto in F Minor, Op. 21 (1829); Preludes, Op. 28 (1831–38); Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat Major, Op. 61 (1846)
songs and other works.

The first of two all-Chopin performances. Exploiting the festival’s unusual ability to vary the traditional concert format by integrating solo, vocal, and orchestral works within a single event, the program provides an overview of the composer’s all-too-brief career. Highlights include the beloved F-minor Piano Concerto, one of Chopin’s teenage masterpieces; rarely heard songs set to texts by the Polish poets he most favored; and his Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” from Don Giovanni, in the original version for piano and orchestra. It was this work that prompted the young Schumann to exclaim: “Hats off gentlemen, a genius!” and which – when Chopin played it to cap his Parisian debut – would serve as his passport to Europe.

Program subject to change.

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Coach transportation from New York City is available for performances on Friday, August 11, Sunday, August 13, Saturday, August 19 and Sunday, August 20; packages are available.

Click here to learn more.