There is probably no composer, great or small, every bar of whose music is so unmistakably stamped with his personality as Chopin. Like his prodigious and idiosyncratic piano technique, his compositions seemed to spring spontaneously from some atavistic knowledge. His musical development was largely a process of honing and refining, a moving closer to himself. Thus it is that his compositional trajectory is curiously reversed; over the years he worked his way back to his unmediated origins.
This explains why Chopin's music never anticipates future styles. In this, he is sharply differentiated from other evolutionary composers who worked as part of the great musical/historical process. Mozart, the first composer to assert his volitional rights rather than just assent in the creative process, reached out to the chromatic dissolution of Wagner, and hinted at dodecaphony. Beethoven, the ultimate in polymorphic fecundity, foreshadowed Schumann, Tippett, and boogie-woogie. Most lesser composers joined hands with the future, even if they touched only fleetingly. But not Chopin. His music is like a totally isolated, personal meditation which stands outside the hurly-burly of nineteenth-century Romanticism.
Personal, certainly: the fingerprints which are to be found in his earliest Rondo in C persist right through to the last posthumous works. But it was never truly isolated and cut-off, self-regarding art for art's sake. Every one of Chopin's works is a dialogue; a dialogue not with people, present or absent, but with a land, with his Poland. Every work is an exile's lament.
Sometimes the almost insupportable homesickness broke out blatantly in mazurkas and polonaises, manifest testaments. Sometimes it is only the inflections of his line's bitter-sweet cantabile, the plangent harmonies. Sometimes it is just the omnipresent physical fact of the piano, Chopin's own instrument, his unstilled voice. Whatever the means of expression, every work is the same work, viewed form a different angle, and the oeuvre a vast set of variations on this hidden theme.
Perhaps more than any other country Poland deserves its Chopin. Its lot in history has been cruel; as a reflection of the constant passage of marauding armies, it has been dubbed the doormat of Europe. Chopin's lone and lonely voice stands outside the central tradition of Western music in the same way that his Poland became the continent's pariah. By turning his back on fellow musicians he was better able to concentrate on his absent country, to enter into its woes, to become its ultimate poet.
It is fitting then that his homeland should honour him with a monument which canonises this specialness, this apartness. The Chopin Edition produced by the institute bearing his name comes printed on slightly cheap paper; its typeface looks strange. It has that uninviting East European feel about it. Everything contributes to the sense that Chopin belongs to another world. This edition somehow enshrines the paradox at the heart of his music. That is, to understand it and him, we must realise that we can never understand either unless we too are Polish, and have suffered with Poland, or unless we too have eaten the bitter bread of exile.
(4.5.86)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.