III.

Chopin’s Music

Chopin’s compositional technique was largely unconventional, and much of it challenged the accepted rules of musical training and procedure. A spontaneous creator of melody, Chopin was among the first to bring into Western music the then-unfamiliar Slavic scales and melodic intervals. He thus tended to undermine the carefully established harmonies of the late 18th century.

Similarly, by using the rhythms of Polish folk dances, Chopin added immense variety to the store of rhythmic devices available to European composers. The piano works with a specifically Polish quality in their melodies, harmonies, and rhythms include the mazurkas and polonaises. Those that are preponderantly western European include most of his numerous etudes, preludes, scherzos, nocturnes, ballades, impromptus, rondos, and waltzes.

Chopin composed nearly 30 etudes as musical exercises to assist pianists in working out specific artistic or technical problems, such as the playing of octaves or thirds. These studies belong among the composer’s greatest achievements, and like the preludes and fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, survive as brilliant keyboard music in their own right, their instructive origin and purpose often largely forgotten.

Although Chopin confined himself primarily to smaller musical forms for the piano, the nature of his music was never so restricted. Part of the winter on Mallorca in 1838 was spent completing and polishing a series of 24 preludes, one in each of the major and minor keys. The preludes range in length and scope from tiny vignettes to full dramas and in mood from serene to wildly raging. The four scherzos he wrote are big, vigorous works, central to the literature of the keyboard. He also produced more than 40 nocturnes, which are lush, dreamy, poetic, predominantly lyric evocations. His more than 50 mazurkas—Polish folk dances in a waltzlike three-beat time—are brief pieces that reflect Slavic melodic turns and harmonies. The polonaises—stately, aristocratic Polish dances—are longer and larger in scope than the marzurkas.

Chopin occasionally composed larger musical structures, with similar success. They include the Barcarolle (1845-1846; see Barcarole), the Berceuse (1844), three sonatas (1828, 1839, and 1844), and the Fantaisie in F Minor (1840-1841). Chopin’s second sonata, in B-flat minor, contains a famous funeral march as its final movement. The Barcarolle, written in the ½ time of a Venetian gondolier’s song, has a varied melody above a steady, unchanging accompaniment. The quiet Berceuse also uses an unchanging left-hand accompaniment for 68 measures to support variations in the right-hand melody. In the Fantaisie, rather than following the outline of one of the classic 18th-century sonata patterns, Chopin let his own melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic ideas determine the form and forward movement of the music.

Chopin also composed works for piano with orchestra, including two piano concertos, one in E minor and one in F minor. In these works the orchestra is subordinate to the piano. Chopin also wrote a sonata in G minor for cello and piano, and a group of songs with piano accompaniment to Polish texts.

Chopin’s music, romantic and lyrical in nature, is characterized by exquisite melody of great originality, refined—often adventurous—harmony, subtle rhythm, and poetic beauty. By questioning the assumptions that governed classic music of the 18th century, Chopin greatly influenced other musicians, notably the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt, German composer Richard Wagner, French composer Claude Debussy, and Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.