„Chopin's mazurkas stand apart from the rest of the considerable production inspired by folk music which reaches into all forms of Romantic music; they cannot conveniently be classified with any of the other manifestations. They are not arrangements of popular folk tunes, … He uses only fragments of melody, Polish formulas, typical national rhythms, and he combines them in his own way with great originality. From early on, Chopin's mazurkas are much more elaborate than the few modest pieces employing mazurka rhythms by Chopin's Polish predecessors, and they soon became the occasion for some of the most complex and pretentious of Chopin's forms.“

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— Charles Rosen

Quelle: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 7 : Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style

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Charles Rosen

US-amerikanischer Pianist und Musiktheoretiker 1927 - 2012

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— Charles Rosen American pianist and writer on music 1927 - 2012

Quelle: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 7 : Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style

„The extraordinary significance that music holds for Delacroix, and which contributes most to his admiration for Chopin, is a symptom of the new hierarchy of the arts and the prominent position which music occupies in it. It is the romantic art par excellence and Chopin the most romantic of all the romantics. In his relation to Chopin, Delacroix’s intimate connection with romanticism is brought most clearly to light.“

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— Arnold Hauser Hungarian art historian 1892 - 1978

Quelle: The Social History of Art, Volume III. Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism, 1999, Chapter 6. German and Western Romanticism

„Such abstruse ideas are totally alien to Chopin. The Romantic interweaving of music and literature that was characteristic of Schumann and Liszt was a negligible source of inspiration. Schumann dedicated Kreisleriana to Chopin, but in fact Chopin’s consciousness for classical strength and form had nothing in common with the exalted, torn, eccentric and confused character of the work.“

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— Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

„Technical display in Chopin, after the early works, is transmuted into tone color or dramatic gesture-we may say, to accept the prejudices of Chopin's own generation, that it has been ennobled. This is the source of much of the poetry in Chopin's music: it comes from the transformation of the vulgar into something aristocratic.“

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— Charles Rosen American pianist and writer on music 1927 - 2012

Quelle: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 6 : Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed

„Herz, Thalberg, Heller, Felicien David and others were great virtuosos of their time, more famous than Chopin himself. They had their own personal styles, but the essence of their music was time-bound, nothing that could occupy generations after them. Chopin, in contrast, was someone special, someone who was completely different from all other artists, composers, and pianists. So too with his style. As a result, the aesthetic in approaching Chopin is distinctive: interpreting his music is the most difficult of all. For me personally, it’s the crowning of playing piano. Bach, Mozart, Chopin: these are the three who definitely created musical art in an all-embracing and overwhelming way.“

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— Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

„Chopin absolutely was influenced by Bach. We know that before Chopin himself performed in concert, he didn’t play anything other than Bach. His own Preludes are a reference to the Well-Tempered Clavier of Bach, and all Chopin’s students had to play Bach. In whole, Chopin admired Bach most of all composers, and it was nothing less than the Well-Tempered Clavier itself that was his musical diary. I also have said that Chopin is the crowning and climax of piano-playing. It’s something so unique, all-affecting in emotionalism, musical architecture, and structure, that all past giants are present in it: Bach and Mozart. Chopin’s elegance is so singular, that again you need much experience to convey his music in the real and original style. The question of rubato is very sensitive: It’s nothing arbitrary, but much more something well calculated and well proportioned, something that is integrated in the classical strength of form, which is constructed on the profound knowledge of the polyphonic and contrapuntal structures of Bach and Mozart. Whether the Goldbergs may relate to this question? Absolutely! I again want to mention a certain and special term: jeu perlé.“

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— Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Without this you can’t play Chopin, you can’t play Mozart, and lastly absolutely not the Goldbergs.
Talkings on Bach

„The editor of this selection from Chopin’s Pianoforte Studies has, however, no such intention; on the contrary. he wishes to make some of them, which owing to their difficulty have hitherto remained unpopularised, more accessible, particularly to the amateur, by pointing out the way to their correct study. And thus, on the basis of the technical facility to be acquired through these pieces, to enable even the non-professional to enjoy a more intimate acquaintance with those works of the classical romanticist, which, though representing the best and most undying side of his genius, have found till now but a small, though daily increasing circle of admirers; for the “Ladies’-Chopin”, which for forty years has blossomed in the pale and sickly rays of dilettantism; the “talented, languishing, Polish youth” to whom the most modest place on the Parnassus of musical literature was denied by the amateurish criticism of German professors, is as little the genuine entire Chopin, as is the Beethoven of “Adelaide” and the “Moonlight Sonata”, the god of Symphony. Truly a span of time must yet elapse before the matured and manly Chopin, the author of the two Sonatas, the 3rd and 4th Scherzos, the 4th Ballade, the Polonaise in F# minor, the later Mazurkas and Nocturnes etc., will be completely and generally appreciated at his full worth. At the same time much may be done by preparing and clearing the way; and one of the best means towards this end is sifting the material, and replacing favourite and unimportant works, by those less known though more important.“

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— Hans von Bülow German musician 1830 - 1894

Preface to Instructive ausgabe. Klavier-Etuden von Fr. Chopin, 1880.

„This is an absolute deep contrast to Chopin, who found himself favoring a classical form of musical essence. He needs to bring nothing in from outside, the music is nearly ‘absolute.“

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— Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

„Chopin is the true inventor of the concert etude, at least in the sense of being the first to give it complete artistic form—a form in which musical substance and technical difficulty coincide.“

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— Charles Rosen American pianist and writer on music 1927 - 2012

Quelle: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 6 : Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed

„To approach Chopin, you have to separate him completely from Schumann. Schumann admired Chopin very much and saw him as friend, but - what only few people know - Chopin himself had much less interest in and esteem for Schumann. In detail: Schumann’s works follow on from a transitional period determined by the successors of Viennese Classicism, particularly Beethoven. Just as the sons of Bach espoused the ‘galant,’ ornamented style of their generation, so the pupils of Mozart and Beethoven - Hummel, Ries, Czerny, Moscheles - took pains to compensate for a thinner musical substance with increased instrumental brilliance and thus prepared the ground for the golden age of the piano and the era of the Romantic virtuoso. Among the multitude of composers writing for the piano at that time, only two - Weber and Schubert - stand out as original creative forces.“

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— Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

„I’m very interested in the ‘Culture of Interpretation.’ I’m convinced that each great artist has his own personal style, but it is his artistic responsibility in developing this style to respond other interpretations, either prior or at the same time. I’m convinced that Rubinstein would have presented us another Chopin if Cortot had not existed. Cortot presented very romantic Chopin interpretations - really masterly, outstanding, but confused. Rubinstein’s immediate answer was a very classical Chopin. He was really the first to point out the classical line and structure in his oeuvre.“

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— Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

„The extraordinary stylistic changes of late eighteenth-century music may have provided much of the inspiration for the literature of the turn of the century, but the literary forms that resulted were deeply eccentric. It was these works—paradoxical, anticlassical, often with startlingly unbalanced proportions—which in turn influenced the music of the generation of composers that followed. The most clearly affected by literature and art were Schumann, Berlioz, and Liszt, but neither Mendelssohn nor Chopin remained untouched by literary developments, like the revival of Celtic and medieval poetry, as the overtures of Mendelssohn and the Ballades of Chopin explicitly demonstrate.“

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— Charles Rosen American pianist and writer on music 1927 - 2012

Quelle: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 2 : Fragments

„The music teacher came twice a week to bridge the awful gap between Dorothy and Chopin.“

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— George Ade American writer, newspaper columnist and playwright 1866 - 1944

Fables

„Chopin’s biography remains obscure. He withheld himself all his life, in diametrical contrast to the openness and accessibility of his contemporary Franz Liszt. Chopin always conveyed the impression of a suffering soul, not to say a martyr, almost as if this was to nourish or even underpin his inspiration. Striving for crystalline perfection, he never ventured outside his own domain. You know, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is said to have given, as a child, “martyr” as his chosen career. Chopin must have shared this cult of the ‘Pater dolorosus.’“

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— Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

„Some of the Etudes in the first set, opus 10, were written by the time Chopin was twenty. It is with these pieces that Chopin's style was fully revealed in all its power and subtlety. Later works are sometimes more ambitious and, in a few cases, more audacious, but there were no radical changes of style, nothing to compare to the later revolutions we find in the careers of Haydn and Beethoven, or even in the shorter lives of Mozart and Schubert. Chopin's mastery was proven with the twelve Etudes of opus 10.“

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— Charles Rosen American pianist and writer on music 1927 - 2012

Quelle: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 6 : Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed

„This is the true paradox of Chopin: he is most original in his use of the most fundamental and traditional technique. That is what made him at the same time the most conservative and the most radical composer of his generation.“

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— Charles Rosen American pianist and writer on music 1927 - 2012

Quelle: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 7 : Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style

„I am not shooting at immortality through my books, no. Nor do I think Chopin was shooting at immortality through his music. That strikes me as a very selfish goal, and I don't think Chopin was particularly selfish. I would also say that I think that music comes much closer to capturing the essence of a composer's soul than do a writer's ideas capture the writer's soul. Perhaps some very emotional ideas that I express in my books can get across a bit of the essence of my soul to some readers, but I think that Chopin's music probably does a lot better job“

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— Douglas Hofstadter American professor of cognitive science 1945

and the same holds, of course, for many composers

„Yet in a relatively short creative life of twenty years or so, Chopin redrew the boundaries of Romantic music, and his self-imposed restriction to the 88 keys of the piano keyboard sublimated nothing less than the aesthetic essence of piano music. It was his total identification with the instrument which, in its radical regeneration of the lyric and the dramatic, fantasy and passion and their unique fusion, shaped a tonal language which united an aristocratic sense of style and formal Classical training and intuition with an ascetic rigor. Chopin’s precisely marshaled trains of thought permitted no experiments, and so he did not ‘wander about’ within his stylistic points of reference as Scriabin was to do. Chopin’s works may seem light and improvisatory, but they are planned in meticulous details, exactly and well calculated.“

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— Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

„There is a paradox at the heart of Chopin's style, in its unlikely combination of a rich chromatic web of polyphony, based on a profound experience of J. S. Bach, with a sense of melody and a way of sustaining the melodic line derived directly from Italian opera. The paradox is only apparent, and it is never felt as such when one hears the music. The two influences are perfectly synthesized, and they give each other a new kind of power.“

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— Charles Rosen American pianist and writer on music 1927 - 2012

Quelle: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 5 : Chopin: Counterpoint and the Narrative Forms

„Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it.
Whoever has polished it more sees more — more unseen forms become manifest to him.“

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— Rumi Iranian poet 1207 - 1273

As quoted in The Sufi Path of Love : The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi (1983) by William C. Chittick, p. 162

Charles Rosen

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