Music of Frederic Chopin

Excerpt from the CD booklet essay by Trevor Stephenson:

The music of Frédéric Chopin is preeminent in the piano repertoire; and perhaps the work of few other composers has ever been more assiduously practiced and performed. This devotion notwithstanding, a trove of publicly available information regarding Chopin’s own method of playing, and his criteria for selecting pianos suitable to his music, has remained largely ignored. An overview of the facts reveals that Chopin’s approach controverts many tenets of modern practice. In opposition to the current paragons of projected concert-hall tone, dramatic dynamic contrasts, continuous employment of the damper pedal, and pianos with an immense, wooly sound, every element of Chopin’s style—whether it concerns performance ambiance, touch, dynamics, pedaling, or the piano’s tonal qualities—reflects an aesthetic devoted to intimacy, delicacy, clarity, and nuance.

The conviction of Chopin’s style at the keyboard came from combining an exquisite modesty of delivery with compositional genius. The trust this approach showed to his hearers was at once comforting and consummately engaging, and they in turn trusted him to deliver his music’s shattering whispers, immaculate arabesques, and immortal intimations—to unfold the “sweet hell within.”

The phrase “the sweet hell within” comes from Walt Whitman’s poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” In the scene in which this phrase occurs the narrator realizes that the mysterious, private, and inexplicable link between love and loss is at the fiery center of meaningful existence; that life is nothing without death.