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Ohlsson Takes on Chopin
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20020 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1992 |
2,158 Words |
| Author
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John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
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The year is 1831. Frederic Chopin's passport description reads as follows: Age: 21. Weight: 97 lbs. Height: 5 ft 7 ins. Features: oval face, round chin, gray-blue eyes, fair hair, and small hands. Date of birth: March 1, 1810. Birthplace: Zelazowa Wola, a village near Warsaw. Current address: 27 boulevard Poissonniere, Paris. Occupation: musician and composer.
An unassuming portrait, yes. According to pianist Garrick Ohlsson, who is now partway through recording all of Chopin's piano works, it is hardly sufficient to describe this extraordinary young man who moved so easily among the greatest artists and writers of the Romantic era in Paris--Delacroix, Gautier, Berlioz, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Balzac--and who became the most popular of all composers for the piano. "Chopin was something of an exotic in this middle-European world," Ohlsson says. "He was like a flower from Tahiti dropped into the mix. His music was revolutionary, but he also had aristocratic polish and bearing. And he was a consummate piano technician--not only as a pianist, but as a composer. He refined and polished his music to a great degree; and he had a sense of texture and balance and phrase and form that is really unparalleled."
It is indicative of the essential aloofness of the man--a bewildering quality noticed by everyone who knew him--that when the Leipzig critic-composer Robert Schumann greeted Chopin's Opus 2, the "La Ci Darem La Mano" Variations, with the now-celebrated "Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!" Chopin reacted with diffidence, disdaining the hubbub that propelled him to international fame.
"Oh, yes, the difference between Chopin and Schumann, these two greatest of all Romantic keyboard figures, was striking, and it said so much about both of them," continues Ohlsson. "Schumann was more of a Californian, shall we say. His enthusiasms were, 'Hey, man, like wow, isn't it cosmic?!' That was his reaction when he heard Chopin's music. He bubbled over with this incredible generosity. And Chopin, being much more of the Old World, who was an intellectual and an arrogant snob, disdained this overly mammalian enthusiasm. You can see all sorts of reasons why two might not click."
Another contemporary whom Chopin didn't get along with was the flamboyant keyboard virtuoso Franz Liszt. Liszt pronounced Chopin a bundle of contradictions: He was a Polish patriot who preferred to live his entire adult life in Paris; a popular pianist who shunned public appearances; and a proper gentleman who conducted an eight year affair with the most notorious woman in
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