How did Chopin play – vol. 3

Chopin was a brilliant teacher, and his fame meant that many people were eager to take lessons from him.

Thanks to his best and most professional students, we can now imagine the kind of performance the composer desired for his own music.

Correct phrasing was crucial to his piano practice, which he explained vividly by comparing piano playing to speech: ‘Wrong phrasing would provoke the apt analogy that it seemed to him as if someone were reciting a laboriously memorized speech in an unfamiliar language, not merely failing to observe the right quantity of syllables, but perhaps even making full stops in the middle of words. Similarly, by his illiterate phrasing the pseudo-musician reveals that music is not his mother tongue but something foreign and unintelligible to him’ – as Karol Mikuli noted.

The same Mikuli, one of the composer’s most talented students, recalled elsewhere: ‘Under his fingers each musical phrase sounded like song, and with such clarity that each note took the meaning of a syllable, each bar that of word, each phrase that of thought. It was a declamation without pathos; but both simple and noble.’

And this is what one of Chopin’s first biographers, Maurycy Karasowski, writes, drawing his knowledge from direct witnesses of the composer’s teaching: ‘He advised his pupils not to fragment the musical idea, but rather to carry it to the listener in one long breath.’

Kamila Stępień-Kutera