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{"id":18725,"date":"2017-03-03T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-03-03T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=448"},"modified":"2017-03-03T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-03-03T00:00:00","slug":"chopin-miniaturist-or-master","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2017\/03\/chopin-miniaturist-or-master\/","title":{"rendered":"Chopin – Miniaturist or Master?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

C<\/span>harles Rosen celebrated Chopin\u2019s birth in June 2010 with a NYRB<\/em> essay<\/a> on the composer. Rosen observed that until the twentieth century, Chopin was often treated as a minor figure: \u201cChopin\u2019s concentration on the genres of salon music considered trivial\u2014nocturnes, mazurkas, waltzes\u2014placed him among the miniaturists. Critics could not grant unqualified approval to his often unconventional forms, and to the disconcertingly modern chromatic harmony of his last pieces. These compositions, they felt, were the morbid work of a sick, dying man\u2014this was even the verdict of Liszt, who wrote a little book on Chopin soon after his death.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, Chopin didn\u2019t compose small pieces: \u201cMany of the large works\u2014ballades, scherzi, sonatas, great polonaises, fantasies, barcarolle\u2014are longer than an average movement of Beethoven.\u201d Rosen also claims that Chopin\u2019s body of work, unlike that of most of his contemporaries, includes no stinkers. <\/p>\n

Chopin was a lifelong student of Bach and counterpoint. He warmed up for performances by playing fugues from the Well-Tempered Klavier. He studied and made use of Italian operatic music. His international influences leads Rosen to characterize him as a \u201cPole who wrote Italian and German music in Paris.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rosen concedes that \u201cChopin\u2019s music has no humor, except for a certain elegant wit present in some of the preludes and mazurkas,\u201d but he thinks that doesn\u2019t disqualify him from the highest rank of composers of his time. The intensity of his music \u201carises from the strange combination, on the one hand, of the techniques he mastered, the long-breathed sustaining of Italian melody, supported as no Italian opera composer knew how to accomplish, by the contrapuntal texture, and on the other, with the richness and continuous expressive interest of the inner voices that he learned from his study of Bach and Mozart. To this he added his adventurous and radical experiments in chromatic harmony that appalled his contemporaries but were exploited by later generations.\u201d In short, \u201cmuch of his music has an intense, focused passion hardly ever equaled in the years between Beethoven and Wagner.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"