Eric Lu: Notes on the Program
“A momentous poetic touch”
Ta-da! It’s November and we are at the third of the three fall recitals in our Timeless program! November can seem like the wet blanket it literally often is: short days stealing away our early-fall joy, dark mornings, wet commutes. But there are several bright spots, too – Thanksgiving with its comforting cuisine, stores smelling like pumpkin spice and decorated in autumnal colors, musical programs on offer all around our city.
What a true blessing, then, to have Eric Lu with us today, bringing us some of the most spellbinding music ever written! The tagline for today’s event, “A momentous poetic touch,” brings to mind an artist with a giant palette, dabbing swaths of vibrant color onto a dull canvas. If this image was already perfectly apt to describe Eric’s originally suggested program, exclusively Romantic, featuring Schubert and Schumann, it is even more applicable to the necessarily revised exclusively Chopin recital we get to hear today.
As Eric himself put it (in an interview for Kurier Chopinowski, the Chopin Competition’s daily newspaper):
“There is something unique in Chopin’s music – it so much connects with the human psyche on a very direct level. Even if someone does not fully comprehend the complexity of some of his works, it makes them feel something, it makes them connect with their own personal life. I think that is what makes great art and that’s what makes art so relevant today and forever. Despite the world completely changing, human beings are still human beings, human nature is still human nature.”
Or, as Marquis de Custine, a neighbor of Chopin’s in the “New Athens” district in Paris put it: “Not only do we love him, we love ourselves in him.”
Nocturne in C-sharp Minor, op. 27 no. 1
If John Field introduced Romantic audiences to a certain type of introspective character piece featuring a cantabile melody over an arpeggiated accompaniment and naming these “nocturnes”, it was Chopin who perfected and redefined the tradition, composing nocturnes throughout his career (21 in all), adding sublime touches of genius all along. The two Nocturnes of op. 27 were composed in 1836 and published the following year, dedicated to Countess Thérèse d’Appony, in whose salon Chopin often appeared. Whereas his previous sets of Nocturnes (op. 9 and op. 15) included three nocturnes each, op. 27 marks a transition towards contrasting pairs of pieces that can almost be described as “ballades in miniature” – much closer to narratives or structured essays than just a stream-of-consciousness floating of ideas.
Although there is dreamy sensitivity aplenty in the C-sharp Minor Nocturne (with the “larghetto” opening setting a mood of mystery and melancholy), this is no moonlit serenade. Instead, classic ternary form (A-B-A plus coda) becomes the backbone for a cinematic exploration of mood, taking us from hesitation and trepidation to emotional release and dispelling of darkness.
If I had to put a personal narrative to this particular piece of night music, it might strongly resemble my frequent lying awake at night, contemplating half-forgotten tasks and unfinished items on the to-do-list. At dawn, the logic of daylight sets in, and the fear somewhat disperses, but it only lifts entirely once the surprise moment of daily clarity arrives, whether by noticing the sunrise through the trees, relishing the last sip of coffee or smiling through the window at a neighbor on a morning walk.
Barcarolle in F-sharp Major, op. 60
Composed just three years before his death, in 1846, the Barcarolle in F-sharp Major, op. 60 is one of the pieces where Chopin’s affinity to the bel canto style is most apparent. Featuring a sweepingly romantic and slightly wistful tone, the double notes in the right hand along with spare arpeggiated accompaniment explicitly imitates the style of a great aria from the bel canto operatic repertoire. (If the term bel canto still has you wondering, we bet you’ve heard of Bellini’s Norma and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.)
Drawn from two Italian words, barca or boat, and rollo or rower, the barcarolle was a beloved 19th-century trope, bringing the rocking, romantic songs of Venetian gondoliers to audiences all over Europe. Imitating an almost painterly sense of color, Chopin’s Barcarolle evokes the world of Romanticism not through storm or spectacle, but through intimate poetry, like a whispered confession at twilight. The Venice that is conjured here, in lilting, watery undulations within a broad 12/8 time signature, is not a literal picture of boats and singers, but a vision of light and reflection.
Much like the paintings of Turner and Delacroix, atmosphere and emotion outweigh clear form. Where visual artists of this era sought to capture on canvas the luminosity of the most complex scenes – light as reflected from water, or seen through rain, steam or fog – Chopin achieves something similar at the piano by blurring the edges between melody and accompaniment, until the whole texture shimmers like water catching the sun. The Barcarolle’s final measures, softly rocking back and forth, seem to fade into the horizon, leaving behind not resolution, but the stillness of memory.
Three Mazurkas, op. 56
1. Allegro non tanto
2. Vivace
3. Moderato
Chopin, who left Poland at twenty, never returned to the country of his birth, spending his entire life as a political exile in Paris. When he left, his teacher, Joseph Elsner, gave him an urn filled with Polish soil. He never parted with the urn, and it was buried with him when he died. As far as musical inspiration or “loam” is concerned, it can be said that the mazurkas are the soul or soil of Chopin, revealing facets of his personality and emotions more directly than any other of his compositions. Of all the forms in which he wrote throughout his career, Chopin turned most frequently to the mazurka, so that the whole collection forms a kind of musical diary, one in which he could confide his most private thoughts, and which, coincidentally, charts his progress as a composer. Chopin preserved the various quintessential elements of this Polish folk dance – sudden changes of emotion, or the drone bass of the bagpipes – and, as with the waltz, polonaise and nocturne, elevated an established form into the realm of high art.
Written in the mid-1840s, the op. 56 Mazurkas reveal a composer at the height of his powers, capable of compressing a world of feeling into a few short pages. In them, we sense not the outward gaiety of folk life, but the inner pulse of nostalgia, the ache of distance, and the tenderness of remembered song. Chopin’s heart, though then living in Paris, still beats to the rhythms of his homeland.
The first Mazurka, Allegro non tanto in B Major, opens with a noble, lilting gesture – a melody that seems to sway like a dancer in quiet reverie. The second, Vivace in C Major, bursts forth with youthful energy. Are those bagpipes we hear in the opening chords? The final Mazurka, Moderato in C Minor, feels almost elegiac, phrases unfolding with the poignancy of remembered voices, its closing bars fading like a distant song carried away by the wind.
Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat Major, op. 61
“Now I would like to finish the Sonata for violoncello, the Barcarolle, and something else that I do not know how to name, but I doubt whether I will have time, for already the bustle begins.” (Chopin in a letter from December 1845, written to his family in Warsaw)
According to leading Chopin scholar Jeffrey Kallberg, the unnamed work to which Chopin refers to in this letter is undoubtedly the Polonaise-Fantasy: a piece that gradually came into existence over a period of 18 months between 1845 and 1846 and which, as can clearly be extrapolated from the numerous sketches he made during composition, gave him considerable trouble. As Kallberg explains: “Nowhere in any original layer in the sketches does the characteristic polonaise rhythmic figure occur; its rare appearances are always as additions or revisions to first thoughts.”
The Polonaise-Fantasy was published in 1846 and, for the next number of decades, was regarded with some uncertainty by many musicians, due to its harmonic complexity and intricate form. Liszt apparently disparaged the work as full of “fevered anxiety,” while Chopin’s early biographer Frederick Niecks wrote that its “pathological contents place it outside the sphere of art.” Today, however, it’s a revered and beloved work, possibly (if I have to wager an opinion!) because its ambiguity is so relatable. When ever before in history has life been so superficially easy yet deeply complex; so devoid of hardship yet so extremely hard?
Part dance, part reverie, part elegy, this piece stands as a summation of Chopin’s artistic and spiritual journey. By uniting what seems paradoxical (a polonaise or stately dance of aristocratic bearing, and a fantasy, or evocation of freedom and imagination), the composer asserts that what life itself is about: structure and freedom, memory and dream, nation and self.
Harmonically, the Polonaise-Fantaisie ventures into uncharted territory. The sudden tonal shifts, the overlapping of voices, and the suspension of time all anticipate the impressionistic world of Debussy and the psychological depth of late Liszt. This is Chopin the visionary, revealing not a patriotic dance, but the inner landscape of exile and reflection.
One might imagine this music alongside the introspective poetry of Chopin’s countryman Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s, whose meditative words on finding enduring beauty in fragmentation echoes the transcendent, dreamlike quality of the Polonaise-Fantaisie:
Life’s end a whisper summons its start:
‘I will not render you – no! I will raise you! …’