There’s no such thing as too much Chopin!
Bill Crane’s Chopin socks
George Sand’s boyfriend: Knocking our socks off since 1818
Written by Amelia de Vaal and Bill Crane
If our gossipy headline made you open this email, consider yourself seen and understood! As far as iconic romances go, the love affair between the celebrated novelist, memoirist and journalist Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil, more commonly known by her pen name, George Sand, and the pianist-composer Frédéric Chopin is the stuff of legend. Right up there with Antony and Cleopatra, Victoria and Albert, Taylor and Travis (…), the consumptive and sickly Frédéric’s almost decade-long entanglement with the dashing, cross-dressing intellectual still fascinates fans and scholars to this day, resulting in a cornucopia of fictional mythologizing and long trails of historical research.
What is not to love? Apart from being the ultimate odd couple, Sand very obviously understood Chopin (at least, until the irreconcilable differences kicked in …) and recognized in him something brilliant we can only ever approximate by listening to his music. Consider this starry-eyed quote from Sand’s autobiography: “The gift of Chopin is the expression of the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power.”
Thinking about Eric Lu’s completely sold-out performance and his switch to an all-Chopin program had the PPI team fluttering around the office this past week like love-sick puppies (on caffeine and sugar.) Yes, we had a lot of pivoting and project management to do – but what a wonderful opportunity to really delve into everything that makes Chopin such a celebrated and universally loved composer.
Intimately linked with the Romantic movement and forever a great arbiter of the piano, Chopin’s music speaks straight to our souls, not only because of its lyricism, melancholy or brilliance, but mostly, if you ask us at PPI, because it is always so utterly and sincerely expressive. None of the fury, none of the momentum, none of the luminosity ever exists for virtuosity’s sake. Chopin wears his (deeply Polish) heart on his sleeve, all of the time, and speaks to us across centuries from a place of deep personal feeling.
This sincerity speaks and feeds imaginations. Why else would there be Chopin statues all around the world, from Shanghai to Havana to Rio de Janeiro? Why else would a crater on Mercury and an asteroid be named after this physically frail but mentally monumental composer? There is even a rose named after Chopin! And hand-written font! A perfume line, and a line of watches! And, should you ever get asked what Marie Curie, Oscar Wilde and Lady Gaga have in common, the answer is not prodigious IQs or world fame, but a widely-professed love of Chopin. (This Thanksgiving, when you’re stuck between a random cousin and your least-favorite aunt, thank PPI for some wonderfully politically and religiously neutral yet fascinating and thought-provoking conversational tidbits.)
There is shared humanity in Chopin. To quote Oscar Wilde: “After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.”
Bonus fact: You don’t have to understand it, intellectualize it or be able to play Chopin yourself to utterly adore it. In Eric Lu’s own words: “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.”
We look forward to joining you in Lincoln Hall this Sunday for Eric Lu’s Chopin bonanza recital at 4:00.