How to Play Chopin, also, maybe, How to Listen to Chopin

Here's everything you need to know about how to play Chopin. Not really, but it's a pretty good start.

1. Chopin loved opera, particularly opera of the bel canto variety. Listen to Joan Sutherland. Notice how each note sounds like a unique, beautifully-colored gem in a bejeweled tiara. Also, realize some notes are melodic and others are ornamental. Play that way.

2. Chopin was a master melodist and a master harmonist. Often, the masterful melodies depend on the masterful harmonies. But be sure to notice when the mastery is more melodic or more harmonic and respond accordingly.

3. Those masterful harmonic moments often amount to the effect of a lighting change on-stage. Learn about chiaroscuro in Rembrandt and notice how Chopin does this, too. Suddenly, the sun comes out, or a single intense ray brings hope to a dungeon. Just really register these things as you play, and they will be very effective. Mozart and Debussy do this, too.

4. Clouds have a silver lining and vice versa. The sad music is rarely wholly sad, and the happy music is never fully happy. Joy and sorrow, life and death, are constant companions in Chopin. It's a lot like Mahler. Read about Mahler 3 (or anything else by Mahler) to get the idea.

5. The handling of transitions creates charisma. In those tentative moments, the momentum of meter is not in the driver's seat. Your personal sensitivity is.

6. Look for rhetorical connections between the sections. For example, usually the sections of a Chopin Nocturne don't sound much alike, but they might make sense together because of some structure they both feature such as a parenthetical phrase at the end of a series of phrases.

7. At times, the music is more contrapuntal than you might expect. Don't forget that the left-hand part can be just as musical as the right. Sort of like playing Bach, you can almost take those left hands and perform them as their own free-standing pieces of music. Almost. With Bach, of course, you can actually do that with all the individual lines. 

There's more, but that will be another post - something about "Ode to the Western Wind."

Thank you to Veda Kaplinsky, Michael White, Ellen Mack, Wayne Connor, Joseph Machlis, and Richard Becker for teaching me these things, and also to my students for studying Bach, Chopin, and Debussy with me.