The Legacy of Chopin by Jan Holcman

Author:Jan Holcman [Holcman, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Philosophical Library
Published: 2013-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VI

Symbolic Music

THE often-discussed subject of program music acquires a new meaning in the light of Chopin’s statements. To try to find some sort of symbolic content in every composition, or even in every modulation, is a favorite occupation of critics and, what is worse, of musicians, who frequently establish connections between fragments of compositions and incidents in the composer’s personal life. Hoesick, one of Chopin’s best biographers, associated the Nocturne in B major with its composer’s intimate moods, and it was by these moods that he accounted for “the magnificent, strange, and at any rate morbid, ending.” According to Hoesick, this Nocturne “excellently reproduces the feeling of horror.” (47) On the basis of the Prelude in A major, he “inferred” that Chopin felt at ease in Delphine Potocka’s company. Such absurdities are often heard, but in reality music is never biography. A composition may express something or not, but its harmony and rhythm cannot serve as a basis for inferring how the composer felt in someone’s company.

In his lectures on Chopin, Kleczynski mentioned the last three notes of the Prelude in D minor, calling them “the three gun shots.” (48) Gide, who discussed the same prelude, found beautiful words to describe its coda, which “concludes fortissimo in frightful depths where one touches the floor of Hell.” (49) Such descriptions add, perhaps, to the originality of a given piece of music, but they detract from its truth. Fortunately, this literary bath into which all the best-known compositions are plunged does not wash off their true characteristics, which the composer has accounted for in an entirely different way, as we shall have occasion to note from Chopin’s own report. From his valuable statements it would appear that a composer may write a piece entitled “Wasp” while calmly thinking of a bear.

Eloquent descriptions, teeming with “pearls,” “throbs,” or “souls,” and couched in a flowery, romantic, heroic style, are as inappropriate to music as they are to literature. However, such phraseology apparently finds favor with the public, since it is so frequently used even today. Most readers of a composer’s biography do not understand his compositions well enough to be able to realize what little connection there is between descriptions of this kind and the character of the composer’s music. No doubt such a thing as program music exists, but this fact does not justify all the nonsense written about it. The visions of interpreters who foist on the public associations between a given piece of music and scenes or feelings it supposedly represents, seem ridiculous to musicians. But when musicians themselves risk such guesswork, we are really aghast.

It is simply inconceivable that a musician of the stamp of Anton Rubinstein could have indulged in such banal illustrative ideas. There is, of course, a fundamental difference between visual images foisted on the public and the remarks a teacher might make privately during the course of a music lesson, in order to stimulate a pupil’s imagination. Sometimes, the teacher may find it helpful to

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