

He was fragile, fussy and precious he was oversensitive about his large nose and he had a nasty streak of anti-Semitism. He is frightened of so many things that I have suggested to him that he should play without candles or audience on a dumb piano.’ ‘He does not want anyone to talk about it. When he performed in Paris in 1841, his lover, the novelist George Sand, wrote to their friend, the singer Pauline Viardot, about his attitude: ‘He does not want any poster, he does not want any programmes, he does not want a large audience,’ she grumbled. During the course of his short, blighted life, he gave only around 30 formal concerts.

He was in his element not in the concert hall playing preordained concertos for mass audiences, but in the salon (see Henryk Siemiradzki’s 1887 painting of Chopin performing for the Radziwiłłs family in 1829, below), improvising for his friends, or alone. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Dvorák, Grieg, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Kreisler, Casals, Bartók, Stokowski, Stravinsky, Berg, Prokofiev, Copland, and many other eminent composers and performers.Paradox number one: Chopin was a musician who didn’t like performing. It also includes the Chopin letter, portrait, and stamp on display in this exhibit, as well as compositions, letters, or autographs by C.P.E. He died in 1974, and in 1986 his heirs generously donated his collection to Yale University. Opochinsky moved to the United States in 1942, and he began collecting rare music documents in 1950.
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(His success in business eventually enabled him to purchase violins by Stradivari and Guarneri.) He also played the piano in fact, he got his start in the movie business as a pianist for silent films. Opochinsky, who was born in the Polish city of Lódz in 1900, was trained as a violinist at the Moscow Conservatory.

They were assembled by David Opochinsky, an engineer whose company, Titra-Film, provides subtitles and dubbing for the movie industry. This manuscript comes from the Gilmore Music Library's Opochinsky Collection, which contains about 300 musical manuscripts, letters, and other documents written by prominent musicians. 3) because it was not published until 1855, six years after his death. Although this polonaise dates from the early part of his career, it bears a high opus number (Op. It differs from our score in several places, but scholars believe that the discrepancies probably do not indicate conscious revisions, but rather Chopin’s imperfect recollection of the piece as he wrote it out from memory, about eight years after its creation. The Chopin Society in Warsaw holds a second manuscript, dated 1836. Chopin continued this tradition, employing the polonaise for some of his grandest and most distinctive works.Ĭhopin wrote this manuscript for the F Minor polonaise in 1828 or 1829, while he was still a teenager living in Poland. When Poland went into political decline in the late 18th century, Polish musicians turned it into a symbol of nationalism. Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and many other non-Polish composers wrote polonaises from time to time. The polonaise (also known as the polacca) had its origins as a Polish folk dance, but it was taken up by composers in western and central Europe, who often employed it as a mild form of exoticism, sometimes in suites with dance forms that stemmed from a variety of countries.
