Search Results

This chapter discusses A Song to Remember, a “life” of the celebrated Polish composer Frederic Chopin that was released in the waning months of World War II. Despite its highbrow profile, it became a box office hit through its entertaining blend of fact and fiction, its patriotic message to contemporary wartime audiences, and its bewitching exploitation of Chopin's music. The Hollywood Reporter greeted A Song to Remember as a welcome addition to the recently imported European screen biographies of Beethoven, Schubert, and Handel. Other critics were equally enthusiastic. The film's casual concern for historical and biographical accuracy, however, outraged other commentators. Particularly notorious was a wholly fabricated penultimate sequence wherein the disease-ravaged Chopin embarks on a suicidal concert tour to aid Polish freedom fighters.

This chapter explores two video games that feature the nineteenth-century pianist and composer Frédéric Chopin as the main character: the Japanese role-playing game Eternal Sonata and the mobile game Frederic: Resurrection of Music. The chapter begins by examining three mythic identities that have shaped audience’s understandings of Chopin and his music and that play a role in Eternal Sonata and Frederic: the salon composer, the Romantic composer, and the Slavic composer. To address the challenges of creating a compelling video game narrative about a real-world composer, both games employ innovative but problematic narrative strategies to transform Chopin into a more stereotypically heroic character. Moreover, both games include his music in ways designed to reinforce its musical greatness and increase the music’s appeal to younger audiences.

The Allegro agitato section of Frédéric Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu in C-sharp Minor comes to a memorable climax, the end of a story of thwarted purposes and hopes unrealized. The agitation in this Allegro comes from a combination of speed and friction. In a classic analytic article of 1947, Ernst Oster claimed there is a resemblance between Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu in C-sharp Minor and Ludwig van Beethoven's “Moonlight” Sonata, also in C-sharp minor. This chapter looks at the resemblance between the two without regard to the allegory. The idea is to read the resemblance between the works as a worldly process, an event rather than a quality. One result is to identify the special type of performative of which resemblance is an instance. Another is to chart the typical origin and behavior of meaning within a large class of artworks, including most classical music. And yet another is to open a hermeneutic window on the early history of modernity.

Although rhapsodies—since the mid-19th century predominantly identified as musical compositions without fixed form—were composed by a number of prominent European and American composers, it was Franz Liszt, the author of Rhapsodies hongroises, who played the seminal role in establishing the status of rhapsody as a musical genre intrinsically joined with the imaginary ideal of gypsyness (defined as an intellectual construct). The chapter discusses consequences of uniting the concept of rhapsody with gypsyness, but also underlines the similarities between instrumental rhapsodies and ballads. It argues that although both genres shared a number of resemblances, the distinctive feature of the rhapsody remained its close association with romantic ideals of gypsyness. This strong link, the author claims, has been affecting the development and reception of the rhapsody as a genre.

This chapter examines evidence showing that Jean-Paul Sartre was interested in music. It begins by perusing the many studies that Sartre devoted to the arts, including matiériste painting, kinetic sculpture, photojournalism, popular cinema, African poetry, and the American novel. Sartre wrote only belatedly about the music of his own century. But it wasn't until the 1970s that he wrote more generally about the modern composers who were at the heart of contemporary debates. Sartre also listened to comic operas. This chapter considers how Sartre plays Frédéric-François Chopin; his Romanticism and how he plays the piano; his views on hallucinations and dreams; his playing the piano as an escape from reality; his political activism; and how he used music to resist science, morality, and power—the three pillars of bourgeois humanism. It also analyzes the rhythm evident in Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de la raison).

This chapter discusses the meeting of George Sand and the then young Polish composer Frederic Chopin. With the looming threat of the Russian occupation, Chopin fled Poland and arrived in Paris in 1831, the same year Aurore Dudevant went to the capital to launch her literary career. Among the other distinguished guests at the soiree were Giacomo Meyerbeer, Eugene Sue, Heinrich Heine, and a group of Polish exiles associated with Adam Mickiewicz, who would shortly become a professor at the College de France. Although Sand was immediately taken with Chopin, the relationship got off to a slow start. “I've made the acquaintance of a great celebrity, Madame Dudevant, known by the name George Sand,” Chopin wrote his parents several days after their meeting. “But her face doesn't appeal to me at all. There's even something about her that puts me off.”

In the nineteenth century Romantic literary critics and philosophers began claiming that art was or should be moving beyond established genres, or even beyond the idea of genre itself, which they saw as inherently limiting. Composers and music critics, particularly those such as Wagner and Liszt, absorbed this attitude in part. This chapter considers the lingering importance of genre, a continuity more substantial in music than in the other arts. Generic contracts and mediation were necessary to make sense of music. They operated on many levels, and ultimately, certain social and conceptual aspects of established musical genres retained or even gained force as other aspects were sacrificed. Genre labels associated with formal aspects, for example, were attacked, whereas large governing generic ideas such as “chamber music” were preserved, and more abstracted categories such as art, folk, and popular music were solidified.

For more than fifty years, the Erard firm had enjoyed relatively stable management in the hands of Sébastien and Jean-Baptiste. Sébastien’s death in 1831, however, ushered in a volatile period of just over twenty years during which the direction of the firm would change twice. At first, Pierre took control of the enterprise, doing his best to maintain the firm’s reputation for innovation. But Pierre’s unexpected cognitive decline and early death resulted in the transfer of the firm’s management to his wife Camille, thrusting the future of the Erard manufacture into unknown territory.

Beethoven’s style, composers and critics agreed, could not be imitated. But his subjectivity—or, more precisely, his perceived attitude of subjectivity—could be emulated quite readily, and it became the new norm soon after his death. Critics, moreover, heard compositional subjectivity not only in new music but also in selected works of the pre-Beethovenian past. In the meantime, the increasingly public nature of musical life created a growing demand for journals, miniature scores, and composer biographies that could help listeners comprehend an instrumental repertoire that was becoming stylistically ever more diverse and technically difficult. Composer biographies, a rarity before 1800, had become commonplace by mid-century. Concert-hall audiences now assumed that the instrumental music they were hearing came from deep within the soul of the composer.

Chapter 3 explores the methods by which composers have depicted themselves and their compositional styles in musical self-portraits. It views musical self-portraits in relation to self-portraiture in visual art to identify techniques shared by the two art forms. The chapter focuses in particular on two self-portraits, György Ligeti’s “Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley (und Chopin ist auch dabei),” from Drei Stücke, and Peter Ablinger’s “Quadraturen IV: ‘Selbstportrait mit Berlin.’ ” In their self-portraits, Ligeti and Ablinger reflect on their professional and artistic identities in the context provided by the music and sounds that they hear around them. The study of these musical self-portraits reveals some of the ways recent and contemporary composers view the role of their art and of the sense of hearing in the construction of their own identities.