The complete idiot's guide to classical music (37 page)

As with Chopin, whom we’ll discuss later, the keyboard looms large in Schumann’s output, whether in the great solo suites, among them “Carnaval,” “Kinderscenen” (Scenes from Childhood), “Kreisleriana,” and “Fantasiestucke,” or the enormously popular Piano Concerto in A Minor.

The piano then appears as partner to the voice in a barrage of lieder and the great song cycles “Dichterliebe” and “Frauenliebe und Leben,” and as a chamber music participant with strings in the three trios, the quartet, and quintet.

In the non-keyboard department, the First (
Spring
) and Third (
Rhenish
) Symphonies are probably the most appealing of the four; the Cello Concerto is a warmly lyric piece, and for a real sonic novelty get out the Konzertstuck (Concert Piece) for Four Horns and Orchestra.

Berlioz’
Symphonie Fantastique
was hailed as the most sensational first symphony ever written, which made it a hard act to follow. Berlioz was up to the task, though, brandishing the banner of revolutionary romanticism by vastly expanding the era’s choral and orchestral horizons.

Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) was born in a small French village near Grenoble. His father was a prosperous physician who appreciated the classics and the arts, so Hector grew up playing the guitar, flute, and piano, though none of them well enough to earn a living by. This was fine with Papa Berlioz, who wanted his son to follow him into the medical trade anyway, and when the time came, he shipped the lad off to medical school in Paris.

Berlioz stuck it through for a year, but it was no use. He would sing arias in the dissecting room and copy opera scores instead of doing his osteology homework. Eventually, he quit his medical studies altogether and enrolled at the Paris Conservatory. His father was so upset that he cut off Hector’s allowance, but the lad got by as a singer in a vaudeville chorus and he wrote articles for a local newspaper.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Berlioz was pretty nervous about his first literary assignments, but he got used to them later. “My brain seemed ready to burst, my blood was on fire,” he wrote in his
Memoirs
, “I felt as if burning embers were scorching my veins. I tore my hair and wept, I beat with my fists against my skull. . . .” Another true romantic!

As it turned out, the bulk of Berlioz’s income in later years came from music journalism, because it didn’t cost a fortune to print reviews, articles, and letters, the way it did to mount such miniatures as
Romeo and Juliet,
which is scored for an orchestra of 200 players, plus three vocal soloists, and a huge chorus; and
The Trojans,
a five-act marathon so long that even Berlioz had to break down and divide it up into two full-evening operas.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Berlioz liked things on a grand scale, even when it didn’t involve his own compositions. At an 1844 concert in Paris, he conducted Weber’s
Die
Freischutz
Overture using 24 French horns; Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with 36 double-basses; and the “Prayer” from Rossini’s opera
Moses
with 25 harps added to the orchestra. Somebody else was paying the bills, naturally.

Despite his illusions of grandeur, Berlioz was indeed a master painter of sound canvasses, using music to convey vivid pictures and tell melodramatic stories. He also excelled as a conductor, his strength of personality (and his insistence on sectional rehearsals) raising performance levels to new heights of power and precision. He defied convention and

opened bright new vistas in the orchestration, and as the French musicologist (and one of Berlioz’s first biographers) Julien Tiersot put it so eloquently, “held high the torch that illuminated the path upon which all future composers were to travel.”

Start with the
Symphonie Fantastique
, with its high passion and graphic descriptions of everything from the beauties of nature to a witches’ sabbath, from a glittering ball to the composer’s opium-clouded vision of his own execution.

Harold in Italy
is a sumptuous travelogue in sound for viola and orchestra, and for those with shorter attention spans, consider the
Roman Carnival
,
King Lear
,
Benvenuto Cellini
, and his many other overtures, with or without operas attached.

The glorious
Requiem
, with its four brass bands sounding from all sides of the hall, will give your home stereo a good run for its money, or for a more intimate vocal experience, listen to the meltingly beautiful orchestral song cycle
Les Nuits d’ete
(Nights of Summer).

What Handel was to oratorio, Beethoven to symphony, and Schubert to lieder, such was Frederic Chopin (1810–1849) to the piano. He left us a dozen songs, a cello sonata, and a few other chamber pieces, but otherwise Chopin poured all of his love and inspiration into the solo keyboard, bestowing upon it such a wide array of sonorities and expressive nuances, that a whole new age of piano artistry came into being.

Born in a little Polish town outside of Warsaw, Frederic Chopin was precocious in many ways, writing poetry at age six, showing considerable gifts for drawing and acting, and already starting to compose little pieces at the piano. When he played a difficult concerto by the Bohemian composer Adalbert Gyrowetz two years later, the Polish public dubbed him “the new Mozart,” and welcomed the child into the aristocratic salons of Warsaw. As a teenager, Chopin dutifully studied at the Conservatory, but his international fame began with his greatly acclaimed Vienna debut in August, 1829 when he played his own
Krakowiak
(a Polish dance) for piano and orchestra.

A year later, Chopin gave his farewell concerts in Poland, and prepared to embark on a tour of Europe, with a possible visit across the Atlantic to the United States. The best laid plans of mice and musicians being what they are, the hoped-for grand tour fell through. Italy, for a change, was a hotbed of political unrest, while America seemed terribly remote and still a bit on the barbaric side. Chopin had to settle for scattered performances in Germany, during one of which, in 1831, he received news of the Russian occupation of Warsaw. Legend has it that the fiercely patriotic Pole responded by rushing to his desk to compose the “Revolutionary Étude”; in any case, in company with many other talented exiles, Chopin soon arrived in Paris.

Very quickly, the young expatriate was inducted into French high society, his performances much in demand at elegant soirees, his reputation as a composer growing almost as quickly. “Hats off, gentlemen!” exulted Robert Schumann, further urging everyone to “bow before Chopin’s lofty aims and masterful, spontaneous genius.”

Chopin was no Berlioz or Wagner, propounding the theory that bigger is better; nor was he like Liszt, ready to subvert any music to virtuoso display, adorning everything he could get his fingers on. On the other hand, Chopin had attained full mastery of the keyboard; his works are at once passionate and delicate, intense and warmly melodic. He was not out to revolutionize music, but he did so nonetheless, at least insofar as the piano is concerned.

 
Important Things to Know
In his mazurkas and polonaises, Chopin proudly recalled the music of his homeland; his waltzes exemplified the bright-hued elegance of the Parisian salons; in the ballades, he was the romantic storyteller; in the nocturnes, he sighed with the soul of the poet. His talents as an interpretive artist apparently mirrored his creative gifts. Critics at the time described his playing as precise, clean, and free from embellishment. Liszt, quick enough to recognize Chopin’s art as miles apart from his own, nonetheless recognized his unique qualities. “He is a poet— elegiac, profound, chaste, and dreaming,” said Liszt after attending one of Chopin’s Paris recitals. “He sought delicate sympathy rather than noisy acclaim.” Chopin, in other words, may have put all of himself into his music, but as a performer, he never lost his cool.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Chopin’s music was said to heat up the work production lines. In England, a statistical study made in 1940 by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Information reported that “the playing of music by Chopin produces an increase of the munitions output from 6 to 12 percent.”

Chopin’s health was fragile and deteriorating, and it wasn’t helped by his emotionally draining work methods. Perhaps the most intimate—and touching—account of Chopin’s creative universe came from George Sand, the brilliant, tuxedo-clad, cigar-smoking novelist who became his live-in lover for more than ten years “His creation was spontaneous and miraculous,” she wrote. “He found it without seeking it, without foreseeing it. It came suddenly, complete, sublime, singing in his head during a walk. But then began the most heart-rending labor I ever saw, a series of efforts, of irresolutions and frettings to seize again certain details of the theme he had heard. He shut himself up in his room for whole days, weeping, walking, breaking his pens, repeating a bar a hundred times. . . .”

By the time of his last recital in Paris, in February 1848, Chopin was already dying of tuberculosis. Within days, the 1848 Revolution broke out, and Chopin took refuge across the Channel in England, where his diminishing strength was taxed further by more concerts, the last of them a benefit for Polish emigres. He returned to Paris in the fall of 1849, and died there on October 17. Thousands of mourners gathered to hear the Mozart
Requiem
sung in his memory, and Chopin’s body was laid to rest between the tombs of Cherubini and Bellini. His heart, however, literally remains in Poland, where, at his own request, it was transported for reburial in his homeland.