Chopin Etudes
About the Chopin Etudes
The Chopin Etudes are some of the most admired works in the standard piano repertoire. Professional pianists, students, and amateurs alike from all around the world practice long hours aiming to achieve the finesse, elegance, nonchalance, sensitivity, virtuosity, panache, and overall poetic mastery needed to convey and perform these works at the highest level.
My own adventure with the Chopin Etudes started with the Revolutionary Etude Op. 10 No. 12. The passionate swells of the left hand and the declamatory heroism of the right hand consumed my practice time for two years before giving way to the nostalgia-tinged joy of Op. 10 No. 5 and the moody, effervescent meanderings of Op. 25 No. 2. As a young pianist, the hypnotic pathos of Chopin’s musical language - mixed with the tantalizing prospect of performing these pianistic acrobatics - fueled my fascination with these Etudes.
During years of performing the etudes around the world, I have encountered audiences who are well-versed in Chopin and those who have never heard of him or heard his music - audiences in Karachi, Kolkata, and Kuching; Lahore and Lima; Yangon and Cairo; Bei Da He, Beirut, Bangalore, and Bangkok; Taipei, Tokyo, and Tunis; Sousse, San Antonio, San Juan, and Singapore; Nanjing and New York; and numerous others. I have had the privilege to play Chopin’s Etudes for young women in Kabul, Afghanistan, for second and third graders on the east coast of Taiwan and for thousands of high schoolers throughout all 24 governorates of Tunisia. At these performances, I often shared that these etudes were intended not only to help pianists develop their technique, but they were also meant to be performed on a concert stage for audiences to enjoy. I enjoyed insisting that Chopin’s concept of piano technique involved not only notions of technique such as clarity, speed, and accuracy of individual notes, but also the use of the pedal, special sound effects, control over multiple musical lines in a single hand, and of course the ability to elicit and convey the widest possible range of emotions.
In another set of Chopin’s works, the Preludes, Op. 28, some of the preludes are sketches of musical ideas, many of which give the impression of improvisation. We know from some sources that Chopin did, in fact, quite a bit of improvising. One technique of improvisation involves particular musical patterns that can be repeated over and over while, above or below these repetitions, the improvisor modifies the harmony and melody. In many of the Etudes, we find this employed as a compositional technique. Inspired by this notion specifically and the spirit of improvisation generally, I have sought to treat the Etudes like Preludes - that is, rather than presenting them as a relentlessly studied execution of a difficult work, my intent is to give the impression of spontaneous unfolding of musical ideas.
