changed fingers upon a key as often as an organist. For repeated notes in a moderate
tempo Chopin avoided the alternation of fingers and preferred the repeated note to be
played with the fingertip very carefully and without changing fingers.
Chopin often played the same composition differently, changing the tempo, timbre and
nuances. He varied his performances according to the inspiration and mood of the
moment. Through his spontaneity the result was always ideally beautiful. He could have
played the same piece twenty times in succession and the listener would still have
listened to the twentieth with equal fascination.
If Chopin during a performance improvised an ornamental passage it was always a
miracle of good taste. When he played his own compositions he liked to add ornamental
variations. He said that he wanted his ornaments to sound as if they were improvised.
Mendelssohn described Chopin as: ‘One of the very first of all. He produces new effects,
like Paganini on his violin, and accomplishes things nobody could formerly have thought
practicable.’
It is possible that Chopin’s own tempos, especially in lyrical, cantabile sections, were
more fluent that is customary these days.
Chopin had a high and profound concept as to what constituted ideal piano composition.
Even in Mozart’s opera Don Juan some passages were ‘unpleasant to his ear’.
Chopin insisted above all on the importance of correct phrasing. To his ear wrong
phrasing seemed as if someone were reciting a laboriously memorised speech in an
unfamiliar language by failing to observe the right quantity of syllables or even making
full stops in the middle of words.
The chief practical directions as to expression which Chopin gave his pupils were as
follows. A long note is stronger as is also a high note. A dissonance is likewise and
equally so a syncopated note. The ending of a phrase before a comma or a full stop is
always weak. If the melody ascends one plays crescendo and if it descends one plays
decrescendo. Notice must be taken of natural accents. For example, in a bar of two the
first note is strong, in a bar of three the first is strong and the two others are weak. To the
smaller parts of the bar the same directions will apply.
Chopin declared: ‘We use sounds to make music just as we use words to make a
language.’ The great vocal school of the 1830s, in which the art of declamation and its
dramatic expression in music were harmoniously united, represented for him the ideal
and definitive model for interpretatation. It was upon the singing styles of Rubini and
Pasta that Chopin based his own style of pianistic declamation that was the key to his
playing and the touchstone of his teaching. Chopin urged his pupils to listen to the great
dramatic artists and declared that ‘you must sing if you wish to play.’
Chopin’s pupil Karol Mikuli wrote: ‘Under his fingers each musical phrase sounded like
song, and with such clarity that each note took the meaning of the syllable, each that of a