肖邦（Chopin）新格羅夫詞條【完整版】

1、Chopin, Fryderyk Franciszek Frdric Franois(b elazowa Wola, nr Warsaw, 1 March 1810; d Paris, 17 Oct 1849 ). Polish composer and pianist. He combined a gift for melody, an adventurous harmonic sense, an intuitive and inventive understanding of formal design and a brilliant piano technique in composin

2、g a major corpus of piano music. One of the leading 19th-century composers who began a career as a pianist, he abandoned concert life early; but his music represents the quintessence of the Romantic piano tradition and embodies more fully than any other composers the expressive and technical charact

3、eristics of the instrument.Silhouette of Fryderyk Chopin at the pianoF. Phillip, Lebrecht Music & Arts 1. In his homeland: 181030.Chopin was the second of four children born to Mikoaj Chopin and Tekla Justyna Krzyanowska; according to the register of births his birth date was 22 February, but he and

4、 others always gave the date as 1 March. His parents met in 1802, when Mikoaj, a Frenchman from Lorraine, was employed by Countess Justyna Skarbek as a tutor for her son (later to be Chopins godfather) at her estate in elazowa Wola, some 45 km west of Warsaw. Chopins mother had been sent to the Skar

5、beks while still a girl. She was a distant relative and acted as a companion and housekeeper for Countess Justyna. The couple married in 1806 and remained with the Skarbek family until 1810, leaving for Warsaw when Chopin was seven months old. Mikoaj had secured a post at the recently established Ly

6、ceum, housed in the Saxon Palace, and for more than six years the Chopins lived in an apartment in the right wing of the palace. They were a respected family, and reasonably well connected socially, not least because Mikoaj was shrewd enough to cultivate the right people and to avoid offending those

7、 in positions of authority. It was a staunchly middle-class household, committed to a sound education, a well-developed sense of morality and an ethos of self-improvement. All four children benefited from a lively cultural milieu in which literary and musical interests were fostered.In early childho

8、od Chopin mixed socially with three principal groups of Warsaw society. First there were professional people, academics in particular. In 1817 the Lyceum moved to the Kazimierzowski Palace, next to the newly established University of Warsaw, and the Chopins took rooms in the right annex of the palac

9、e, where they mixed constantly with university teachers. Mikoaj was part of a circle of Warsaw intelligentsia, whose salons had something of the character of literary or scientific gatherings, and it was through these contacts that the young Chopin was able to visit Berlin in 1828, his first glimpse

10、 of the world beyond Poland. Secondly there were the middle gentry (szlachta). Many of the Lyceum pupils were from this background, and several of them boarded with the Chopins. Even before he entered the Lyceum in 1823 (he was privately educated until the fourth class), Chopinbecame friendly with t

11、hese boys, and several of the friendships were to prove enduring and important. Later, in his teenage years, he spent two summers (1824 and 1825) at the country home of one of the boarders, Dominik Dziewanowski. Much has been made of Chopins documented contacts with folk music during these youthful

12、visits to Szafarnia. But it is possible to overrate their significance. His contribution to musical nationalism was real and important, but it did not in the end hinge on the recovery of some notionally authentic peasant music.The third group with which Chopin mixed was the small handful of wealthy

13、aristocratic families at the top of the social hierarchy in Poland. Here his passport was his talent, for as a gifted prodigy (a second Mozart) his fame rapidly spread, and he was much in demand at the salons of the best society. He was even a regular visitor to the Belvedere Palace, home of the not

14、oriously unpopular Viceroy of Poland, Grand Duke Constantin. Aside from such salon performances, he made occasional public appearances, including a performance of a Gyrowetz concerto at the Radziwi Palace in February 1818. Already by then he was a published composer. Two polonaises from 1817 have su

15、rvived, and one of them (in G minor) was lithographed by Canon Izydor Cybulski. The Warsaw press responded with a eulogy: The composer of this Polish dance, a young lad barely eight years old, is a true musical genius. Of his other early works, it is worth singling out a Polonaise in A major of 1821

16、, not least because it is the first of Chopins surviving autographs. It was dedicated to his teacher Wojciech (Adalbert) ywny, one of several Czech musicians then living in Warsaw. Reports on ywnys teaching are somewhat mixed, but at the very least he did Chopin the service of introducing him to Bac

17、h and to Viennese Classicism. He taught Chopin from 1816 to 1821, at which point he no doubt realized that his most gifted pupil needed to move on.It is likely that Chopin had private lessons with Jzef Elsner for several years before entering the High School of Music (lessons were held at the univer

18、sity and the conservatory), of which Elsner was rector, in 1826. We know that Elsner introduced him to a harmony textbook by Karol Antoni Simon in 1823, for instance, and this may have been the trigger for sporadic lessons in music theory. In the same year he began to take organ lessons from Wilhelm

19、 Wrfel, an eminent pianist on Elsners staff at the High School. Yet in all important respects he was self-taught as a performer. Neither ywny nor Elsner had much to offer on keyboard technique, and it may well be that Chopins highly individual approach to teaching and playing in later life resulted

20、in part from this unorthodox background. His High School years, on the other hand, gave him a rigorous training in composition, though there is some suggestion that in the later stages of the course Elsner may have allowed him more freedom to follow his own inclinations than was usual for High Schoo

21、l students. In any event, his final report, written in July 1829, left no doubt about Chopins acumen: Chopin F., third year student, exceptional talent, musical genius.It was clear at this point that Poland had little further to offer Chopin, and when the Education Ministry turned down an applicatio

22、n for funds to study abroad the composer grew increasingly restless in his native city. There were concert series in Warsaw, and regular visits from virtuosos en route to St Petersburg, as well as a tolerable opera repertory at the National Theatre. But in comparison with Europes cultural capitals,

23、the town had a provincial feel. That was brought home to Chopin when he paid a short visit to Vienna immediately after his graduation from the High School, especially as he managed more by luck than planning to secure two well-received public concerts in the Austrian capital. After the first concert

24、, at which he played the Variations op.2, he wrote home that everyone clapped so loudly after each variation that I had difficulty hearing the orchestral tutti. On his return to Poland he gave numerous salon and concert performances, but the pressure to give a big public concert in Warsaw steadily m

25、ounted. In the end he succumbed and gave the F minor Concerto to an audience of 900 people on 17 March 1830. Later in the year (11 October) he followed this with a second concert at which he played the E minor Concerto. The publicity surrounding these concerts, especially the first, was distasteful

26、to Chopin, and may well have strengthened his growing conviction that the conventional path of the public pianist-composer was not for him. On the other hand, alternative career paths were by no means obvious.This uncertainty about his future was no doubt a principal factor in the depression Chopin

27、suffered during his final year in Warsaw. But he was also troubled by emotional insecurities of a kind that are by no means unusual among 19-year-olds. He decided that he was in love with a young singer Konstancja Gadkowska, but apparently did little to make her aware of his feelings. Indeed he foun

28、d it much easier to communicate emotionally with men than with women in these days, and perhaps in later years too. Before his premature death in 1828, Chopins school friend Jan Biaobocki had been his principal confidant. That role was quickly taken over by another friend from the Lyceum years, Tytu

29、s Woyciechowski, and it was in letters to Tytus that Chopin poured out his heart over Konstancja. The letters reveal him as emotionally fragile and indecisive, all too ready to lean on his more robust and self-assured friend. Fittingly, it was in the company of Tytus that he finally ventured on a mu

30、ch planned (and often postponed) journey to Vienna on 1 November 1830, though at the time he had no reason to think that it would be his last contact with Poland.2. New frontiers: 183034.The intention was to embark on a European tour, with Vienna as first stop. In the end Chopin stayed for eight mon

31、ths in the Habsburg capital. One week after their arrival, the youths had news of the Warsaw uprising, which had been sparked off by an ill-judged attempt to assassinate the Grand Duke Constantin. Tytus immediately returned to play his part, leaving Chopin to fend for himself in a city where Poles w

32、ere no longer welcome. Unsurprisingly, he now found it virtually impossible to arrange a concert of any importance and whiled away his time rather aimlessly with a small circle of new and old friends, including the Malfatti family (Dr Malfatti had been a close friend of Beethoven), one of his fellow

33、 students from Warsaw, Tomasz Nidecki, the young Czech violinist Josef Slavk and the cellist Josef Merk. His nostalgia for Poland is evident in letters to his new confidant Jan Matuszyski, then a medical student in Warsaw, and, if the language is at times excessive, the sentiments were no doubt real

34、 enough: I curse the moment of my departure. It seems that he had considered returning with Tytus but had been dissuaded from doing so by his friend, partly on the grounds that his contribution to the Polish cause could best be made in other ways.Several of Chopins friends (including his teacher Els

35、ner) were hopeful that he would one day create a great Polish opera, which might do justice to the national plight. He himself was aware that his talents lay elsewhere, but it does seem that following the uprising his attitude to Polishness in music changed in significant ways. It was in Vienna that

36、 he wrote the first nine mazurkas that he himself released for publication, as opp.6 and 7, and it was through these that the genre was comprehensively defined. Perhaps more significantly, it was in Vienna that he stopped composing the salon polonaises of his early years, pieces barely distinguishab

37、le in style from the polonaises of Hummel, Weber and other non-Polish virtuosos. When he returned to the polonaise several years later he was able to redefine it as a genre, allowing it to take on a quite new, explicitly nationalist, significance. It goes without saying that Chopins music cannot be

38、confined by a nationalist aesthetic, but that it played a part in the development of cultural nationalism, and not only in Poland, is beyond question.On 20 July 1831 Chopin finally left Vienna, following difficulties in securing a passport from the Russian authorities. He stayed in Munich for a mont

39、h and then proceeded, by way of Stuttgart, to Paris. The two weeks spent in Stuttgart were among the darkest of Chopins life, as his diary entries reveal. Even byChopins standards, it was a period of agonizing indecision. He was far from friends and family, and he was painfully conscious that he was

40、 dependent still on funds from his father. As yet he had shown little evidence that he could establish a reputation beyond Warsaw, though at the same time he was all too well aware of the limitations of musical life in Poland. It was while in Stuttgart that he learnt of the failure of the uprising,

41、and he gave vent to his feelings in an extraordinary, barely coherent outpouring of grief in his album. O God! You are there! You are there and yet you do not take vengeance! Oh father, so this is how you are rewarded in old age! Mother, sweet suffering mother, you saw your daughter the youngest chi

42、ld Emilia die, and now you watch the Russian marching in over her grave to oppress you! To return to Poland was now out of the question, and a few days after the Stuttgart diary he was in Paris.【2】1. In his homeland: 181030.Chopin was the second of four children born to Mikoaj Chopin and Tekla Justy

43、na Krzyanowska; according to the register of births his birth date was 22 February, but he and others always gave the date as 1 March. His parents met in 1802, when Mikoaj, a Frenchman from Lorraine, was employed by Countess Justyna Skarbek as a tutor for her son (later to be Chopins godfather) at h

44、er estate in elazowa Wola, some 45 km west of Warsaw. Chopins mother had been sent to the Skarbeks while still a girl. She was a distant relative and acted as a companion and housekeeper for Countess Justyna. The couple married in 1806 and remained with the Skarbek family until 1810, leaving for War

45、saw when Chopin was seven months old. Mikoaj had secured a post at the recently established Lyceum, housed in the Saxon Palace, and for more than six years the Chopins lived in an apartment in the right wing of the palace. They were a respected family, and reasonably well connected socially, not lea

46、st because Mikoaj was shrewd enough to cultivate the right people and to avoid offending those in positions of authority. It was a staunchly middle-class household, committed to a sound education, a well-developed sense of morality and an ethos of self-improvement. All four children benefited from a

47、 lively cultural milieu in which literary and musical interests were fostered.In early childhood Chopin mixed socially with three principal groups of Warsaw society. First there were professional people, academics in particular. In 1817 the Lyceum moved to the Kazimierzowski Palace, next to the newl

48、y established University of Warsaw, and the Chopins took rooms in the right annex of the palace, where they mixed constantly with university teachers. Mikoaj was part of a circle of Warsaw intelligentsia, whose salons had something of the character of literary or scientific gatherings, and it was th

49、rough these contacts that the young Chopin was able to visit Berlin in 1828, his first glimpse of the world beyond Poland. Secondly there were the middle gentry (szlachta). Many of the Lyceum pupils were from this background, and several of them boarded with the Chopins. Even before he entered the L

50、yceum in 1823 (he was privately educated until the fourth class), Chopinbecame friendly with these boys, and several of the friendships were to prove enduring and important. Later, in his teenage years, he spent two summers (1824 and 1825) at the country home of one of the boarders, Dominik Dziewano

51、wski. Much has been made of Chopins documented contacts with folk music during these youthful visits to Szafarnia. But it is possible to overrate their significance. His contribution to musical nationalism was real and important, but it did not in the end hinge on the recovery of some notionally aut

52、hentic peasant music.The third group with which Chopin mixed was the small handful of wealthy aristocratic families at the top of the social hierarchy in Poland. Here his passport was his talent, for as a gifted prodigy (a second Mozart) his fame rapidly spread, and he was much in demand at the salo

53、ns of the best society. He was even a regular visitor to the Belvedere Palace, home of the notoriously unpopular Viceroy of Poland, Grand Duke Constantin. Aside from such salon performances, he made occasional public appearances, including a performance of a Gyrowetz concerto at the Radziwi Palace i

54、n February 1818. Already by then he was a published composer. Two polonaises from 1817 have survived, and one of them (in G minor) was lithographed by Canon Izydor Cybulski. The Warsaw press responded with a eulogy: The composer of this Polish dance, a young lad barely eight years old, is a true mus

55、ical genius. Of his other early works, it is worth singling out a Polonaise in A major of 1821, not least because it is the first of Chopins surviving autographs. It was dedicated to his teacher Wojciech (Adalbert) ywny, one of several Czech musicians then living in Warsaw. Reports on ywnys teaching

56、 are somewhat mixed, but at the very least he did Chopin the service of introducing him to Bach and to Viennese Classicism. He taught Chopin from 1816 to 1821, at which point he no doubt realized that his most gifted pupil needed to move on.It is likely that Chopin had private lessons with Jzef Elsn

57、er for several years before entering the High School of Music (lessons were held at the university and the conservatory), of which Elsner was rector, in 1826. We know that Elsner introduced him to a harmony textbook by Karol Antoni Simon in 1823, for instance, and this may have been the trigger for

58、sporadic lessons in music theory. In the same year he began to take organ lessons from Wilhelm Wrfel, an eminent pianist on Elsners staff at the High School. Yet in all important respects he was self-taught as a performer. Neither ywny nor Elsner had much to offer on keyboard technique, and it may w

59、ell be that Chopins highly individual approach to teaching and playing in later life resulted in part from this unorthodox background. His High School years, on the other hand, gave him a rigorous training in composition, though there is some suggestion that in the later stages of the course Elsner

60、may have allowed him more freedom to follow his own inclinations than was usual for High School students. In any event, his final report, written in July 1829, left no doubt about Chopins acumen: Chopin F., third year student, exceptional talent, musical genius.It was clear at this point that Poland