Chopin’s Aliases

ROGER MOSELEY Chopin’s Aliases Chopin’s Aliases ROGER MOSELEY Frédéric Chopin’s Waltz in C♯ Minor, op. 64, no. 2 (1847), was a longstanding staple of Arthur Rubinstein’s repertoire. When the elderly pianist was asked how he could play the same waltz for more than seventy-five years, Rubinstein was said to reply, “Because it’s not the same, and I don’t play it the same way.”1 Despite its insistance on idiosyncrasy, Rubinstein’s retort extended a tradition rooted in accounts of Chopin’s own playing, which “varied each Aspects of the research that led to this article were presented at Cornell University, Case Western Reserve University, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Cambridge, Yale University, the Peabody Institute, the University at Buffalo, the Graduate Center, CUNY, Tufts University, the Deutsches Museum, Munich, and the 2016 meeting of the American Musicological Society in Vancouver. I am grateful to all who provided feedback and shared insights on those occasions. [composition] according to the mood of the moment, a mood that charmed by its very waywardness.”2 Rubinstein’s adherence to this tradition is borne out by the recordings he made in 1928 (RCA 63002) and 1963 (RCA 63047). In the former, the freewheeling pianist takes numerous textual liberties by displacing or doubling octaves and adorning cadential dominantseventh chords with 4–3 suspensions. Throughout most of the latter, he scrupulously adheres to the letter of the score, which contributes to the prevailing affect of restrained melancholy. Toward the end, however, the notes boxed in plate 1 are conspicuously brought out by Rubenstein’s right thumb as an octave-displaced echo of the stepwise descent from dominant to tonic plotted by the pitches falling on the downbeats 2 1 The waltz served as an encore at Rubinstein’s final recital, given in 1976: see Bryce Morrison, “Arthur Rubinstein: The Greatest Chopin Pianist On Record?”, Gramophone 90, no. 3 (2013): 20. Alfred James Hipkins, quoted in Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Chopin: Pianist and Teacher as Seen by His Pupils, ed. Roy Howat, trans. Naomi Shohet with Krysia Osostowicz and Howat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 55. 19th-Century Music, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 3–29 ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2018 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/ journals.php?p=reprints. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2018.42.1.3. 3 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC Plate 1: Frédéric Chopin, Waltz in C♯ Minor, op. 64, no. 2 (Paris: Brandus, n.d.), mm. 173–92. Audio 1: Chopin, Waltz in C♯ Minor, op. 64, no. 2, mm. 176–92, performed by Arthur Rubinstein (RCA 63047, recorded in 1963). (See online edition.) of each measure.3 In this particular guise, Chopin’s waltz prompted Rubinstein to unveil (or fabricate) a hidden relationship by accentuating notes whose canonic candidature might 3 The barest hint of this effect might be heard during the penultimate refrain of the 1928 recording (mm. 160–76). While the linear descent in this passage also caught the attention of Heinrich Schenker, Rubinstein’s echo serves only to obfuscate what Schenker identified as its underlying contour, articulated by the fourth eighth notes in each of mm. 177–80: see Antonio Cascelli, “Chopin as Salon Composer: Schenker’s Reception of Chopin,” in Chopin’s Musical Worlds: The 1840s, ed. Artur Szklener et al. (Warsaw: Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina, 2008), 83–96 (95–96). 4 well elude the naked eye. Since they are derived directly from the score, such stresses cannot be dismissed as whimsical addenda; at the same time, their inversion of rhythmical hierarchy cannot be held to represent the content or directives of the score as read according to Chopin’s own precepts.4 As a result, the com- 4 Jan Kleczyński claimed that Chopin “often repeated to his pupils” the following “practical directions”: “If the melody ascends, one plays crescendo, if it descends, decrescendo. Moreover, notice must be taken of natural accents. For instance, in a bar of two, the first note is strong, the second weak, in a bar of three the first strong and the two mon pitch classes they highlight occupy an interstitial void between identity and divergence, information and redundancy, fidel-ity and duplicity. The values ascribed to this space reflect the multiplicity of sources and editions of Chopin’s music as well as historical shifts in performance practice and its cultural regulation. Beyond such issues, Rubinstein’s apocryphal assertion that the same waltz is in fact “not the same” points up music’s notorious ontological instability, in the face of which even the score’s enduring presence is paper-thin.5 In what follows, I suggest that the interface of the keyboard provides other ways of making sense of Chopin’s music and the diverse treatments to which it has been subjected. In particular, the transmission of Chopinian signals at the keyboard introduces and articulates ambiguities that can be elucidated in terms currently associated with methods of mollifying the jagged presentation of smooth contours when processed by digital systems. The letters that form the text you are reading were initially arrayed across a fixed-pixel display. At close quarters, the discrete pixels of such displays are clearly apparent, as are the lines that neatly distinguish each from its identical neighbors. From a distance, however, these reticulations converge and disappear, resulting in the impression of an indivisible whole, the structure, function, and selective permeability of which lie beyond the limits of perception. Apple has recently capitalized on this threshold by switching from technological to biological terminology in marketing its “retina displays,” the pixels of which are too small to be individually resolved at a normal viewing distance. But regardless of their registration as such by the human sensorium, loss and distortion always attend—indeed, are integral to— the transductive operations by which signals are construed as such. When zooming into the image of a lattice on a fixed-pixel display and others weak. To the smaller parts of the bar the same direction will apply. Such then are the rules: the exceptions are always indicated by the authors themselves” (Chopin’s Greater Works, trans. Natalia Janotha [London: William Reeves, ca. 1896], 41–42). 5 Art Tatum’s 1949 recording “of” op. 64, no. 2 (Storyville 108 8603) provides evidence of just how far Chopin’s waltz can depart from itself while remaining recognizable as such. thereby navigating the continuum that connects and separates the states of grid and filter, visual artifacts emerge as the distinction between intersection and interstice is constantly recalculated and scaled. Such artifacts, known as moiré effects, are the outcome of aliasing, the distortion of a signal caused by the limitations of the techniques by which it is sampled and reconstructed. Aliasing gives rise to ambiguity and the possibility—even the inevitability—of misidentification. In such cases, multiple values present themselves as equally plausible, even though only one (if any at all) reflects the properties of the signal they purport to represent. While the concept of aliasing might seem to stand at historical and temperamental odds with Chopin’s pianism, it names a tension between the countable and the infinite that was registered in many discursive forms throughout the nineteenth century. In particular, the figure of Chopin at the keyboard was held to represent the incommensurability of nature and technology while embodying a means of reconciling them.6 Just as the contemporary meanings of aliasing have deeply entwined etymological roots, moreover, so might the relative ubiquity and longevity of Chopin’s music be understood in part to reflect its relevance to digital phenomena that extend beyond its immediate milieu. Writ large, aliasing and the techniques that mitigate it call into question the assumption that digital technologies flatten and overdetermine the content they mediate. They provide a way of examining what is at stake when one person, object, or action is said to stand in for another. And they challenge the zero-sum distinction between identity and difference by suggesting alternative modes of apprehending the significance of an individual note, key, or sound in the context of longstanding debates concerning qualities that seem to elude quantification. Moving across the discursive registers of pedagogy, performance, and media theory while 6 On Chopin’s mediation between the natural and the technological, see Jeffrey Kallberg, “Chopin’s Music Box,” in Chopin’s Musical Worlds, 189–202, and Kallberg, “Mechanical Chopin,” Common Knowledge 17, no. 2 (2011): 269–82. 5 ROGER MOSELEY Chopin’s Aliases 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC touching on phenomena ranging from the Aeolian harp to the telephonic keypad, this article pursues the notion that the realization of Chopin’s music has always been predicated on the inevitability of communicative distortion and the impulse to transcend such artifacts via the fine-grained manipulation of the very techniques that produce them. Throughout, the notion of the keyboard as a digital interface that can act as grid, filter, and analogical conduit provides perspectives from which a consideration of sonic counterparts to visual (anti-)aliasing in Chopin’s music and its latter-day adaptations can be framed.7 “Art Is Infinite within the Limits of Its Means” From his day to ours, musical images of Chopin at the keyboard have mediated Romantic fantasies that at once acknowledge and seek to transcend the mechanisms that animate them. In 1877 Louis Ehlert proclaimed of Chopin that “never did a musical nature so ground itself in the keyboard as his. The keys are magic wands out of which he forms his language.”8 Upon acquiring the remnants of Chopin’s abortive pedagogical treatise (Projet de méthode) in 1936, Alfred Cortot hoped that it would disclose how the composer performed his feats of prestidigitation. When he leafed through the disparate folios on which it had been sketched, however, Cortot was disappointed to find only “commonplaces” concerning music’s most basic rudiments couched in “dubious French.”9 7 On the mutually constitutive relations and functions of grids and filters, see Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 8 “Nie vielleicht wurzelte eine musikalische Phantasie so ganz in der Claviatur, wie die seine. Die Tasten sind die Runenstäbchen, aus denen er seine Sprache bildet.” Louis Ehlert, “Frederic Chopin,” in Aus der Tonwelt: Essays, 2nd edn. (Berlin: Behr, 1882), 283–309 (293), trans. F. Slocum, Dwight’s Journal of Music 37, nos. 13–14 (1877): 97–98 and 105–06 (97). Along similar lines, the Parisian critic Maurice Bourges wrote in 1842 that Chopin “sait faire parler à ses doigts un prestigieux langage” (quoted in Dana Gooley, “Between ésprit and génie: Chopin in the Field of Performance,” in Chopin’s Musical Worlds, 141–56 (155n.28). 9 “Il ne s’agit d’autre chose que d’une douzaine de feuillets, rédigés en un français fort contestable. . . . Il ne s’y agit, en 6 So bitter was Cortot’s chagrin at the “surprising vacuity” exhibited by the Projet de méthode that he wished he had never set eyes on it: “one can only regret that it escaped the bonfire that consumed the master’s unfinished works.”10 Despite Chopin’s ultimate failure—or refusal—to enumerate the first principles of his art, the strangely reiterative fragments of the Projet de méthode expose telling epistemological assumptions concerning not only music’s elements and properties, but also how they can be perceived and identified in the terms adumbrated by Ehlert. The Projet de méthode articulates a quasi-syllogistic sequence of axioms concerning the nature of sound, its modulation into meaningfully discrete units by the analogous means of language and music, and its representation as such both on the page and at the piano. Word is born of sound—sound before word. Word[:] a certain modification of sound. We use sounds to make music just as we use words to make a language. 1. One abstract sound doesn’t make music, just as one word doesn’t make language. 2. In order to have music, there must be several sounds. 3. As soon as there are two sounds, one is higher and the other lower. 4. To write music, it is logical to use lines graded by height.11 réalité, que d’un véritable ‘puzzle’ de lieux communs portant sur les notions les plus élémentaires de l’éducation musicale.” Alfred Cortot, Aspects de Chopin (Paris: Albin Michel, 1949), 52. 10 “Et la viduité surprenante du document pouvait engager à déplorer que l’autodafé auquel Liszt avait ajouté créance n’ait pas fait justice d’un propos théorique aussi dépourvu de toute significance valable.” Cortot, Aspects de Chopin, 51, trans. Cyril and Rena Clarke, In Search of Chopin (London: Peter Nevill Limited, 1951), 38. 11 “La parole naquit du son—le son avant la parole. La parole[:] certaine modification du son. On se sert des sons pour faire de la musique comme on se sert des paroles pour faire un langage. 1. Un son abstrait ne fait pas de musique, comme un parole ne fait pas de langue. 2. Pour qu’il [y] ait musique, il faut plusieurs sons. 3. Sitôt qu’il y a 2 sons, il y [en] a un plus haut, l’autre plus bas. 4. Pour écrire de la musique il est rationnel qu’on se serve de lignes échelonnées selon leur hauteur.” Frédéric Chopin, Ésquisses pour une méthode de piano, ed. Eigeldinger (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), 48, trans. in Eigeldinger, Chopin, 195–96. For Chopin, the written note stood in not merely for a sound, but for a symbolic and relational system that quantizes sounds in order to differentiate one from another. As Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger has observed, moreover, its “entire reasoning . . . is founded on the structure of the (equal-tempered) keyboard.”12 Just as the ladder-like lines of the staff distinguish each pitch from its immediate neighbors, so is the keyboard’s topography formed of interstices and intersections, finger-sized expanses of identity that exist by virtue of their proximity to and distinctness from chromatic and diatonic otherness. By materializing music-theoretical epistemology, the keyboard’s grid enables its players to focus on the acquisition of techniques through which music can be grasped as “l’art de manier les sons,” as Chopin defined it.13 As a digital system, the keyboard is a singularity that contains multitudes: while its individual elements can only be handled in relation to one another, their countless possible combinations bear out Chopin’s belief that “art is infinite within the limits of its means.”14 Having mapped the stave and keyboard onto each other, the Projet de méthode proceeds to quantify the temporal realm via the illustrated subdivision of notes, rests, and measures.15 Here, again, a gulf emerges between the bathetic patency of Chopin’s text and the subtlety of the practices it underwrites. Within the realm of French music, discrepancies between the conventions of notating and realizing rhythmic values had long been acknowledged, in part because their literal observance led to renditions that were “cold, mechanistic, insipid, and lifeless,” as Marie-Dominique-Joseph Engramelle put it in La tonotechnie (1775).16 This treatise on the art of pinning musical cylinders set out to prove that the mechanical reproduction of music could nonetheless provide evidence of careful listening and good taste. Since “nothing in music cannot be exactly measured,” according to Engramelle, the most refined musical expression of celebrated keyboard performers such as Claude Balbastre could be registered and realized by no more than the “measurement of notes by numbers, the division of the circumference of cylinders into so many equal parts as required to apply prongs at precise and regular distances, and the disposition of such prongs in a manner that plays pieces of music with taste and precision.”17 Drawing on a long tradition of encoding music for the purposes of automated playback, this epistemological outlook and its material manifestations can be extended by way of the player piano to the technology that underpins and represents the digital sequencing of music today.18 As shown by Engramelle’s encoding of various “Notes et Signes des Agrements [sic]” (plate 2), published in 1778 as part of Dom Bédos de Celles’s influential treatise on the construction of organs, the limited granularity associated with mechanical modes of storing and recreating music could be refined simply by increasing the resolution of the underlying grid and thus the frequency with which samples could be taken, which extends in this case to the thirty-second note (as did Chopin’s illustration of rhythmical subdivision). Engramelle’s method also accounted for the timing of a note’s release, which he considered to be just as important as that of its attack.19 He thus consid- 17 12 Eigeldinger, Chopin, 90n.2. Chopin, Ésquisses pour une méthode de piano, 48. 14 “L’art étant infini dans ses moyens limités.” Ibid., 40, trans. in Eigeldinger, Chopin, 193. 15 Chopin, Ésquisses pour une méthode de piano, 50–51. 16 “Tout ce qui résulteroit sans l’oreille & le goût des meilleurs principes de la Musique, seroit froid, machinal, insipide & inanimé.” Marie-Dominique-Joseph Engramelle, La tonotechnie, ou l’art de noter les cylindres (Paris: Hermann, 1993 [1775]), 3. On Engramelle’s treatise in the context of the clavecinistes who preceded him, see Rebecca Cypess, “‘It Would Be without Error’: Automated Technology and the Pursuit of Correct Performance in the Enlightenment,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 142, no. 1 (2017): 1–29. 13 Engramelle, La tonotechnie, 16; “Comme il n’est rien qu’on ne puisse mesurer exactement en musique, il n’est aucune piéce, aucune simphonie, aucuns concerts & enfin aucuns détails qu’on ne puisse noter sur les cylindres avec la plus grande précision.” Ibid., 62. For a concise explanation and sonic realization of Engramelle’s techniques as applied to Balbastre’s Romance in C Major, see Patrick Feaster, Pictures of Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Audio, 980–1980 (Atlanta: Dust-to-Digital, 2012), 7–18. 18 On this media-genealogical lineage, see Roger Moseley, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 49–58. 19 In this regard, Engramelle was automating expressive principles articulated by François Couperin according to which the player’s “suspension” and “cessation” of the harpsichord’s sound could analogize the dynamic variability of 7 ROGER MOSELEY Chopin’s Aliases 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC Plate 2: “Notes et Signes des Agrements [sic],” encoded by Marie-Dominique-Joseph Engramelle, in François Lamathe Bédos de Celles de Salelles, L’art du facteur d’orgues (Paris: Delatour, 1766–78), 4 vols., IV, plate 110. 8 ered his high-definition method of programming musical events superior both to its more crudely pixelated predecessors and to conventional notation, which was incapable of representing such fine-grained nuances. Rather than leaving the realization of musical notation to the imagination of readers and performers, Engramelle’s technological mediation was graphically explicit even as it sought to render its own intercession imperceptible. In a manner akin to Apple’s claim to surpass the retina’s capacity to distinguish between pixels, Engramelle’s mechanism aimed to eliminate all traces of the mechanical in resolving the sonic details of ornamentation and articulation to the satisfaction of the ear. Engramelle’s means of registering the imbrication of notes and their micro-timings took quite literally the line of thought expressed in a profoundly flippant remark attributed to J. S. Bach: “All one must do is strike the right keys at the right time, and the instrument plays itself.”20 In the early nineteenth century, however, the curiosity value of instruments that promised to play themselves was supplanted by deep and enduring suspicion of the threat such performances posed to the vaunted inimitability of human accomplishments.21 This threat was double-edged: while machines could approximate (or even outdo) the efforts of humans, humans were increasingly judged according to criteria established and enforced by machines. 22 The metronome, devised by string instruments: see Peter Szendy, Phantom Limbs: On Musical Bodies, trans. Will Bishop (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 74–75. 20 “Man darf nur die rechten Tasten zu rechter Zeit treffen, so spielt das Instrument selbst.” Quoted in Philipp Spitta, Johann Sebastian Bach (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1873– 80), 2 vols., II, 744. 21 This shift is epitomized by the uncanny nineteenth-century resonances of eighteenth-century musical automata, discussed in relation to E. T. A. Hoffmann below and noted elsewhere by Adelheid Voskuhl (Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013], esp. 201–30); Katherine Hirt (When Machines Play Chopin: Musical Spirit and Automation in Nineteenth-Century German Literature [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010]); and Terrance Riley (“Composing for the Machine,” European Romantic Review 20, no. 3 [2009]: 367–79). 22 On this point, see Stefania Neonato, “Irony and Mechanics in Schumann’s Toccata, Op. 7,” Keyboard Perspectives 3 (2010): 23–48 (28–29). Diederich Nicolaus Winkel and subsequently popularized by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, held human players to the horological standard to which mechanical organs and music boxes had been calibrated for centuries.23 At the hands of Johann Heinrich Scheibler, the age-old skill of tuning instruments was reduced to an algorithmic procedure.24 Meanwhile, piano teachers delegated responsibility for manual training to mechanisms, whether constructed of wood and metal or notated as exercises, designed to stretch the hand’s span, to develop the independent strength of each finger, and thereby to foster perfect evenness and regularity.25 As Rebecca Cypess points out, Engramelle’s presumption that the convergence of the human and the mechanical should naturally be pursued with the aid of technology was rooted in the materialist philosophy expounded by Denis Diderot and others.26 To those of a more idealistic persuasion, however, technology became symptomatic rather than curative. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story “Die Automate” (1814) features a performance given by musical androids and the mysterious Professor X that is attended by the students Ludwig and Ferdinand.27 In its aftermath, Ludwig is incandescent: The striving of mechanicians to imitate human organs in order to produce musical sounds, or to substitute them by mechanical means, I consider tantamount to a declaration of war against the spiritual 23 On Winkel and Maelzel, see Myles W. Jackson, Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 183–97. 24 On Scheibler, ibid., 151–81. 25 On such pedagogical devices, invented by Henri Herz, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Johann Bernhard Logier, and Casimir Martin, among others, see Arthur Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954), 297–301, and Wolfgang Scherer, KlavierSpiele: Die Psychotechnik der Klaviere im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 1989), 107–223. On the rise of the piano exercise, see Leslie David Blasius, “The Mechanics of Sensation and the Construction of the Romantic Musical Experience,” in Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Ian Bent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–24, and Szendy, Phantom Limbs, 65– 68. 26 Cypess, “‘It Would Be without Error.’” 27 On “Die Automate,” see Emily I. Dolan, “E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Ethereal Technologies of ‘Nature Music,’” Eighteenth-Century Music 5, no. 1 (2008): 7–26, and Hirt, When Machines Play Chopin, 33–64. 9 ROGER MOSELEY Chopin’s Aliases 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC principle; but the greater the forces amassed against it, the more evident becomes its victory. For this very reason, the more perfect the machine, the more despicable it is, and a simple barrel-organ, in which the mechanism attempts nothing but to be mechanical, is far dearer to me than Vaucanson’s flute player or the harmonica girl.28 This response identifies the depression recognized today as the “uncanny valley,” according to which technological representations of natural phenomena evoke reactions of skepticism and revulsion rather than familiarity and recognition owing to their considerable yet imperfect degree of lifelikeness.29 Ludwig rejects the Engramellian notion that the essence of music can be captured simply by increasing digital accuracy and its power to resolve music in ever higher definition. Such measures are doomed to fall asymptotically short; their sharpening focus serves only to render more acute the listener’s sense of the spirit that is abjectly lacking. Although Ludwig pivots on a binaristic distinction between nature and artifice, he suggests how these terms tend toward displacement and deferral: rather than canceling each other out, their reciprocity always leaves a remainder. Just as a mechanical lever might be considered as a mimetic affront to a human finger, so might that finger be considered an unwitting agent of virtuosic automatism that leaves the soul untouched. Similarly, the piano itself could be either lauded for its expressive qualities vis-à-vis the harpsichord and organ or 28 “Das Streben der Mechaniker, immer mehr und mehr die menschlichen Organe zum Hervorbringen musikalischer Töne nachzuahmen, oder durch mechanische Mittel zu ersetzen, ist mir der erklärte Krieg gegen das geistige Princip, dessen Macht nur noch glänzender siegt, je mehr scheinbare Kräfte ihm entgegengesetzt werden. Eben darum ist mir aber auch gerade die, nach mechanischen Begriffen vollkommenste Maschine der Art eben die verächtlichste, und eine einfache Drehorgel, die im Mechanischen nur das Mechanische bezweckt, immer noch lieber, als der Vaucansonsche Flötenblaser und die Harmonikaspielerin.” E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Die Automate,” in Die SerapionsBrüder, ed. Wulf and Ursula Segebrecht (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2001), 1377–1398 (1384). 29 On the “uncanny valley,” the rhetoric of which draws on Hoffmann via Sigmund Freud’s famous interpretation of “Der Sandmann,” see Angela Tinwell, The Uncanny Valley in Games and Animation (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2015). 10 found wanting by comparison to those of the violin, which was capable of echoing its player’s “slightest discomfort [or] softest change of mind,” according to Heinrich Heine.30 Surveying the endless stream of piano virtuosos passing through Paris in 1843, Heine let loose a Ludwig-like outburst aimed not at the musical approximations produced by automata, but at the humans who now sought to imitate them. This eternal piano playing has become unbearable! . . . This harsh jangling that lacks natural resonance, this heartless whirring, this prosaic banging and pecking, this Fortepiano is killing all our thoughts and feelings, and we are becoming stupid, dull, idiotic. This prevalence of piano playing, not to mention the triumphal parade of the piano virtuosos, is characteristic of our time and testifies to the victory of machinery over the spirit. Technical skill, the precision of an automaton, the identification with strung wood, the audible instrumentalization of human beings, are now hailed and celebrated to the highest degree.31 In his Projet de méthode, Chopin echoed Heinean truisms concerning the nature of music by describing it as “la manifestation de notre sentiment par les sons.”32 At the same time, he 30 “Die Violine ist ein Instrument, welches fast menschliche Launen hat und mit der Stimmung des Spielers sozusagen in einem sympathetischen Rapport steht: das geringste Mißbehagen, die leiseste Gemütserschütterung, ein Gefühlshauch, findet hier einen unmittelbaren Widerhall.” Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1974), 6 vols., V, 437. On Heine’s music criticism, see Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), and Hirt, When Machines Play Chopin, 92–121. 31 “Diese ewige Klavierspielerei ist nicht mehr zu ertragen! . . . Diese grellen Klimpertöne ohne natürliches Verhallen, diese herzlosen Schwirrklänge, dieses erzprosaische Schollern und Pickern, dieses Fortepiano tötet all unser Denken und Fühlen, und wir werden dumm, abgestumpft, blödsinnig. Dieses Überhandnehmen des Klavierspielens und gar die Triumphzüge der Klaviervirtuosen sind charakteristisch für unsere Zeit und zeugen ganz eigentlich von dem Sieg des Maschinenwesens über den Geist. Die technische Fertigkeit, die Präzision eines Automaten, das Identifizieren mit dem besaiteten Holze, die tönende Instrumentwerdung des Menschen, wird jetzt als das Höchste gepriesen und gefeiert.” Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, V, 435. Heine’s opinion was shared by critics such as Luigi Cherubini and François-Joseph Fétis, both of whom fired salvos in what Jim Samson describes as “yet another querelle” over the status and value of virtuosity (Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 73). 32 Chopin, Ésquisses pour une méthode de piano, 48. was at pains to stress that his method was concerned not with “musical feeling or style but purely with the technical aspects of playing, what I call the mechanism.”33 By drawing this distinction, Chopin indicated that hand and keyboard were united in their mechanical subservience to music’s impalpable qualities. At the same time, he implied that the smooth operation of both physiological and technological mechanisms was indispensable if such qualities were to be conveyed.34 The extent to which Chopin’s “mechanism” was capable of effacing all traces of the mechanical moved even Heine to join Robert Schumann in doffing his hat: “Yes, we must attribute genius to Chopin in the full sense of the word: he is not merely a virtuoso, he is also a poet. . . . In [his] case, I completely forget the mastery of piano-playing, and sink into the sweet abysses of his music, into the painful sweetness of his equally deep and tender creations.”35 Sophie Léo remarked that Chopin “appeared hardly to touch the piano; one might have thought an instrument superfluous. There was no suggestion of the mechanical; the flute-like murmur of his playing had the ethereal effect of Aeolian harps.”36 In a letter to Chopin, Astolphe de Custine conveyed similar sentiments: “I rediscovered you and with you the piano, without its tiresome features, without its meaningless notes, but with the thoughts that you express in 33 “Il n’est question [ici] bien entendu ni du sentiment musical ni du style, mais purement de la partie technique du jeu, que j’appelle le mécanisme.” Chopin, Ésquisses pour une méthode de piano, 60, trans. in Eigeldinger, Chopin, 192. 34 Eigeldinger notes that “mechanical precision was of vast importance to the composer-pianist.” (“Placing Chopin: Reflections on a Compositional Aesthetic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Chopin, ed. Samson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 102–39 [130].) See also John Rink, “Chopin and the Technique of Performance,” in Chopin in Performance: History, Theory, Practice, ed. Szklener (Warsaw: Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina, 2005), 225–37. 35 “Ja, dem Chopin muß man Genie zusprechen, in der vollen Bedeutung des Worts; er ist nicht bloß Virtuose, er ist auch Poet. . . . Bei Chopin vergesse ich ganz die Meisterschaft des Klavierspiels, und versinke in die süßen Abgründe seiner Musik, in die schmerzliche Lieblichkeit seiner ebenso tiefen wie zarten Schöpfungen.” Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, II, 353 and V, 442, trans. Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century, 61–62. 36 Quoted and trans. in Eigeldinger, Chopin, 279. spite of the instrument itself. You do not play on the piano but on the human soul.”37 These tropes endured to the extent that the very qualities that Chopin had managed to evince despite the piano’s shortcomings were displaced onto it and recast as its own attributes. Writing in 1930, when it was the piano’s turn to be threatened with obsolescence, Adolf Weissmann declared that at Chopin’s Promethean bidding, “the machine was endowed with a soul and made eloquent by a unique personality. Even scales and figurations began to quiver with excitement. . . . For the first time, the keyed machinery was redeemed.”38 Yet the redemption of the “keyed machinery” be wrought only through its punctiliously regulated operation: the ensoulment of the piano was made audible via the digital and podial activity it purported to transcend. This seeming paradox is a familiar feature of nineteenthcentury thought in the face of technological developments that continually redefined the human and the spiritual in the very terms of the new media that threatened to render them redundant. As John Durham Peters phrases it in the context of nascent telegraphy and telephony, “communication as a person-to-person activity became thinkable only in the shadow of mediated communication.”39 Similarly, 37 Quoted and trans. in ibid., 286. For Gooley, this strand of reception characterizes Chopin as “a transparent, disembodied conduit of pure sentiment” capable of “short-circuiting . . . communicative mediation” (“Between ésprit and génie,” 143). 38 “Hier war die Maschine von einem unerhörten Menschen beseelt, redend gemacht. Der Lauf, die Koloratur begann in Erregung zu beben. . . . Die Erlösung der Klaviermaschine durch den Menschen war zum ersten Male.” Adolf Weissmann, Die Entgötterung der Musik (Berlin: Hesse, 1930), trans. Eric Blom, Music Come to Earth (London: Dent, 1930), 11–12, 5. Weissmann was echoing Camille Pleyel and Hippolyte Barbedette, whose biography of Chopin appeared in 1861: see Kallberg, “Con duolo: On Chopin’s Soul,” in Chopin in Performance, 79–96, and Halina Goldberg, “Chopin’s Oneiric Soundscapes and the Role of Dreams in Romantic Culture,” in Chopin and His World, ed. Jonathan D. Bellman and Goldberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 15–43 (29). 39 John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 6. In a letter to his family of 20 July 1845, Chopin noted that the “year since we saw the JKdrzejowiczes” has gone by “as if along an electric telegraph wire” (Chopin’s Polish Letters, trans. David Frick, 372 [Warsaw: Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina, 2016]). 11 ROGER MOSELEY Chopin’s Aliases 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC Arthur Schopenhauer figured psychic life in the optically illusive terms of phantasmagoria and the magic lantern; retrospectively, even Immanuel Kant’s noumenal realm became apprehensible as a technological projection of the phenomenal world.40 Just as Hoffmann’s alphabetically encoded stream of consciousness mediated immediacy, so could Chopin’s notes, digits, and feet conjure the sound of an Aeolian harp, the spirit of vocality, the essence of personality, the soul of a nation, and other nineteenth-century intangibles. But how? What were the techniques by which technique could be heard to erase or transcend itself? Answers can be sought both in the metaphorical analogies applied to Chopin’s music and at the intersections of the various grids and filters that both barred and disclosed it. “The Hand of an Artist” Just as Chopin’s compositions imply much more than the direct bitmapping of tone, key, note, and measure, so does the realization of his music entail the conversion of digital motions into “la plus belle qualité possible de son,” as he put it.41 This process requires not only the distinctive melding of keyboard and hand, drawing on the affordances of each in order to accommodate the other, but also “some idea of hammers and dampers,” of the means by which the depression of keys could be transduced into the vibration and resonance of strings, phenomena that challenge the limits of discrete representation.42 When the Aeolian player-piano company attempted to persuade Artur Schnabel to sign a recording contract with the boast that its Duo-Art mechanism could register sixteen dynamic gradations, Schnabel was said to decline under the pretext that his playing deployed seventeen shades.43 While n is never enough, n+1 lies out of reach on the other side of the uncanny valley. Yet the very name of the Aeolian company points to the ambiguity of the nonhuman means by which “strung wood” can be sounded. The Duo-Art mechanism operated in the name of Aeolus, Greek god of the wind, who had spent the previous two centuries animating countless harps ranging in scope from boxes placed at open windows to the enormous meteorological devices described by Jacob Bernoulli and Hoffmann.44 The eerie sonorities produced by Aeolian harps were prized for their oracular qualities as well as their autonomous operation: in registering the atmospheric present and predicting its future, they were heard to envoice nature.45 At the same time, like the cultivated technology of the piano, they served as analogies for what Heine bemoaned as the “audible instrumentalization of human beings,” whether its effects were inspirational or suffocative. For Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, the transductive functions of the Aeolian harp were echoed within the sympathetic human body: “Music courageously smites upon the hidden harp strings and, in that inner world of mystery, strikes up in due succession certain mysterious 43 40 On the material practices and media technologies that underpinned German idealism, see Stefan Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (New York: Zone Books, 2013), 49–71. 41 Chopin, Ésquisses pour une méthode de piano, 42. 42 “[On] a l’idée des marteaux et des étouffoirs.” Chopin, Ésquisses pour une méthode de piano, 64, trans. in Eigeldinger, Chopin, 192–93. Chopin saluted “le génie qui a présidé à la construction du clavier, si bien en rapport avec la conformation de la main” (Ésquisses pour une méthode de piano, 60). For his part, Józef Sikorski hailed the sustaining pedal as “the universal means through which Chopin realized the spirit that he applied to all compositions” in his obituary of the composer (“Recollection of Chopin,” trans. John Comber, in Chopin and His World, 45–85 [78–79]). 12 The anecdote is relayed in Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Pianola: The History of the Self-Playing Piano (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 263. As Ord-Hume reports elsewhere, however, Schnabel made multiple piano rolls for Welte-Mignon and Ampico (Player Piano: The History of the Mechanical Piano and How to Repair It [London: Allen & Unwin, 1970], 96–97), which indicates that it might be apocryphal. 44 See Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments of the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 102. Ludwig mentions the Wetterharfe in Hoffmann’s “Die Automate,” 1388. 45 On the Aeolian harp’s manifestations and resonances, see Hankins and Silverman, Instruments of the Imagination, 86–112; Dolan, “E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Ethereal Technologies of ‘Nature Music’”; Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 41–52; and Inge van Rij, “‘A Living, Fleshy Bond’: The Electric Telegraph, Musical Thought, and Embodiment,” this journal 39 (2015): 142–66. ROGER MOSELEY Chopin’s Aliases Plate 3: Facsimile of the first page of Chopin’s autograph manuscript of his Étude in A♭ Major, op. 25, no. 1 (1836), mm. 1–19. Reproduced from Works by Chopin: Facsimile Edition, [10] A II/25, ed. Zofia Chechlińska (Warsaw: Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina, 2007). chords—our heart-strings, and we understand the music.”46 On a darker note, Hector Berlioz attributed “a deep feeling of . . . surrender” and “a temptation toward suicide” to the effects of the Aeolian harp, as did Hoffmann’s Ludwig, hinting that the promise (or threat) of automatism could issue from (super)natural as well as cultural forces.47 The mysterious acoustical effects of Aeolian harps ran the gamut from pungent dissonance to sweet harmony depending on whether their 46 Quoted in Oskar Walzel, trans. Alma Elise Lussky, German Romanticism (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932), 123. 47 Quoted and trans. in Hankins and Silverman, Instruments of the Imagination, 99; Hoffmann, “Die Automate,” 1389. strings were activated transversally, longitudinally, or frictionally.48 On the one hand, they could be stimulated to produce mournful glissandi; on the other, they could resonate in mellifluous accordance with the harmonic series, suggesting a point of confluence between nature and art. It was this reciprocity that Schumann invoked when he inadvertently attached the Aeolian harp as a sobriquet to Chopin’s Étude in A♭ Major, op. 25, no. 1 (1836, plate 3), in the wake of the composer’s performance of the work: “Imagine that an Aeolian 48 On the acoustical properties of the Aeolian harp and nineteenth-century attempts to account for its effects, see Hankins and Silverman, Instruments of the Imagination, 95–99. 13 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC harp possessed all the musical scales, and that the hand of an artist were to cause them all to intermingle in all sorts of fantastic embellishments, and yet in such a way as to leave everywhere audible a deep fundamental tone and a soft continuously-singing upper voice, and you will get the right idea of his playing.”49 While the musician’s ear must be attuned to natural order, nature might also be bent to the musician’s will. Although the harmonic texture subtly modulates throughout op. 25, no. 1, within each tonal zone it is typically composed of the most prominent intervals from the harmonic series, giving rise to delicate major triads and dominant sevenths nestling within a euphonious tonal haze. Schumann cautioned that “[it] would be a mistake to think that he let us hear each of the small notes distinctly; it was more like a wave of sound in A♭, heightened from time to time by the pedal.”50 Above, the melody unfurls in parallax: save for the odd upper neighbor and passing tone, it too initially dwells on the fifth, the root, and the major third, although all three pitches are subjected to harmonic recontextualization. 49 “Denke man sich, eine Aeolsharfe hätte alle Tonleitern und es würfe diese die Hand eines Künstlers in allerhand phantastischen Verzierungen durcheinander, doch so, daß immer ein tieferer Grundton und eine weich fortsingende höhere Stimme hörbar—und man hat ungefähr ein Bild seines Spieles.” Schumann, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 7 (1837): 199, trans. in James Huneker, Chopin: The Man and His Music (New York: Scribner’s Sons), 173. Schumann might have been riffing on Jean Paul’s invocation of the piano and the Aeolian harp when distinguishing between “talent” and “genius” in his Vorschule der Aesthetik (1804): “The one-sided talent gives only one sound, like a piano string hit by a hammer; but the genius resembles the string of an Aeolian harp: one and the same produces manifold sounds from manifold winds” (quoted and trans. in Neonato, “Irony and Mechanics in Schumann’s Toccata, Op. 7,” 32). Schumann’s remark also chimes with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s contention that it is “as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre” (“A Defence of Poetry,” in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments [London: Edward Moxan, 1840], 2). 50 “Man irrt aber, wenn man meint, er hätte da jede der kleinen Noten deutlich hören lassen; es war mehr ein Wogen des As-Dur-Accordes, vom Pedal hier und da von Neuem in die Höhe gehoben.” (Schumann, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 7 [1837]: 199, trans. in Leon B. Plantinga, Schumann as Critic [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967], 231). 14 As can be seen at the bottom of plate 3, Chopin instructed the engraver to distinguish clearly between the large notes that outline this melody and the small ones that fill in the harmony. Despite Chopin’s directive, however, the question of precisely which notes are “grandes,” and which “petites” has been resolved in different ways based on factors ranging from the variability of Chopin’s penmanship to inferences drawn from his occasional highlighting of an inner voice, most notably the tenor thumb that, as Schumann both saw and heard, descends in contrary motion to the main melody in mm. 17–20.51 In his 1916 edition, and to an even greater extent in his 1934 recording, Alfred Cortot brings out patterns concealed within inner voices elsewhere, such as in mm. 15–16.52 These practices emerged from the sense in which op. 25, no. 1, is “an exercise in gradations of touch,” as Charles Rosen described it, that helped define the rules of the figure-ground game played by Rubinstein in his 1963 recording of op. 64, no. 2.53 Significantly, however, the question of which notes might be identified in this way also departs from the mimetic creation of an all-encompassing “wave of sound.” The indication that a note should obtrude from its context presupposes not only a deictic praxis of distinguishing melody from harmony or signal from noise, but a symbolic order capable of establishing the grounds on which identity and non-identity can be assigned and construed. This helps explain why Chopin’s 51 “[Aber] durch die Harmonieen hindurch vernahm man in großen Tönen Melodie, wundersame, und nur in der Mitte trat einmal neben jenem Hauptgesang auch eine Tenorstimme aus den Accorden deutlicher hervor.” Schumann, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 7 (1837): 199. For a range of interpretations of this issue, see Chopin’s other autograph manuscript of op. 25, no. 1 (reproduced in Leopold Binental, Chopin w 120-tF rocznicJ urodzin: Documenty i pamiatki [Warsaw: Lazarskiego, 1930], plates 60–62), which reveals that Chopin initially double-stemmed the melodic notes, and the editions of Breitkopf & Härtel (Leipzig: n.d. [“nouvelle édition,” no. 12281]), Karol Mikuli (New York: Schirmer, 1895), and Cortot (Paris: Senart, 1916). 52 In his edition, Cortot supplements Chopin’s indications of which notes to privilege via accents in parentheses; in his recording (HMV DB2308–10), he brings out still more while adding the occasional octave doubling for good measure. 53 Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 371–72. ROGER MOSELEY Chopin’s Aliases Plate 4: Chopin, Prélude in F, op. 28, no. 23, first edition (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, n.d.), mm. 19–22. notation has so often been understood not simply to describe, prescribe, instruct, or suggest, but rather to pose inscrutable puzzles that require philological decipherment, hermeneutic rigor, and the odd leap of pianistic faith.54 One such puzzle is the aberrant E♭, played by the left hand’s thumb, that tints the final arpeggio of the Prélude in F, op. 28, no. 23 (plate 4). In addition to seeking answers in the piece’s generic function and its penultimate location within the set, we might follow Heinrich Schenker in hearing it not to form or mimic a functional seventh chord, but as a “poetic-visionary attempt” to materialize the most prominent extra-triadic overtone: its accent both signals and conveys an Aeolian transmission whose autophonic sonorities were capable of moving even Hoffmann’s Ludwig.55 Chopin could evoke nature via deictic gestures at the keyboard that at once contrived and belied it. 54 See, for instance, Wojciech Nowik, “Frédéric Chopin’s Musical Notation: Its Form, Specific Features and Function,” in Chopin Studies 3, ed. Zygmunt Mycielski et al. (Warsaw: Frederick Chopin Society, 1990), 105–29; Sandra P. Rosenblum, “Some Enigmas of Chopin’s Pedal Indications: What Do the Sources Tell Us?”, Journal of Musicological Research 16, no. 1 (1996): 41–46; and Roberto Poli, The Secret Life of Musical Notation: Defying Interpretive Traditions (New York: Amadeus Press, 2010). 55 Heinrich Schenker, Harmony, ed. Oswald Jonas, trans. Elisabeth Mann Borgese (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 27: I am grateful to Jonathan De Souza for bringing this passage to my attention. In Hoffmann’s “Die Automate,” Ludwig recalls hearing the wind somehow activate this very chord to profound effect in the dead of East Prussian autumn nights: “Oft konnte ich genau das tiefe F mit der anschlagenden Quinte C unterscheiden, ja oft erklang die kleine Terz des C, Es, so dass der schneidende Septimenaccord in den Tönen der tiefsten Klage meine Brust mit, das Innerste durchdringender Wehmuth” (1386– 87). “Silvery Lace Woven by Elves in the Moonlight” Beyond its sonic signatures, the Aeolian harp stood for Chopin’s founding of bel canto melody on a fundamental bass and the happy union he effected between the natural and the cultural.56 His music was played and heard in light of the piano’s morphological kinship with the Aeolian harp and its associations with both rational order and irrational phenomena. In this regard, Chopin’s own identity seemed to fuse with the piano’s: his “soul was strung with Aeolian harpstrings, on which the lightest breath of wind played wondrous unknown melodies [to which] we listened as though the elementary voice of Nature pronounced an enigmatic prophecy,” as Ehlert put it.57 To become audible, however, this voice could not merely pass through Chopin’s body and the grid of the keyboard: it had to take shape where they met. As Chopin repeatedly impressed upon his pupil Emilie von Gretsch, “[il] faut chanter avec les doigts!”58 56 David Kasunic observes that in addition to Schumann and Sophie Léo, Henry Chorley and Henri Blaze de Bury described Chopin’s playing in terms of the Aeolian harp (“Revisiting Chopin’s Tubercular Song, or, An Opera in the Making,” in Chopin and His World, 103–21 [105]). 57 “Der arme Chopin! seine Seele war mit Aeolsharfensaiten bespannt, auf denen der leiseste Windhauch wunderbar unbekannte Weisen spielte; wie aus heiliger Stille klingen diese seraphischen Legenden an unser Ohr, daß wir aufhorchen, als spräche die Natur selbst mit elementarer Stimme eine räthselhafte Weissagung aus.” Ehlert, Briefe über Musik an eine Freundin (Berlin: Guttentag, 1859), 125, trans. as Letters on Music to a Lady by Fanny Raymond Ritter (Boston: Ditson, 1870), 166 (trans. slightly modified). On Chopin’s identity in this regard, see also Gooley, “Between ésprit and génie.” 58 Quoted and trans. in Eigeldinger, Chopin, 45. 15 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC Plate 5: Chopin, Nocturne in F ♯ Major, op. 15, no. 2 (Paris: Schlesinger, n.d.), mm. 16–20. Audio 2: Chopin, Nocturne in F ♯ Major, op. 15, no. 2, mm. 16–20, performed by Ignacy Jan Paderewski (Victrola 74529, recorded in 1917). (See online edition.) The Nocturne in F♯ Major, op. 15, no. 2 (1832), is typical of its genre insofar as it exhibits evidence of the pianistic techniques through which Chopin manually re-created the style of singers such as Giulia Grisi, Maria Malibran, Giuditta Pasta, and Giovanni Battista Rubini.59 In particular, Maurycy Karasowski noted that Chopin “loved to find in piano playing what we understand by portamento in singing” and was known to add it as an improvisatory embellishment when performing his own music.60 The passage in plate 5 indicates how such portamento could be effectively digitized.61 In notational terms, the raw bitmapping of pitch and duration is supplemented by a slew of curves and vectors that occupy the Romantic interstice space between the limits of the knowable and the je ne sais quoi. The array of slurs, phrase marks, and hairpins, not to mention the qualitative and superlative linguistic directions, are all precisely vague in their refusal to be reduced to the binary encoding of information or instruction.62 59 On Chopin’s multifaceted evocations of song, see Bellman, “Middlebrow Becomes Transcendent: The Popular Roots of Chopin’s Musical Language,” in Chopin and His World, 147–70 (152–57). 60 Quoted and trans. in Eigeldinger, Chopin, 45; see also 113– 15n.82. 61 I am grateful to Malcolm Bilson for drawing this example to my attention. 62 Even the pedal indications index a practice of far greater subtlety than their on/off directions appear to convey: see, for instance, Rosenblum, “Some Enigmas of Chopin’s Pedal Indications”; Dominique Merlet, “L’art de la pédale chez Chopin,” in L’interprétation de Chopin en France, ed. Danièle Pistone (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1990), 35–43; and Poli, The Secret Life of Musical Notation, 139– 79. For a concise overview of attempts to capture the nuances of pedaling on the page, which reach back as far as Muzio Clementi, see David Rowland, “Piano Notation in 16 But of greatest import here are the seven notes perdues that simultaneously register and prompt the performance of the portamento.63 Despite their binding to the keyboard’s chromatic trellis, their fastidiously unmeasured defiance of metrical arithmetic would have risked falling between the cracks of Engramelle’s most refined sampling mechanism. In the process of Ignacy Jan Paderewski’s sensitive realization (Audio 2), the temporal calculus of a vocal body in motion creates the illusion that its melodic trajectory is analogously continuous.64 Effects such as this were presumably in Ehlert’s mind when he evoked the most delicate grids and filters imaginable in likening Chopin’s “super-sensuously fine [and] fantastic Chopin and Liszt’s Paris,” in “Grandeur et finesse”: Chopin, Liszt and the Parisian Music Scene, ed. Luca Sala (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 111–24 (117–20). 63 Frederick Neumann traces the compositional deployment of notes perdues, small notes “that were not included in the metrical count of the measure,” back to Marin Marais and suggests their history extends even further (Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music, with Special Emphasis on J. S. Bach [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983], 34–35). I am grateful to Rebekah Arendt for bringing this point to my attention. 64 Kleczynski noted that “the small chromatic scale renders the fall of the voice easy, and excellently imitates the vocal portamento or the gliding of the finger along the strings of a violin” (Chopin’s Greater Works, 33). Even to the extent that they remain audible, Chopin’s semitones might themselves be understood as a faithful imitation (rather than a pixelated approximation) of vocal technique in the form of the chromatic scales performed to ravishing effect by singers such as Laure Cinti-Damoreau and Henriette Sontag, both of whom Chopin compared to instrumentalists: see Bellman, “Middlebrow Becomes Transcendent,” 156. embellishments” to “silvery lace woven by elves in the moonlight.”65 Such effects were made possible via the acquisition of techniques modeled throughout Chopin’s études, which thematize the mechanical underpinnings of poetry as well as the poetry of a well-oiled mechanism in motion. As is evident in the case of op. 25, no. 1, the very manner of their notation put these techniques on conspicuous display. Confronted by the interlaced lines and ellipses that formed the score of Chopin’s variations on Mozart’s “Là ci darem la mano,” Schumann famously “felt as if I were being watched by strange, wondering eyes, flowers’ eyes, basilisks’ eyes, peacocks’ eyes, young girls’ eyes.”66 Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, conversely, James Huneker described the decidedly unromantic alarm of the unsuspecting novice upon turning to the first page of Chopin’s op. 10 set of études: “The irregular, black, ascending and descending staircases of notes strike the neophyte with terror. . . . Here is the new technique in all its nakedness, new in the sense of figure, design, pattern, web.”67 While notation of all types suggests crossdomain mappings across sensorial realms, the idiosyncrasies of Chopin’s written music only begin to make sense through its tangible realization.68 As Ehlert put it, Chopin’s music was formed from the union of poetry with dexterity. . . . Its combinatorial power was always under the unconscious control of digital technique. Chopin’s imagination must have had some kind of mental method of fingering that made the most extravagant passages immediately accessible to the hand. . . . [In the case of the Étude in G♯ Minor, op. 25, no. 6,] Chopin makes such a work of art out of an exercise in thirds that, in the study of the same, we imagine ourselves more on Parnassus than at work upon a lesson.69 Addressing the same étude, Huneker turned the selection of fingering from a matter of comfort or aesthetics into an index of ideology: “Where two or three pianists are gathered together in the name of Chopin, the conversation is bound to formulate itself thus: ‘How do you finger the double chromatic thirds in the G♯ minor study?’ That question answered, your digital politics are known. You are classified, ranged. If you are heterodox you are eagerly questioned; if you follow von Bülow and stand by the Czerny fingering, you are regarded as a curiosity.”70 The taxonomical import of this question does not solely hinge on which fingering is smoothest or most efficient: on the contrary, it derives in part from Chopin’s stance against the digital fungibility and perfect evenness promoted by François-Joseph Fétis and others.71 “As many different sounds as there are fingers,” he wrote; going even further, and outdoing the seventeen shades of grey that Schnabel 65 “Hat die Filigranarbeit und die maurische Arabeske etwas so übersinnlich Feines gesponnen wie jene fantastischen Zierrathen, welche aussehen, als waren es blasse Spitzen, von Elfen im Mondlicht geklöppelt?” Ehlert, Briefe über Musik an eine Freundin, 130, trans. Ritter, 172–73. In hearing Chopin’s music to evoke elven lace, Ehlert was following in a well-established tradition: see Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 66 and 76– 77, and Rosenblum, “Some Enigmas of Chopin’s Pedal Indications,” 42. 66 “Hier aber war mir’s, als blickten mich lauter fremde Augen, Blumenaugen, Basiliskenaugen, Pfauenaugen, Mädchenaugen wundersam an.” Schumann, “Ein Opus II,” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 33, no. 49 (1831): cols. 805–08 (806). 67 Huneker, Chopin, 144. Huneker’s observations—which are readily applicable to more recent études by György Ligeti, Marc-André Hamelin, and Unsuk Chin—are borne out in Maurizio Pollini’s recording of op. 10, no. 1 (Deutsche Grammophon 2530–291, 1973), which exposes these attributes with forensic clarity. 68 On such mappings, see Gurminder Kaur Bhogal, “Visual Metaphors in Music Analysis and Criticism,” in The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, ed. Tim Shephard and Anne Leonard (New York: Routledge, 2014), 191–99. 69 “Es handelte sich hier nicht um neue Passagen, in der Art Hummel’s und Clementi’s, sondern um eine aus der Verbindung von Poesie und Fingergefühl entstandene neue Form von Wirkungen. . . . Es war ein Combinationsvermögen, welches immer unter der unbewußten Controlle der Applicatur stand. Chopin’s Phantasie muß eine Art von geistigem Fingersatz gehabt haben, welcher den ausschweifendsten Wendungen etwas angeboren Handgerechtes gab. . . . Chopin bringt eine Terzenübung nicht nur in Verse, er macht ein solches Kunstwerk aus ihr, daß man sich beim Studiren derselben mehr auf dem Parnaß als in der Lection glaubt.” Ehlert, “Frederic Chopin,” 294–95, trans. Slocum, 97 (trans. modified). 70 Huneker, Chopin, 189. See Eigeldinger, Chopin, 40, for Chopin’s own fingering for op. 25, no. 6, as relayed by Mikuli. 71 On the Méthode des méthodes compiled by Fétis and Ignaz Moscheles and the implications of the digital equalization it recommends (despite the incorporation of Chopin’s name and music), see Szendy, Phantom Limbs, 65–68. 17 ROGER MOSELEY Chopin’s Aliases 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC Plate 6: a. a circle as a vector; b. a circle as a bitmap; c. a circle as an anti-aliased bitmap. claimed to draw from the keyboard’s monochrome palette, he showed one pupil how to “obtain diverse sonorities from the same key, by striking it in twenty different ways.”72 Conversely, it was said that Chopin often deployed the same digit on adjacent keys for ergonomic reasons that also contributed to the cause of tonal variety and gestural nuance.73 Cumulatively, and in marked contrast to the identification of accented aliases elsewhere in Chopin’s oeuvre, these methods amount to a pianistic anti-aliasing technique analogous to the method by which the sharp edges of crudely bitmapped graphics are softened in plate 6. In op. 25, no. 6, the performer’s task is not merely to play the notes, but to transform the jagged edges of their bitmapped information into vectors at the keyboard by the co-ordination of a supple wrist and precise digital motions. Even when fingers, hands, and wrists moved with the utmost smoothness, the grid of the keyboard could not help but introduce significant rounding errors. But through the strategic addition of finely shaded grey pixels, which is to say the striking of each key as if “a fly [were] brushing against it with its wing,” in the words of Chopin’s pupil Marcelina Czartoryska, bitmapped edges recede into a blurry haze.74 Chopin himself noted that “no one will notice the inequality of sound in a very fast scale, as long as the notes are played in equal time.”75 In psycho-acoustical terms, his acknowledgment of both anatomical and sonic inequality was tantamount to the digital technique of dithering, which involves the deliberate introduction of noise—and, on occasion, silence—into a signal to eliminate undue uniformity and to mitigate against banding artifacts.76 These antialiasing techniques compensated for the keyboard’s limited granularity by relying on the indexical qualities of each digit to introduce subtle degrees of variation at which fingering numerals—not to mention the notes themselves—could provide only the broadest of hints. As demonstrated by Josef Lhévinne’s 1935 recording of op. 25, no. 6 (Audio 3), the discreetly discrete application of digital dithering can make the étude’s finely graded trills, flumes, and cascades flow all the more continuously. Audio 3: Chopin, Étude in G♯ Minor, op. 25, no. 6 (1836), mm. 1–34, performed by Josef Lhévinne (RCA Victrola VIC–1544, recorded in 1935). (See online edition.) The subtleties through which Chopin’s craftsmanship at once conformed to and sought to elude the strictures of the keyboard’s grid fascinated Johanna Kinkel, an author, composer, 72 “Autant de différents sons que de doigts.” Chopin, Ésquisses pour une méthode de piano, 74; F.-Henry Peru, quoted and trans. in Eigeldinger, Chopin, 32. 73 Mikuli, quoted and trans. in Eigeldinger, Chopin, 40. On the nuances of Chopin’s pianistic touch, see Rosenbum, “Chopin Among the Pianists in Paris,” in Chopin and His World, 271–95 (282–87), and Bellman, “Frédéric Chopin, Antoine de Kontski and the carezzando Touch,” Early Music 29, no. 3 (2001): 398–407. 74 Quoted and trans. in Eigeldinger, Chopin, 32. 18 75 “Personne ne remarquera l’inégalité du son dans une gamme très vite quand elle sera jouée également pour le temps.” Chopin, Ésquisses pour une méthode de piano, 74, trans. in Eigeldinger, Chopin, 195. 76 On dithering in the sonic domain, see Melle Kromhout, Noise Resonance: Technological Sound Reproduction and the Logic of Filtering (Ph.D. diss., Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2017), 71–115. conductor, singer, pianist, pedagogue, and activist who fled Germany for London in the aftermath of 1848. For all their agogic and dynamic nuance, Kinkel bemoaned the fact that Chopin’s melodies were condemned to “slink reluctantly by way of semitones” in a quest for “finer spiritual nuances than current intentions can realize.”77 Her call to double the number of gradations in the scale might be aligned with Engramelle’s pragmatic approach to the matter of temporal resolution insofar as the maneuver effectively rescales a grid as a filter capable of extracting the refined essence of Chopin’s music. The ramifications of her proposal extended further, however, for its terms were politically as well as historiographically charged. With revolutionary zeal, Kinkel heard Chopin’s enharmonic digital maneuvers to “rattle the mysterious gate” behind which “Nature’s eternal sounds” were imprisoned.78 By distinguishing between a C and a D♭♭ in defiance of the inconvenient fact that the two pitches were forced to share the same key, Chopin’s music captured traces of “the spirit voices whispering in the spheres which only the soul can perceive” and heralded the “emancipation of quarter tones,” which would create nothing less than “a new Tonwelt!”79 Yet grids can offer insight even as they restrict access. A cross-hatched “veil” had first enabled Leon Battista Alberti to render natural phenomena as veristic images, as laid out in Della pittura (1435) and later illustrated by Hieronymus Rodler, who mapped the lattice77 “Seine Melodien schleichen widerstrebend durch die halben Töne, als tasteten sie nach feinern, vergeistigtern Nüancen, als die vorhandenen feinen Intentionen bieten.” Johanna Kinkel, Acht Briefe an eine Freundin über Klavierunterricht (Stuttgart: Cotta, 152), 78–79. On Kinkel’s multi-faceted career, see Linda Siegel, “Johanna Kinkel’s Chopin als Komponist and Other Musical Writings: Untapped Source Readings in the History of Romantic Music,” College Music Symposium 43 (2003): 105–25. 78 “An dieser mysteriösen Pforte scheint Chopin zu rütteln. . . . Ist einmal diese Pforte gesprengt, so sind wir abermals um einen Schritt näher den ewigen Naturlauten.” Kinkel, Acht Briefe an eine Freundin über Klavierunterricht, 78– 79. 79 Quoted and trans. in Siegel, “Johanna Kinkel’s Chopin als Komponist and Other Musical Writings,” 112 (Kinkel was referring to Chopin’s Impromptu in A♭ Major, op. 29, m. 27); “Emancipirt die Vierteltöne, so habt ihr eine neue Tonwelt!” Kinkel, Acht Briefe an eine Freundin über Klavierunterricht, 78. work of a window directly onto a painter’s canvas.80 Writing in 1979, Rosalind Krauss asserted that the grid “is an emblem of modernity by being just that: the form that is ubiquitous in the art of our century, while appearing nowhere, nowhere at all, in the art of the last one.”81 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, Albertian grids were conceived (and recursively subdivided) in order to encode and send pixelated images along the Aeolian fibers of the telegraph, as illustrated by a device invented by M. W. H. Lowd.82 This goes to show that nineteenth-century grids hid in plain sight: if they rarely drew attention to themselves, they nonetheless played crucial technical roles in rendering optical phenomena visible.83 Analogously, the keyboard’s gridwork formed multiple frames through which nature’s swoops and parabolas could become observable, calculable, graspable, and re-creatable in a lifelike manner. Chopin deployed techniques that rely on both the grid’s intersections and its interstices, on the veil’s ambiguous capacity to mask and reveal. As Ehlert noted in relation to the quintuplets that animate the “impassioned middle portion” of op. 15, no. 2, “the original thought is here covered over with a thick veil; but even the veil can serve as ornament.”84 Similarly, 80 See Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 98–100; Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 61–62; and Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (1979): 50–64 (52). 81 Krauss, “Grids,” 52. 82 See Daniel Bellet, “La télégraphie des dessins,” La nature 24, no. 1175 (1896): 26–27. In an article on the Aeolian harp published in the same journal fourteen years beforehand (“Les harpes éoliennes,” La nature 11, no. 496 [1882]: 44–46), Dr. Z… observed that “under the influence of the wind, telegraph wires are often subjected to vibrations that reproduce phenomena associated with the Aeolian harp. The electric telegraph that crossed the Rhine before the construction of the Kehl bridge very frequently resonated in such a manner: the observer who placed an ear against the poles on the river bank could hear a sound resembling the far-off ringing of bells” (“Les harpes éoliennes,” 46). On such phenomena, see Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal, 45–52, and van Rij, “‘A Living, Fleshy Bond,’” 151–55. 83 On this point, see Krauss, “Grids,” 57. 84 “Selbst der leidenschaftliche Mittelsatz streift in seiner Quintolenbewegung an das, was ich das tragisch figurirte Ornament nennen möchte. Der ursprüngliche Gedanke wird hier durch dichte Schleier verhüllt, aber auch der Schleier kann Ornament sein.” Ehlert, “Frederic Chopin,” 301, trans. Slocum, 105. 19 ROGER MOSELEY Chopin’s Aliases 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC while Kinkel deplored the “clumsy patchwork” of tones and semitones that composers vainly cobbled together in mimetic pursuit of the Aeolian harp’s magical strains, she praised Chopin’s “episodic melismas” that at once embroidered and obscured their musical “roots.”85 Kinkel advised students “to place a figuredbass symbol under each note” in order to reverse-engineer the processes from which Chopin’s “tone-tapestry” had been compositionally fabricated and could be woven anew at the piano.86 Instead of forcing the hand to conform to the keyboard’s flat planes and straight lines, Chopin reconfigured the keyboard in light of the hand’s natural properties. “You should . . . mould the keyboard with a velvet hand,” he advised his pupil Georges Mathias.87 To that end, B major displaced C major as the default key and the diminished seventh ousted the major triad as the archetypal arpeggio.88 In a flagrant reversal of pedagogical norms, sharps were naturalized and accidentals deemed essential in order to form the voluptuous assortments of black and white keys that constitute Chopin’s signature tonalities. Accordingly, anatomy and aesthetics were assumed—and thereby demonstrated— to be inextricable, as borne out on the one hand by the delicate refinement of Chopin’s own physiognomy and on the other by his distaste for the “gigantic finger, which was destined somewhere out there in the Ukraine to wield a steward’s whip and reins,” belonging to his unfortunate pupil Wojciech Sowiński.89 The unseemly threat of glitches posed by such digital protuberances was countered by Chopin’s continuous movement of the wrist, the quasi-respiratory function of which was described by Karol Mikuli as “even-flowing rather than in steps.” 90 Liquescence was a hallmark of Chopin’s pianism: he parodied the effusions of his British pupils, who repeatedly exclaimed “Like water!” upon hearing him play. When it was their turn, however, he reported that the same pupils were all too aware of their physiological mechanisms and blissfully oblivious of the sonic consequences: “They all look at their hands and play the wrong notes with great enthusiasm.”91 Musical attributes both informed and were reflected by the framing of nation, ethnicity, character, and physique. As Mikuli’s sharp distinction between stepped and flowing motion suggests, relationships between the discrete and the continuous were themselves typically figured in binaristic terms, whether relating to keyboard and hand, mechanism and body, virtuosity and expression, or technique and feeling.92 Even within the bounds of the self, the two hands were subjected to the symbolic logic of law and (dis)order, at least insofar as their dexterous 85 “Denn warum können wir die Aeolsharfe, das Waldesrauschen, die zauberischen Laute des Wassers nicht treu in Töne fassen, nur schwach nachahmen, weil unsere sogenannten ganzen und halben Töne zu plump und lückenhaft auseinander liegen, während die Natur nicht bloß Viertel- und Achteltöne, sondern die unendliche, kaum in Klang-Atome zersetzte Skala besitzt!” Kinkel, Acht Briefe an eine Freundin über Klavierunterricht, 79; Kinkel, quoted and trans. in Siegel, “Johanna Kinkel’s Chopin als Komponist and Other Musical Writings,” 114. 86 Ibid. Kinkel was responding to what Rosen would describe as Chopin’s signal achievement, the “reconception [of Classical counterpoint] in terms of Romantic color” (The Romantic Generation, 302; see also Samson, Chopin [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 124–25 and 165–67). 87 Quoted and trans. in Eigeldinger, Chopin, 31. 88 Chopin opined that “il est inutile de commencer à apprendre les gammes au piano par celle d’ut, la plus facile pour lire, et la plus difficile pour la main, comme n’ayant aucun point d’appui. On commence par une [gamme] qui place la main facilement, occupant les doigts longs avec les touches hautes, comme p[ar] ex[emple] si majeur.” (Ésquisses pour une méthode de piano, 66.) On the primacy of the diminished seventh, ibid., 62, and Eigeldinger, Chopin, 25, 36, and 90–91n.3. 20 89 Chopin to Tytus Woyciechowski, 25 December 1831, trans. in Chopin’s Polish Letters, 257. On the relationship between character and physiognomy as evinced by portraits of nineteenth-century musicians, see Wiebke Thormählen, “Physical Distortion, Emotion and Subjectivity: Musical Virtuosity and Body Anxiety,” in Music and the Nerves, 1700–1900, ed. James Kennaway (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 191–215 (193–200). For an insightful treatment of the relationship between anatomy, technique, and aesthetics in Chopin’s music, see James Q. Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 41–65. 90 Quoted and trans. in Eigeldinger, Chopin, 37 and 45. In his Projet de méthode, Chopin compared the role of the wrist to “la respiration dans la voix” (Ésquisses pour une méthode de piano, 76). 91 Chopin to Wojciech Grzyma¬a, 21 October 1848, trans. in Chopin’s Polish Letters, 467. 92 On the prevalence of such thought in the context of virtuosity and “symphonic taste,” see Dana Gooley, “The Battle Against Instrumental Virtuosity in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Franz Liszt and His World, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs and Gooley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 75–111 (76–77). ROGER MOSELEY Chopin’s Aliases Plate 7: Chopin, Ballade in F Minor, op. 52 (Paris: Schlesinger, n.d.), mm. 173–78. and sinister activities were represented for pedagogical purposes. This is particularly evident in the temporal domain, where the freedom of Chopin’s celebrated rubato was understood to arise from adherence to a strict ethical code: the left hand held its counterpart accountable for any stolen time, insisting that it be paid back in full. As Chopin reportedly put it to Wilhelm von Lenz: “The left hand is the Kapellmeister: it mustn’t relent or bend. It’s a clock. Do with the right hand what you want and can.”93 At the hands of pianists such as Paderewski, however, the manual desynchronization hard-baked into the F ♯-Major Nocturne’s notation became a stylism to be performed wholesale.94 Exceptionalism became a rule according to which the inimitable could be all too easily imitated, albeit at the cost of accu- 93 Quoted and trans. in Eigeldinger, Chopin, 50. Writing in 1935, Mark Hambourg claimed that Chopin himself used a metronome while practicing: see “A Master Lesson by Mark Hambourg,” in Piano Lessons in the Grand Style: From the Golden Age of The Etude Music Magazine (1913– 1940), ed. Jeffrey Johnson (New York: Dover, 2003), 32–33 (32). 94 Tellingly, Paderewski also omits the bass line’s octave doubling, creating an increased degree of spatial latitude between the hands that is matched by their temporal desynchronization. mulating temporal debt that would never be repaid.95 Yet Chopin’s compositional practice defied both the neat distinctions he preached and liberties taken by subsequent pianists (if not himself).96 A passage in the Ballade in F Minor, op. 52 (1842–43, plate 7), provides an example of how expressive rubato could itself be prescribed and charted by way of nothing more than ingeniously precise measurement, just as Engramelle had claimed. Here, the hemiola technique on display in the nocturne (m. 19) is com- 95 Anticipating the methods of latter-day empirical musicology, the Chopinian notion that time stolen must be paid back was put to the test—and found wanting—by John Blackwood McEwen’s analysis of piano rolls by Busoni, Vladimir de Pachmann, and Teresa Carreño in his pamphlet Tempo Rubato or Time-Variation in Musical Performance (London: Oxford University Press, 1928). See also Mark Arnest, “Why Couldn’t They Play with Their Hands Together? Noncoordination between and within the Hands in 19th-Century Piano Interpretation,” http:// www.lib.umd.edu/binaries/content/assets/public/ipam/resources-reviews-and-links/arnest-hands-together-article-pdf5-15-12.pdf, and Richard Hudson, Stolen Time: The History of Tempo Rubato (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 96 On Chopin’s rhythmic license and its implications for historically (and nationally) informed notions of rubato, see Rowland, “Chopin’s tempo rubato in Context,” in Chopin Studies 2, 199–213, and Bellman, “Chopin’s Pianism and the Reconstruction of the Ineffable,” Keyboard Perspectives 3 (2010): 1–21 (13–18). 21 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC pounded by the progressive offsetting of the primary melodic pitches, gradually running up a rhythmical debt that is gracefully consolidated at the end of m. 176. At such celestial moments, Chopin’s admiration for Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier, who deduced the existence and location of Neptune in 1846 via mathematical inferences alone, is telling: “What a triumph for science to arrive at the discovery of something like that by calculation!”97 The correlation of seemingly incommensurable phenomena also underpinned Chopin’s handling of harmony at the keyboard. For Huneker, the radical sonorities of Chopin’s music did not merely offer a glimpse through Kinkel’s garden gate, but threw it wide open, encouraging nature and culture to cross-fertilize with promiscuous abandon: “How he chromaticized the prudish, rigid garden of German harmony, how he moistened it with flashing changeful waters until it grew bold and brilliant with promise!”98 Echoing Kinkel’s emancipatory rhetoric, Huneker claimed that “Chopin . . . untied the chord that was restrained within the octave, leading it into the dangerous but delectable land of extended harmonies.”99 Whereas Kinkel figured such liberty as freedom from the tyranny of twelve-note equal temperament, however, Chopin celebrated the pianist’s freedom from having to worry about the matter of intonation, which could be delegated to the tuner.100 As Kinkel had to acknowledge, his compositional practice relied upon the fungibility of common pitch classes that could perform divergent enharmonic functions; while she was at pains to stress distinctions between them that were 97 Chopin to his family, 11 October 1846, trans. in Chopin’s Polish Letters, 395. On Chopin’s interest in science, engineering, automation, and computation in the context of this letter, see Kallberg, “Chopin’s Music Box,” 194–99. 98 Quoted and trans. in Huneker, Chopin, 129. 99 Ibid. 100 “L’intonation étant le fait de l’accordeur, le piano est délivré d’une des plus grandes difficultés que l’on rencontre dans l’étude d’un instrument” (Chopin, Ésquisses pour une méthode de piano, 42). Chopin nonetheless valued the work of tuners and was not indifferent to the question of temperament: see Bellman, “Toward a Well-Tempered Chopin,” in Chopin in Performance, 25–38. 22 fine-grained to the point of idealization, the material identities they shared were integral to the conception and realization of the ambiguous functions at the keyboard. A passage toward the end of the Nocturne in G Major, op. 37, no. 2 (1839–40, plate 8), brings these issues to the fore. As Steven G. Laitz points out, these three measures contain two cyclical revolutions rotating in contrary motion, each of which is associated with a particular manual gesture unfolding over the plane of the keyboard: the left hand outlines a descending circle of fifths while the right hand stacks up a tower of minor thirds, which show themselves to be the basis of compositional as well as digital technique.101 In his poised recording of this passage (Audio 4), Leopold Godowsky’s hands diverge at an inverse rate to that at which the harmonic pace increases, creating an Escheresque impression of simultaneous motion and stasis. But for this passage to achieve its disorientingly satisfying effect, the Gs that form its points of departure and arrival must be understood as one and the same pitch class, however distant they might appear when mapped onto the two-dimensional intersections of the Tonnetz (plate 9 and Video 1). To insist on an unbridgeable disparity between twelve fifths and four minor thirds would destroy the commutative beauty of this effect and attenuate the two-fold resolution effected by the left hand’s eventual arrival on the low Gs in the nocturne’s final system. In this recursive context, where the edges of the Tonnetz wrap around to become a cylinder (whose extremities meet in turn to become a torus), identity and non-identity become indistinguishable. To return to the terminology of visual artifacts and signal transmission, pitches become aliases 101 Steven G. Laitz, The Complete Musician: An Integrated Approach to Tonal Theory, Analysis, and Listening (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 688–89. Chopin here bears out the statement attributed to Beethoven by Theodor W. Adorno that “much of what we attribute to a composer’s original genius ought to be credited to his skilled use of a diminished seventh chord” (Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Seabury Press, 1976], 217). On the pedagogical primacy that Chopin accorded the diminished seventh, see n.88 above. ROGER MOSELEY Chopin’s Aliases Plate 8: Chopin, Nocturne in G Major, op. 37, no. 2 (Paris: Troupenas, n.d.), mm. 130–40. Audio 4: Chopin, Nocturne in G Major, op. 37, no. 2, mm. 130–40, performed by Leopold Godowsky (Columbia LPAPR7010, recorded in 1928). (See online edition.) Plate 9: Representation of harmonic correspondences in Chopin, Nocturne in G Major, op. 37, no. 2, mm. 130–33. Video 1: Animation of Plate 9, synchronized with Audio 4. (See online edition.) 23 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC of themselves, revealing that while different things can be the same, sameness can itself make all the difference. “At this moment, I am not with myself” The discrete continuum formed by the keyboard simultaneously affords and resists digital activity: its intransigence is as critical as its pliability. As Weissmann noted, “the obstacles [the piano] put into the way of the fingers’ capacity to grip and the hand’s span” served only to intensify the performer’s “ambition to inspirit this machine.”102 On the one hand, the piano “seemed to yield its secrets with comparative readiness,” as Weissmann put it; on the other, “the fancy of the exceptionally gifted exercised itself upon, indulged in and took fire from, the manipulation of the keys.”103 The key that obediently responds to the exertion of professional will can engender automatism; conversely, the key that refuses to sound can inspire poetic effusions. In Theodor W. Adorno’s words, the piano “does not do what I would like it to, but at the same time it is always saying: this is how it can be, this is how it should be.”104 Despite and owing both to its digital configuration and to the analogies it prompts, the piano in general—and Chopin’s music in particular—is at once easy to play and impossible to master. Schumann caviled at Chopin’s “iniquitous habit, at the end of each piece, of running a finger from one end of the keyboard to the other in a disruptive glissando, as if to break the spell.”105 For Chopin, this action performed the liminal function of cleaving the realms of 102 “Aber um so höher der Ehrgeiz, diese Maschine zu beseelen. Sie setzte der Griffmöglichkeit der Finger, der Spannweite der Hände Hemmungen entgegen.” Weissmann, Die Entgötterung der Musik, 11, trans. Blom, Music Come to Earth, 3–4. 103 “Da war ein Mechanismus, der sich auch dem minder Begabten leichter zu erschließen schien. . . . Alle Phantasie der Begabten übte sich, erging sich, erhitzte sich an den Tasten.” Weissmann, Die Entgötterung der Musik, 10–11, trans. Blom, Music Come to Earth, 3–4. 104 Adorno, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction trans. Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 130. 105 Quoted and trans. in Andreas Ballstaedt, “Chopin as ‘Salon Composer’ in Nineteenth-Century German Criticism,” in Chopin Studies 2, ed. Rink and Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 18–34 (19). 24 the artistic and the mundane by brusquely wiping the keyboard’s ivory slate clean. Opus 10, no. 5, the “Black Key” Étude, is situated at a polar remove from such glissandi, just as it lies at the opposite extreme of the chromatic continuum bookended by op. 25, no. 6. As indicated by its nickname and the yawning gaps between the notes allotted to the right hand, this étude is decidedly parsimonious in the constraining affordances that govern both its conception and realization. The audibly folkloristic consequences of the étude’s pentatonic topography sustained political overtones: for Hugo Leichtentritt, it was responsible for the piece’s “attractively primitive tint,” language that betrays the deep-rooted nationalistic assumptions concerning musical nature and culture— mapped onto Poland and France respectively— that have framed the reception of Chopin’s music.106 But the fact that “Chopin’s cheerful spirit only touched the uppermost keys,” as Liszt put it, flags up the étude’s ludic flip-side, which Leichtentritt acknowledged by describing it as “oddly playful.”107 Bernard Suits points out that playing a game can be understood as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”108 Like the narrow voids at the intersections of paving stones, the cracks between the piano’s keys thus present ludomusical challenges throughout op. 10, no. 5, successful navigation of which entails both acknowledgment and circumvention.109 Just as the pleasurable challenge posed by paving stones is more evident to the skipping child than the adult in attendance, so was Chopin’s étude directed pri- 106 Hugo Leichtentritt, Analyse von Chopins Klavierwerken (Berlin: Hesse, 1922), 2 vols., II: 109. 107 Franz Liszt, The Collected Writings of Franz List, ed. and trans. Janita R. Hall-Swadley (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011–), 6 vols., I, 126; Leichtentritt, Analyse von Chopins Klavierwerke, II, 109. 108 Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2005), 55. 109 From this perspective, it is telling that the right hand is allotted a solitary white key to play (in m. 66), an exception that proves the pentatonic rule. As Simon Finlow observes, “[the] unique creative challenge entailed by this technical constraint is one to which [Chopin] responds with an ingenuity that sparkles with every new turn taken by the figure” (“The Twenty-Seven Études and Their Antecedents,” in The Cambridge Companion to Chopin, 50– 77 [57]). marily at performers rather than listeners. When Chopin heard that Clara Wieck had played it in public, he snapped that “it would have been better to . . . sit quietly,” since only those personally acquainted with its peculiar configuration could properly appreciate it.110 Chopin’s “Black Key” Étude formed an origin that proceeded to spawn a network of editions, revisions, traditions, modernizations, upgrades, mash-ups, and other aliases, to enumerate its nodes in terms that themselves reflect the changing cultural and technological resources in play over the last two centuries. Perhaps no performer has been more attuned to the ludic qualities of the étude than Vladimir de Pachmann. His 1927 recording (Audio 5) is replete with a preview that draws the listener’s attention to the updates he will make to Chopin’s writing for the left hand (which include jazzy syncopations as well as lurid harmonies that stand in as aliases for Chopin’s originals), a false start, running commentary on the obstacles facing him at every turn, an outrageous double glissando, and repeated acknowledgment of Godowsky’s responsibility for the concluding volley of octaves in contrary motion.111 Audio 5: Chopin, Étude in G ♭ Major, op. 10, no. 5 (1833), performed by Vladimir de Pachmann (HMV Bb11763–1, recorded in 1927). (See online edition.) Pachmann’s octaves represent the least of Godowsky’s interventions, however. On the one hand, the transcriptive “modernizations” (as Pachmann characterized them) to which Godowsky subjected works by Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and even Brahms as well 110 “Did Wieck play my étude well? Why—instead of something better—did she choose precisely the étude that is the least interesting for those who don’t know that it is played on the black keys?” Chopin to Julian Fontana, 25 April 1839, trans. in Chopin’s Polish Letters, 304. 111 This recording has divided latter-day critics: while Kenneth Hamilton celebrates its idiosyncrasy (After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 179–80), Edward Blickstein and Gregor Benko execrate it as “pathetic,” “laughable,” and outright “terrible” (Chopin’s Prophet: The Life of Pianist Vladimir de Pachmann [Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013], 405). as Chopin reflect both the advancements and the diminishing returns of nineteenth-century investments in piano technique. On the other, as Adorno observed, they testify to the recursive logic by which such technical developments could feed back into compositional ambition: “the technique which the composer encounters as if it were self-sufficient is also always reified, alienated from him as well as from itself. Compositional self-criticism grates on such instances of reification, disentangles them from technique once more, and thus drives technique forward.”112 Between 1894 and 1914, Godowsky made no fewer than eight arrangements of op. 10, no. 5, including one that creates a negative image of the piece by switching the melody to the left hand and transposing it into the white-note key of C major (plate 10), thereby making it far more difficult (in line with Chopin’s pedagogical admonition).113 Another, dubbed “badinage” (plate 11), playfully crosses the étude with its tonal stablemate known as the “Butterfly,” op. 25, no. 9: both Pachmann and Godowsky performed this arrangement, which “astounded the whole musical world,” according to Arthur M. Abell.114 More recently, Marc-André Hamelin has published an étude written in 1990 (plate 12 and Audio 6) that tricks out Chopin’s original, nodding both to Gottfried Galston’s outfitting of the right hand with double notes (1910) and to Godowsky’s hyper-virtuosic brand of hotrodding while adding an extra twist of Hamelin’s own.115 Originally subtitled “pour les idées noires,” the étude was later renamed “after 112 “Die Technik, auf die er als eine gleichwie fertige stößt, ist dadurch immer auch verdinglicht, ihm wie sich selbst entfremdet. Kompositorische Selbstkritik reibt sich daran, scheidet eben dies Verdinglichte aus der Technik wieder aus und treibt diese dadurch weiter.” Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie: Zwölf theoretische Vorlesungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962), 223. 113 On Chopin’s inversion of the usual educational functions attributed to the white and black keys, see note 95 above. 114 Quoted in Blickstein and Benko, Chopin’s Prophet, 146. 115 On Hamelin’s études, see Bogdan Claudiu Dulu, “Redefining Virtuosity in Marc-André Hamelin’s 12 Études in All the Minor Keys” (DMA diss., University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2015), in which the influence of Galston’s exercise is discussed (82), and Jory Debenham, “Piano Music by Marc-André Hamelin,” Notes 70, no. 1 (2013): 186–89. 25 ROGER MOSELEY Chopin’s Aliases 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC Plate 10: Chopin/Leopold Godowsky, “Study on the White Keys,” op. 10, no. 5 (Berlin: Schlesinger, 1903–14), mm. 1–4. Plate 11: Chopin/Godowsky, “Badinage,” op. 10, no. 5, and op. 25, no. 9 (Berlin: Schlesinger, 1916), mm. 1–6. 26 ROGER MOSELEY Chopin’s Aliases Plate 12: Chopin/Marc-André Hamelin, “Étude No. 10: After Chopin” (New York: C. F. Peters, 2010), mm. 1–9. Audio 6: Chopin/Hamelin, “Étude no. 10: After Chopin” (1990), performed by Hamelin (Hyperion CDA67789, recorded in 1998). (See online edition.) Chopin,” an ostensible simplification that nonetheless bears the ambiguous implications of at once following, updating, and even superseding.116 Beyond its tenebrous affective inversion, Hamelin’s sharpened mode switch undoes Chopin’s and Godowsky’s segregation of the black and white keys. In the manner of op. 25, no. 6, the left hand pointedly saturates chromatic space, plugging and dithering the original’s prominent gaps to create an anti-aliased wash of sound. In this regard, it is telling that Hamelin has described the dysmophic effect of his étude in terms of Chopin’s original “heard through about twenty feet of water. . . . Everything here is distorted, be it melody, mode, harmony, timbre, texture, or even the pianist’s physical feeling.”117 As realized on Hamelin’s CD, the form of these distortions sounds profoundly digital, supplanting the analog wow, flutter, bloom, 116 Marc-André Hamelin, 12 Études in All the Minor Keys (New York: C. F. Peters, 2010), vi. 117 See Debenham, “Piano Music by Marc-André Hamelin,” 187. blur, and hiss that bathe audio recordings of an older vintage in a nostalgic glow.118 Locally, Hamelin introduces handfuls of dissonant dyads and clusters, glitches that at once indicate and conceal the notion of a “correct” underlying pitch. At certain points, Hamelin increases the spatial resolution of the right hand from five-bit to twelve-bit, supplementing Chopin’s pentatonicism with shades of serial technique.119 Elsewhere, figures and entire phrases are derailed by a single chromatic step, resulting in marginally offset sonorities that are both immediately proximate to and infinitely remote from Chopin’s own.120 The resultant artifacts 118 On the forms and function of digital distortion, see Peter Krapp, Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 119 See Dulu, “Redefining Virtuosity in Marc-André Hamelin’s 12 Études in All the Minor Keys,” 88. 120 The “wrong” notes in Hamelin’s étude echo the remarkably obstinate F heard throughout Charles-Valentin Alkan’s Allegretto in A Minor, op. 38b, no. 2 (1857), which Jacqueline Waeber describes as an “alien element . . . that seems to contaminate the whole piece” (“Searching for the Plot: Charles-Valentin Alkan’s Souvenirs: Trois morceaux dans le genre pathétique, Op. 15,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 132, no. 1 [2007]: 60–114 [85]). On analogous 27 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC have a decidedly late-twentieth-century ring, as if Chopin’s music were being rendered via a touch-tone telephone keypad rather than a piano keyboard.121 As the product of a composer-pianist, Hamelin’s étude is at once wholly contiguous with Chopin’s and an uncanny echo of it. Despite their stark differences in idiom, the methods by which Hamelin transduces blackness from key into thought retrace Chopin’s own strategies for navigating the tangled networks that relate the keyboard’s arithmetical layout and its logarithmic ordering of sounds to the calculus to which the smooth trajectories of limbs in motion could be held accountable. By such means, the “algebraic character of [Chopin’s] tone language,” as Theodor Kullak described it, became synonymous with the “mysterious rustling and whispering of the foliage.”122 Just as Chopin’s digits were heard to filter nature, so Hamelin recursively resamples Chopin, thereby revealing how techniques of adaptation can become second nature when it comes to the ostensible self-evidence of writing, playing, listening, storing, and retrieving. Upon hearing Harold Bauer perform Chopin’s Étude in C♯ Minor, op. 10, no. 4, at breakneck speed, Theodor Leschetizky quipped that “You played it so fast that it sounded as if it were in D minor!”123 For Leschetizky, as for anyone familiar with the phonograph, raised pitch had become an artifactual corollary of increased playback speed. Yet David Suisman has recently challenged the received idea that the analog technology of the phonograph simply super- phenomena in Chopin’s op. 59 mazurkas, see Lawrence Kramer, “Chopin’s Rogue Pitches: Artifice, Personification, and the Cult of the Dandy in Three Later Mazurkas,” this journal 35 (2012), 224–37. In different ways, Waeber’s and Kramer’s observations resonate with Edward T. Cone’s in “Schubert’s Promissory Note: An Exercise in Musical Hermeneutics,” this journal 5, no. 3 (1982): 233–41. 121 Hamelin is no stranger to such phenomena, as demonstrated by the concluding measures of his “Ringtone Waltz,” also known as “Valse Irritation d’après Nokia” (ca. 2001–02). 122 Quoted and trans. in Huneker, Chopin, 175–76. 123 Quoted in Harold Bauer, Harold Bauer: His Book (New York: Norton, 1948), 135. Performing an analogous operation in real time, Pachmann occasionally played op. 25, no. 6, in A minor: see Blickstein and Benko, Chopin’s Prophet, 135. 28 seded the digital techniques of transmission materialized by the typewriter, the (player) piano, and the storage of their input and output on sheets and rolls of paper.124 While the relationship between digital velocity and the perception of pitch is not directly analogical, the digital and the analog have long represented distinctive yet mutually dependent technical means by which Chopin’s music could be quantified, qualified, and mediated. The kinetic and gravitational forces encoded by Chopin’s notation prompted real-time musical transformations between discrete elements and continuous phenomena. Whether through the fingers, in the ears, or on the page, and whether trapped behind Kinkel’s gate or filtered through Ehlert’s veil, keyboard music takes shape both from the filtering of an undifferentiated sonic morass and from the seriated agglomeration of multitudes from individual elements, as Chopin’s Projet de méthode makes disarmingly apparent. Accordingly, pianism becomes a cultural technique that at once produces and processes the phenomena it renders playable, audible, and comprehensible. Shaped by traumatic political circumstances, as every biographer attests, Chopin’s identity was fundamentally dissociative. In 1831 he confided to Tytus Woyciechowski that “In feeling I am always in a state of syncopation with everyone.”125 The feeling endured: “At this moment I am not with myself, but only as usual in some strange outer space,” he wrote to his family more than a decade later.126 Yet his identity was formed by the categories into which it did not fit. From this perspective, binaries themselves are generated as artifactual aliases of the very Romantic thought that seeks to transcend 124 David Suisman, “Sound, Knowledge, and the ‘Immanence of Human Failure’: Rethinking Musical Mechanization through the Phonograph, the Player-Piano, and the Piano,” Social Text 28, no. 1 (2010): 13–34. 125 Chopin to Tytus Woyciechowski, 25 December 1831, in Chopin’s Letters, ed. and trans. E. L. Voynich (New York: Knopf, 1932), 165. 126 Chopin to his family, 20 July 1845, trans. in Chopin’s Letters, 285: I am grateful to Mackenzie Pierce for bringing this passage to my attention. Kramer hears Chopin’s music from this era to engage in “the studied production of difference, negativity, and non-identity” (“Chopin’s Rogue Pitches,” 236). them. Whether cast in the terms of crude grids and refined filters, clocks and voices, black and white keys, signs and signals, stricture and liberty, technique and expression, or simply nocturne and étude, Chopin’s music identifies the binaries it so elegantly eludes (and vice versa). The contents of Chopin’s music exceed the bandwidth of a linear model of transmission that connects sender to receiver—or composer to listener—by way of the transduction of written notes into heard sounds at the piano. Amid the manifold shades of grey that issue from the activation of those black and white keys, perhaps the sharpest distinction has been drawn by those who insist on the opposition of binary and non-binary thinking. Speaking for and through Chopin’s own non-identical selves in addition to the aliases of others and the innumerable digits that have collectively molded it at the keyboard, this music prompts us to discover how fingers can act both as natural phenomena and as agents of cultural forces that confound distinctions between the figures of culture and the ground of nature even as they embody and perform them. l Abstract. The ambiguity of Chopin’s music and its amenability to reinvention help account for its enduring appeal to pianists, composers, and critics. This article examines the conditions under which such ambiguity has taken shape on the page and at the piano. Just as curves become jagged—or “aliased”—when represented by the grid of discrete pixels that form digital displays, so have the contours of Chopin’s music been both veiled and disclosed by the straight lines that define the staff and the keyboard. Despite the term’s contemporary ring, the issues raised and reflected by aliasing are rooted in a set of nineteenth-century dichotomies concerning the discrete and the continuous, artifice and nature, instruments and bodies, virtuosity and poetry, machines and voices, and constraints and liberties, all of which Chopin’s music was heard both to invoke and to elude. By way of recordings and transcriptions by Leopold Godowsky, Marc-André Hamelin, Josef Lhévinne, Vladimir de Pachmann, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, and Arthur Rubinstein, the article presents various instances of aliasing and attempts to mitigate it via a range of compositional, pianistic, and cultural techniques that reveal how aliases can produce ambiguity by calling the very distinction between identity and difference into question. Keywords: Chopin, Hamelin, Godowsky, Rubinstein, aliasing 29 ROGER MOSELEY Chopin’s Aliases