Frédéric Chopin

From Wikiquote

Jump to: navigation, search
Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

Frédéric Chopin (February 22, 1810 – October 17, 1849) was a Polish composer of classical music and pianist who lived in Paris for the majority of his life. He wrote almost solely for piano and is one of the most widely played composers for that instrument. His music ranged from patriotic and passionate to simple and beautiful, and he was known as a great teacher of piano during his lifetime.

[edit] Sourced

  • My piano has not yet arrived. How did you send it? By Marseilles or by Perpignan? I dream music but I cannot make any because here there are not any pianos . . . in this respect this is a savage country.
    • Letter to Camille Pleyel (21 November 1838); published in Fryderyk Chopin, Korespondencja Fryderyka Chopina (1955), edited by Bronisław Edward Sydow, (2 vols.), Vol. 1, p. 443
  • I'm a revolutionary, money means nothing to me.
    • Quoted in Arthur Hedley, Chopin (1947)
  • I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness, but I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them.
    • As quoted in Chopin (1978) by George Richard Marek, Arthur Maling, and Maria Gordon-Smith
    • Variant translation: I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness. And yet I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them.
  • One needs only to study a certain positioning of the hand in relation to the keys to obtain with ease the most beautiful sounds, to know how to play long notes and short notes and to [attain] certain unlimited dexterity... A well formed technique, it seems to me, [is one] that can control and vary a beautiful sound quality.
    • As quoted in Chopin : Pianist and Teacher as Seen by His Pupils (1986) by Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Roy Howat, Naomi Shohet, and Krysia Osostowicz, p. 16
  • Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
    • As quoted in If Not God, Then What? (2007) by Joshua Fost, p. 93

[edit] About Chopin

His creation was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without searching for it, without foreseeing it. ~ George Sand
Alphabetized by author
  • His creation was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without searching for it, without foreseeing it. It came to his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he would hasten to hear it again by, tossing it off on his instrument. But then would begin the most heartbreaking labor I have ever witnessed. It was a series of efforts, indecision, and impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he had heard: what had come to him all of a piece, he now over-analyzed in his desire to write it down, and his regret at not finding it again "neat," as he said, would throw him into a kind of despair. He would shut himself up in his room for days at a time, weeping, pacing, breaking his pens, repeating and changing a single measure a hundred times, writing it and effacing it with equal frequency, and beginning again the next day with a meticulous and desperate perseverance. He would spend six weeks on one page, only to end up writing it just as he had traced it in his first outpouring.
    • George Sand, Oeuvres autobiographiques, ed. Georges Lubin, 2 vols. (Paris, 1978); Vol. 2: Histoire de ma vie, p. 446. I (Jeffrey Kallberg) have modified somewhat the English translation printed in George Sand, Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand, group translation ed. Thelma Jurgrau (Albany, 1991), p. 1109. The chapter on Chopin dates from August or September 1854.
  • After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.

[edit] External Links

Wikipedia
Wikipedia has an article about:
Commons
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
Retrieved from "http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Chopin"