Hi Gilda, happy to meet you in this forum!
I decided to insert this topic within your wonderful idea of opening a forum on Chopin because it seemed like a real shame to let fall an assertion you made to support your cause. Here it is: «Chopin is a great... he is not just a great piano composer... but he is a great composer. I am certain that if he had not died so young and had not been so humble, he would have also composed operas and symphonies.»
Now, Gilda – surely your name or nick makes one think more of Verdi than Chopin! - while waiting for others, perhaps much more qualified than myself, to eventually have their say on the matter if they wish, I would like to try to give you my opinion.
The discussion regarding what many great composers who died very prematurely would have composed is a bit of a constant in music history. A Schubert who died at only 29, after composing immense masterpieces; a Mozart at almost 36; a Pergolesi at only 26; but even Beethoven himself who died at 56 – let's consider that Cherubini died at 83 – but with still so many ideas in his head, starting from a tenth symphony of his, what else could they have given us beyond everything they have left us? Obviously the question is rhetorical and can never have an answer, but, quite rightly, we like to ask it.
This question also applies to Chopin, who died at only 39 and was certainly «a great composer» - indeed a genius, why not say it openly – and not just a «great piano composer», even if he composed very little for the orchestra, and nothing for the theater.
In Chopin's case, without being presumptuous and without thereby diminishing his importance and greatness, I think one thing can be said with extreme certainty: he would certainly have done other splendid things for the piano, but he would never have written music for orchestra alone - nor even more for piano and orchestra – and even less for the theater.
Why am I sure of this, Gilda? Because Chopin composed his only works for piano and orchestra between 1827 and 1830 and, therefore, in his youth. Then – apart from Opuses 3 and 65 for cello and piano, the 17 Polish songs Opus 74, and other chamber music pieces, with the piano always present nonetheless – everything else was for the piano.
What caused this absolutely reluctant attitude toward composing for orchestra is a question that remains highly debated. All the hypotheses made find their own foundation and validity. Here I want to propose two, essentially in antithesis, which however, despite this, contain undoubted truth.
The first is that of Claudio Capriola and Giorgio Dolza, co-authors for Einaudi of a booklet containing all of Chopin's works titled: “Chopin. Gentlemen, the catalogue is this”: «To us, it seems correct to believe that, above all, our musician was convinced of the fact that the piano, the piano alone, was enough to contain his entire sonic, poetic, and expressive universe».
The second is from Milan Kundera, a great Czech writer of both novels and essays, as well as a musician and son of a musician: «It would be interesting to examine all nineteenth-century music as a constant attempt to overcome its structural dichotomy. I would like to cite, for example, what I would call the Chopin strategy. (...) Chopin shuns large-scale composition and writes almost exclusively short pieces gathered in collections. (...) (The few exceptions confirm the rule: his concertos for piano and orchestra are mediocre). He thus moved against the current, because in his time the basic criterion for evaluating a composer's importance was the creation of a symphony, a concerto, or a quartet. But by precisely withdrawing from this criterion, Chopin created a work that is perhaps the only one of its era not to have aged and that will remain alive in its entirety, almost without exception.»
From my point of view, I substantially agree with both these statements – except for the final part of Kundera's, but that would be an entirely different discussion that would take us far from here – because, even though I know saying this can create strong criticism, I am convinced that Chopin, in his works with orchestra, was substantially mediocre; and this is despite the two concertos still enjoying great popularity today among classical music audiences.
To frame all this, it is necessary, as always, to review and contextualize the music history of that period, and especially that relating to the piano concerto and solo piano music. And so, as always, I will go on a long rant. Amen and excuse me!
In reality, it is - as with all post-Beethovenian music - necessary to refer back to Beethoven and his very great and absolutely imposing legacy.
In the context of the history of the concerto for"}
Piano and orchestra, with Beethoven that revolution was completed, already well present in the Fourth Opus 58 of the strengthening of the symphonic aspect on one hand and that of the soloistic aspect on the other, seeking their ideal integration: the soloist no longer overlaps and accepts to be treated as a section of the orchestra.
After Beethoven, starting from Schubert himself, who was an absolutely multifaceted and brilliant composer but in whose vast catalog full of every good thing there are no concertos for solo instrument and orchestra? The right answer was given, in my opinion, by the musicologist Alfred Einstein: "One could imagine that he would have been able to continue cultivating that genre in the way Mozart felt it, who still treats the piano as primus inter pares, in perfect balance with the orchestra, without assuming any dramatic function (...) but after Beethoven, whose concertos had already been composed since 1809, this was no longer possible. After Beethoven, the only possible formula was the dramatic opposition between the solo instrument and the orchestra."
For Schubert, for his musical conception still anchored in various respects to the end of the 1700s, it would have been impossible to continue on that path.
After Beethoven, the concertos of various composers like Cramer, Moscheles, etc., who followed the salon style made of very frivolous and light scores so fashionable at the time, are today substantially unknown.
But it can well be said that even great composers like Chopin and Mendelssohn did not know how to go beyond these models, so much so that Robert Schumann, in his capacity as a music critic – he was one of the first to hold this role within the history of music – did not fail to criticize them harshly. Regarding his friend Felix Mendelssohn's Second Piano Concerto, he wrote: "It belongs to his lighter creations, composed in haste, just like those that the old masters wrote when they were resting from their great creations."
In reality, there was a problem for Sonatas as well, and this, precisely because of the difficulty of saying something new after Beethoven's last ones. After the Beethovenian and Schubertian piano-solo corpora, composers oriented themselves towards shorter, single-movement piano genres: studies, polonaises, mazurkas, preludes, etc.: Chopin himself included only 3 sonatas – of which the 2nd and 3rd are absolute masterpieces – in his catalog. The only post-Beethovenian composer who composed 9 sonatas was Prokofiev.
That said, the fact remains that Chopin, with his "solo" piano, was the composer capable of summarizing the infinite, expressing the language of feeling, giving voice to the unspeakable, and this, without pretending to describe or illustrate anything."
