Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Myth and reality: a biographical introduction
- PART 1 The growth of a style
- PART 2 Profiles of the music
- 5 Extended forms: the ballades, scherzos and fantasies
- 6 Small ‘forms’: in defence of the prelude
- 7 Beyond the dance
- 8 The sonatas
- PART 3 Reception
- Appendix A historical survey of Chopin on disc
- Notes
- List of Chopin's work
- Bibliographical note
- Index
6 - Small ‘forms’: in defence of the prelude
from PART 2 - Profiles of the music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Myth and reality: a biographical introduction
- PART 1 The growth of a style
- PART 2 Profiles of the music
- 5 Extended forms: the ballades, scherzos and fantasies
- 6 Small ‘forms’: in defence of the prelude
- 7 Beyond the dance
- 8 The sonatas
- PART 3 Reception
- Appendix A historical survey of Chopin on disc
- Notes
- List of Chopin's work
- Bibliographical note
- Index
Summary
Chopin was a master of small forms. Few beliefs more centrally govern modern perceptions of Chopin than this one. It supports not only the myriad manifestations of his high stature in our culture (performances and critical analyses alike can be read as endorsements of the composer's extraordinary skill at miniatures), but also the occasional barbs that are thrown his way (some writers profess a complementary axiom that mastery of large forms eluded him).
But while the centrality of this belief may lend it the appearance of a timeless truth, it seems instead that the meaning of its fundamental term, form, has altered substantially over the past century and a half. When we unreflectively discuss form in Chopin's music as if its intent were self-evident, we therefore at least to some degree misrepresent its significance to his culture. All of us – pianists and amateur enthusiasts as well as musicologists – need to be aware of this disjunction between past and present: before we can probe aspects of form in Chopin's miniatures, we need to explore some of the ways in which the ideas of form and (to a lesser extent) smallness were construed in the first half of the nineteenth century. That these explorations can have very practical applications I hope to show in the second portion of my essay, which will focus on Chopin's smallest forms, the preludes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Chopin , pp. 124 - 144Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992
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