Or you can just sit and watch Lang Lang perform Chopin's mazurkas.
by Jake Cline
Superstar pianist Lang Lang will return to the Arsht Center April 16 for a concert featuring works by Gabriel Fauré, Robert Schumann and Frédéric Chopin. The music will be dramatic, calming and, for those so inclined, danceable. Following are notes on the program.
PAVANE, OP. 50
GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845-1924)
“Perhaps no other composer has ever been so generally ignored outside his own country, while at the same time enjoying an unquestionably eminent reputation at home,” Aaron Copland wrote of Gabriel Fauré in October 1924, just one month before the French composer’s death. Writing for the extant academic journal The Musical Quarterly, Copland noted that Fauré had “numerous honors heaped upon” him by the French government and was regarded as the greatest living composer by his fellow French citizens.
Among them was Marcel Proust, who featured Fauré’s music in a 1907 concert he organized at The Ritz in Paris and who is thought to have modeled a character in In Search of Lost Time after the composer. By his own admission, Proust could not shut up about Fauré’s work. “I not only love, not only admire, not only adore your music, I have been and am still falling in love with it,” Proust reportedly wrote in a letter to Fauré. “I could write a book more than 300 pages long about it.”
What inspired such devotion and national pride? A colleague of Camille Saint-Saëns, Fauré spent the later years of his life teaching the likes of Maurice Ravel, Florent Schmitt and Nadia Boulanger at the Paris Conservatory, where he served as director from 1905 to 1920. As The New York Times once noted, Fauré “was seen as the link between the Romantic past and the contemporary present of Debussy, Ravel and Les Six.” He also spent nearly 20 years contributing music criticism to Le Figaro, though he was by accounts a mild and forgiving reviewer. This aversion to confrontation can be detected in his own music, and it’s not uncommon to read Fauré’s style described as “gentle,” “appealing,” “genial,” “sensitive” and “lovely.”
That is not to say Fauré’s compositions were safe and weak. Copland remarked how Fauré’s music only got “ever more spiritually youthful and serene” as he grew older, and his idiomatic way with harmonics is often noted in discussions of his style.
Written in 1887, Fauré’s Pavane shares its name with the court dance whose roots stretch to 16th century Spain (though some trace it even earlier to Italy). The pavane is sometimes called the peacock dance for its emphasis on showcasing the dancers’ attire, but a listener will find little flash in Fauré’s version for piano. Certainly, Lang Lang’s understated recording of it on his recently released album, Saint-Saëns, is a six-minute exercise in restraint. Quietude, of course, can be just as arresting as commotion. One doesn’t have to dance to this music, but attention should be paid.
KREISLERIANA, OP. 16
ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)
“It’s a highly dramatic piece,” Hélène Grimaud says of Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Op. 16, which the French pianist included on her 2023 album For Clara. “Everything’s extreme in it.”
While describing a Schumann work as “dramatic” may seem redundant, the eight-movement Kreisleriana reflects not only the troubled composer’s extravagant nature but also its main inspiration: Johannes Kreisler, the accomplished but erratic musician who appears in several works by German author E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822). “He is prey to manic-depressive mood swings, going in a moment from wild merriment to inconsolable weeping,” music critic Alex Ross wrote of the character in The New Yorker. “He has a habit of composing prolifically by night and then burning his work the next day.” Schumann reportedly wrote Kreisleriana in a four-day burst in April 1838.
As suggested by the title of Grimaud’s recent album, Schumann was not just thinking of Hoffmann’s fictional character while writing Kreisleriana. A year earlier, Schumann had proposed to Clara Wieck, a talented pianist and composer who was nearly a decade younger than him. Wieck’s father disapproved of the relationship, and even went so far as to take the composer to court in an attempt to prevent the couple from marrying. A listener doesn’t have to strain hard to hear the yearning and impatience in Schumann’s piece, which he publicly dedicated to his fellow composer Frédéric Chopin so as not to further tick off Herr Wieck. That Chopin was no fan of Schumann’s music only makes the gesture sadder.
In 1840, Schumann and Clara Wieck were married at last. Schumann was not done with Kreisleriana (or the frustrations that drove it), and in 1850 he reissued the score with minor revisions. It remains among his most admired and difficult works.
“I would say one of the most characteristic Schumann gestures is to be off-balance, to put the performer off-balance, to put the listener off-balance, to put the soul of the listener in a state of imbalance,” pianist Richard Goode said during a 2012 lecture at Duke University. “He does it in so many ways in so many pieces. He gives you the state of being uncertain. This is a profoundly unclassical thing to be. And this is one of the things Schumann reveled in.”
MAZURKAS: OP. 7 NO. 3; OP. 17 NO. 1, 2, 4; OP. 24 NO. 2, 4; OP. 30 NO. 3, 4; OP. 33 NO. 3, 4, 2; OP. 59 NO. 3
AND
POLONAISE IN F# MINOR, OP. 44
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810-1849)
Frédéric Chopin left his native Poland when he was 20 years old. He lived for the majority of the next year in Vienna and then settled in Paris, which remained his primary home for the rest of his brief life. Although he never returned to Poland, he visited the country often through his music, particularly in ambitious polonaises and spirited, three-beat pieces known as mazurkas.
The latter compositions share their name with a genre of folk dancing that dates to the 1500s and is most closely associated with the region where Chopin grew up, just west of Warsaw. Mazurkas are meant to be danced by pairs in large groups, and involve a fair amount of stomping and sweeping arm movements.
Chopin wrote roughly 60 mazurkas. One of them — Op. 68, No. 4 — was the last piece of music he ever wrote. A New York Times music critic once argued that the mazurkas “represent Chopin at his most fearless and intimate.”
They also betray a touch of rebellion. “When Chopin started composing mazurkas, Poland was under Russian rule,” a representative of the Frédéric Chopin Institute told a German news service in 2017. “So it was important to compose Polish music, Poland’s national identity. All his life, Chopin tried to create a Polish national style.”
Chopin wrote fewer polonaises than mazurkas. They are notoriously complex. “Just try to count bars in the Polonaise-Fantaisie,” musician Jeremy Denk wrote in a 2017 New York Times essay. “It’s like trying to graph a sentence in late Henry James.”
The dance itself can be performed by hundreds of pairs, and traditionally breaks out at large events such as weddings and high school proms. Chopin’s Polonaise in F# minor, Op. 44 is known as his “tragic” polonaise, though the composer considered it, as he described in a letter, “a kind of fantasy in polonaise form.”
One Polish musicologist, Mieczyslaw Tomaszewski, hears a mazurka ringing out from the Polonaise in F# minor “as a nostalgic recollection of old times and faraway places,” while noting that Franz Liszt detected “scents of marjoram and mint” in the work’s many moods. For Chopin, no doubt, it felt like home.