Fryderyk (Frédéric) Chopin (1810 – 1849) was a Polish-born French pianist who composed and performed some of the greatest piano music of the Romantic era.
Professor of Music History at University of Pennsylvania, Jeffrey Kallberg has published widely on the music of Chopin and its cultural contexts.
Q: You’re a Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania where you specialize in the music of the 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, you’ve studied and published widely on the music and cultural contexts of Frédéric Chopin. How did your fascination with all things Chopin begin?
A: Curiously, it did not begin in my first years studying piano as an adolescent. Then I believed Chopin too “saccharine” (a telling misconception in light of the direction of some of my later studies). Fortunately, a friend disabused me of this notion by playing for me Artur Rubinstein’s 1960 recording of the G-minor Ballade, op. 23. When I heard the lilting and lyrical second theme return, energetically transformed into a passage that sounds massive and triumphant, Chopin first took hold of my imagination and never let go.
The beginnings of my professional engagement with Chopin began in my first year of graduate study at The University of Chicago. Generally interested at that time in the compositional process (how and why composers made decisions about form, melody, harmony, and counterpoint when they wrote music), I learned that the Newberry Library in Chicago owned an autograph manuscript of Chopin’s late Nocturne in B major, op. 62 no. 1. The autograph proved to be a fascinating compositional document, full of large- and small-scale revisions, with the earlier versions cancelled by Chopin with vigorous cross-hatches. The manuscript hinted at a world of complexities in the ways that Chopin composed. By further coincidence, the Joseph Regenstein Library at The University of Chicago held one of the best collections of Chopin’s first editions in the United States, and I learned from comparing the editions that Chopin published nearly simultaneously in France, Germany, and England that the compositional complexities continued into the publication process. I decided to write my dissertation on compositional process in Chopin, and this led me to consult nearly all of his extant manuscripts and first editions as contained in libraries throughout Europe and the United States.