Studia Chopinowskie

Structural Coupling in the Coda of Chopin’s Barcarolle

Alison Hood — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Chopin’s Barcarolle can be heard as a compelling narrative. Its intricate ‘story’ might be mapped onto any number of different events in our lives. It could, for example, be related to a conversation, a journey, a dance, or a romance. This paper, instead of pursuing any one of these mappings, will focus on how its coda ties up some of the specifically musical ‘story lines’ of the piece. This analysis is not exhaustive and those interested in more indepth treatments of the Barcarolle could read Rink’s essay in Chopin Studies (Cambridge 1988) or my dissertation ‘Chopin’s Strategic Integration of Rhythm and Pitch: A Schenkerian Perspective’ (Trinity College Dublin, 2003).
The Barcarolle maintains momentum and interest right until the end – beyond the close of the urlinie – due to the intricate ‘story’ created from the interaction of the work’s premises. Chopin seems to think about the structure of the piece in an unusual way
for dramatic reasons. Throughout the Barcarolle it is as if two voices are trying to find a particular relationship with each other. In particular, I will show how pairs of notes imply specific arrival goals (to a specific octave or sixth in a specific register), how
Chopin manipulates our expectation for those arrivals, and how the coda finally finds and celebrates the achievement of those goals. Register – especially the coupling of notes an octave apart – not only differentiates between one octave and another octave, but also integrates the ebb and flow of tension throughout the work. Rather than speak of an ‘obligatory register’ in this piece, perhaps we should speak of ‘obligatory coupling’. These premises work together in forming the structure or dramatic narrative of this work, and can therefore present interpretive questions for the performer. I will conclude with an examination of how the interpretations of selected performances (by Claudio Arrau, Dinu Lipatti, Artur Rubinstein, and Murray Perahia) may be heard as reflecting the ‘story lines’ i describe in cogent and compelling ways.

Symmetry and a Template: Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, and Chopin’s Preludes, Op. 28

Ruth Tatlow — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Letters and documents show that fryderyk chopin was deeply interested in the keyboard music of J.S. Bach. Chopin owned several copies of The Well Tempered Clavier, used the preludes and fugues in his teaching, and had committed them to memory. When he came to compose his own set of preludes, he allegedly had a copy of Bach’s The Well Tempered Clavier by his side. At first sight and sound, the contrasts between the Bach and chopin preludes are greater than their similarities. The aim of this paper is to see what influence, if any, Bach’s The Well Tempered Clavier had upon the formation of chopin’s collection of 24 preludes, specifically in its proportioning and compositional ordering.
The technique of proportional parallelism, found in all Bach’s publications and fair copies, has raised questions about its origins and transmission. Recent research has shown that although several of Bach’s predecessors, including pachelbel and Kuhnau, used the technique occasionally, it is more frequently found in the published compositions of Bach’s sons, including C.E. Bach and J.F. Bach, and students, including J.L. Krebs and J.P. Kirnberger. Proportional parallelism is an objective technique, measured by the number of bars, to form layers of 1:1 symmetry in a composition or collection. compositional structure, on the other hand, is neither objective nor philosophically neutral, as it is chosen deliberately by the composer.
Treatises by lutheran music theorists in Bach’s time show how the proportions of musical consonances, transmitted from beliefs in universal harmony, had acquired a moral and theological significance, in addition to the ancient aesthetic understanding that proportions closest to the unity (1:1 and 1:2) were the most beautiful and the most perfect. one can therefore understand how important it was for the devout composer in Bach’s time to order musical compositions with layers of 1:1 and 1:2. But one would not necessarily expect this ideational technique to have survived once its significance had changed.
My current research project explores whether, and if so, how, Bach’s ordering technique influenced the compositional ordering of later composers who both knew and were inspired by Bach’s compositions. One such is fryderyk chopin, whose set of 24 preludes was allegedly influenced by his own close study of, and familiarity with, Bach’s collection of preludes and fugues. With evidence from primary sources and proportional parallelism, this systematic investigation yields some groundbreaking results, providing numerous new answers to old questions. It is now possible to see that chopin based the order of his 24 preludes on the structure of preludes 1–10 in Bach’s The Well Tempered Clavier II. The investigation also exposes for the first time the perfect overarching symmetry that Chopin created across the 24 preludes, to unite the collection as whole.

A Morphology of Consciousness Narratives in romantic Instrumental Music

James Parakilas — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Music in all times and places has produced alterations of consciousness in those who experience it. Instrumental music of the romantic era connected music and consciousness in a much more specialised way: many composers of that era, in alignment with physicians and poets of their day, created works that, without the aid of text, chart the experience of undergoing an alteration of consciousness. a model is proposed here of the succession of elements that composers characteristically used to construct such a narrative in wordless music. This succession of elements is designed: 1) to suggest the presence of a protagonist in whose consciousness the narrative can be located; 2) to establish a break leading from the protagonist’s default state of consciousness (one that is tied to the here and now) to an altered state (such as dream or fantasy or trance); 3) to portray the nature of that altered state; and 4. to evoke a reemergence from the altered state of consciousness to the hereandnow state, with perhaps lingering residues of the altered state.
This model reveals what unites the consciousness narratives of composers like Berlioz, who spelled out their narrative programs in words, with those of composers like Chopin, who barely suggested programs even in their titles, and those of composers like
Schumann and Tchaikovsky, who experimented with varying methods and degrees of divulging or not divulging a narrative program. The model provides means for identifying common narrative strategies as well as distinguishing features of a highly varied set of
works, all issuing from a shared exploration of the workings of human consciousness. Analysis here focuses on two works: Schumann’s Piano Trio in D Minor, op. 63, and Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op. 61.

‘Espaces Imaginaires’ and the Romantics Imagination: Chopin’s Damper Pedal and the Haze of Dreams

Dylan Henderson — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The unfinished Portrait de Frédéric Chopin et George Sand painted by Eugène Delacroix in 1838 is one of the defining images of musical romanticism. A portrait of the artist embodying the ‘dream realm of poetry’ (as heinrich heine so memorably put it), it captures the expression of a composer who is present in the ‘here’ whilst simultaneously existing in the ‘there’. This plurality of consciousness, or ‘splitting’ between dreams and reality, was a familiar theme amongst nineteenthcentury writers, philosophers and poets, and it crops up several times in Chopin’s correspondence. Throughout his lifetime, Chopin’s performances of his own works were consistently praised as ineffable, transcendental listening experiences. His exquisite control and use of the damper pedal was often likened to techniques of painting, and his notated instructions for its use were uncommonly detailed and sophisticated. The keyboards on which chopin’s works were conceived were radically different to our contemporary instruments, and whilst most of chopin’s pedal markings can be faithfully observed on the modern piano, there are certain ‘aeolian’ passages from selected preludes, nocturnes and mazurkas that necessitate more frequent and judicious damping in order to avoid undesirable harmonic blurring.
A series of two and three way comparisons of the author’s own performances on a c.1819 Graf (2007 replica by Paul McNulty), an original c.1846 Pleyel and a 2016 Bösendorfer helps validate Chopin’s intentions in the broader context of romanticism, providing further evidence that the composer notated pedal markings with the resonance of specific instruments in mind. These experiential insights build on recent publications by Sandra P. Rosenblum, James Parakilas and Halina Goldberg, and allow us to understand Chopin’s pedalling as a proxy for the plurality of consciousness experienced in his espaces imaginaires, lending even greater credence to Antoine François Marmontel’s assertion that Pleyel pianos are ‘absolutely indispensable’ to Chopin’s art.

Chopin’s Ossianic manner

Zbigniew Granat — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article focuses on the ‘bardic style’ as a defining trait of the G Minor Ballade and the balladic genre initiated by chopin. I suggest that viewing the piece through the lens of performativity reveals chopin’s reliance on a prototype of embodied performance. Borrowing the term ‘performativity’ from linguistic studies, I redefine it as a type of musical narrativity that mimics a real or imaginary performance. In his first Ballade, chopin creates precisely this kind of narration, built around a central figure of a bard who is captured in the act of performance. Chopin portrays the persona of the bard as a virtuoso of the harp, an instrument that is central to the 19th-century bardic style. As a result, the piano texture of the Ballade reveals a plethora of harp imitations that include the plucking or strumming of strings, arpeggiated chords, the overlapping of sustained notes, and many others. Skilful manipulations of these devices enabled Chopin to create audible distinctions between narration and action, or past and present, in the musical trajectory of his Ballade.
My analysis demonstrates how this ‘harp performance’ embodied in the Ballade functions as both the main unifying factor of form and a critical referential component that generates several layers of meaning. To provide context for my analytical claims, I discuss the potential impact of the ossianic movement, selected songs by franz schubert and poetic works by Adam Mickiewicz on Chopin’s concept of an instrumental ballade. All four ballades by Chopin feature imitations of the harp. Similarly, composers who contributed to this genre in the course of the 19th century followed in Chopin’s footsteps and also utilized abundant harplike textures in their own ballades. I adduce examples of this modelling from works by Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and Edvard Grieg.

Correspondence of Fryderyk Chopin, Vol. 3: Part I – 1839–1843 Part II – 1844–1847 Part III – 1848–1849 Part IV – [Lost letters, published in summaries] Collected, edited, and annotated by Zofia Helman, Zbigniew Skowron, and Hanna Wróblewska‑Straus.

Marcin Gmys — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Music in American Nineteenth-Century History ed. Billy Coleman and J.M. Mancini

Zbigniew Skowron — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Aesthetic Legacy of Eduard Hanslick. Close Readings and Critical Perspectives ed. Lee Rothfarb, Alexander Wilfing, Christoph Landerer

Silvia Bruni — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000