Abstract

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.