Frederic Chopin: Accessing the Heart

Frederic Chopin, looking ever so cheerful

Emotional expression through music has always seemed rather mathematical to me. When you want to feel anger, you listen to loud, harsh music. When you want to feel love, you listen to sweeping, sweet tones. When you want to feel patriotic, you find majestic, triumphant marches. To be happy, you listen to music in a major key, to be sad, you listen to the minor. It all seems very simple. 

About a year ago, I had an experience that changed all of this. I had been exploring classical music as a companion to literature; I wanted to read with accompaniment but without distraction, and Impressionist and Romantic piano music seemed to do the trick. In the course of my searching, I stumbled across an artist named Frederic Chopin, whose name I had heard dozens of times, but whose work I had never sought out. Chopin was a child prodigy on the piano. In fact, his virtuosity was such that he hardly ever explored any other instrumentation in his compositions. Solo piano works comprise almost his entire corpus.

At the time I discovered Chopin, I was reading a book called Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina is a novel centered around love and heartbreak and follows the story of the eponymous character as she navigates the consequences of adultery. When I began to listen to Chopin's work while reading this book, I suddenly felt my emotions at the events in the story begin to swell up. My mild annoyance with certain characters or actions was fanned into a passionate bonfire when I immersed myself in pieces such as Op. 28, No. 15, or Nocturne in C-Sharp Minor. 

 

Through this experience, I began to realize that music can act similarly to a window in a wall. The more empty space there is, the greater amount of wind that can rush through. Sometimes, the quietest and simplest of pieces may not necessarily reflect my emotions the best, but I discovered that those pieces can have great power in accessing them. 

Curious what could have inspired such perceptive melancholy, I researched a little into Chopin's personal life. I discovered that he was often ill and died at a relatively young age, thirty-nine. In addition, he was known for having a turbulent love life. I guess circumstances like those almost seem stock for a Romantic-era composer, but the raw emotion in his pieces tell me that Chopin was a true Romantic, filled with passion and blessed with a talent to express that passion through music.

Image Credits: in the public domain, licensed through CC