Our new lunchtime concert series in the National Museum Wales begins in February with an entertaining exploration of the music of Chopin, his friends and contemporaries.
Professor Kenneth Hamilton, internationally-renowned pianist and Head of the School of Music, will perform three concerts in the series (6 February, 13 February, 20 February). These concerts will feature works by Chopin and his contemporaries, including Liszt, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schumann, alongside relaxed commentary on the pieces being performed.
Here, Professor Hamilton tells us about Chopin as teacher…
“Paris, 1842. No. 9 Place d’Orleans. Every week of the “season”, from around the beginning of October to the end of March, a steady stream of piano pupils would come to study with Fryderyk Chopin. It was a fashionably artistic area of the city – Charles-Valentin Alkan also lived there, and a host of lesser luminaries. Chopin was by then the most famous pianist permanently resident in Paris, and accordingly its most exclusive piano teacher. Even Liszt had not charged as much for a one-hour piano lesson: 20 gold francs. At around 4.5 zlotys, this was a phenomenal fee. A bank clerk might earn 250 zlotys a year; a gentleman could live very respectably on 2,500. As Chopin gave up to five lessons per day, piano teaching – and not the modest royalties from his music – quickly became his main source of income, just as Berlioz largely made his living as Librarian of the Conservatoire, and Wagner by sponging off friends.
“Piano pupils arriving at Chopin’s flat would be greeted by a valet, evidence in itself of unusual opulence; most musicians, then as now, had to open their own front doors. While waiting in an antechamber, the students would unobtrusively place the fee for their lesson, delicately concealed in an envelope, on the mantelpiece. On no account was cash to be handed over directly – Chopin found anything to do with money or sex equally distasteful, and avoided close engagement with either.
“Almost inevitably, most of Chopin’s pupils were wealthy young ladies with talents in inverse proportion to their social status. Wilhelm von Lenz, an occasional Russian pupil, noted that a steady stream of such students – “each one even prettier than the last” would emerge from the music room and parade haughtily past the next in line. Nevertheless, one or two of these “perfumed ladies in frilly dresses” might actually have pursued professional careers, had such a prospect not been entirely unthinkable. Camille O’Meara in particular was an extremely accomplished player with an instinctive feeling for her teacher’s style. Yet, as Liszt said many years later, Chopin was “unlucky with his students”. None achieved international fame as performers, though a few of them – such as Karol Mikuli, teacher of Moriz Rosenthal – fruitfully passed on to subsequent generations what they had learned in the Place d’Orleans. Chopin himself had especially high hopes for Carl Filtsch, an astonishingly talented prodigy only 13 years old who came to study with him at the end of 1842. “When this lad starts touring,” joked Liszt, “I’d better shut up shop.” But Filtsch was already ill. He died of consumption in 1845, a few years before Chopin’s own death from the same disease.
“Once students had spent the requisite time in Chopin’s antechamber, they would be ushered into the music room, which housed a Pleyel grand piano and an upright of the same manufacture. The pupil sat at the former, Chopin at the latter, from where he would demonstrate the correct execution of troublesome passages. Most of his teaching was by direct example – he far preferred to do rather than describe. According to Mikuli, some pupils would “play no more than a few bars during the entire lesson”. But listening attentively was unusually valuable, because what one mainly learned from lessons with Chopin was how to play Chopin. The composer would write ornaments or variants into pupils’ scores – some of them distinct improvements over the versions originally published – as well as fingerings and friendly admonitions. Playing from the score was a requirement, for in contrast to the prevailing opinion among pianists today, Chopin regarded memorisation as likely to prompt an overly mechanical performance. “I don’t want any of this,” he snapped, after discovering that a pupil intended to play a piece by heart. “Are you reciting a lesson?”
“Especially important to Chopin were the creation of a singing tone and a subtle blending of sonorities. He himself was known not for the speed and power of his playing (on the contrary, audiences in larger halls found his performances verging upon the inaudible) but for its exquisite elegance and refined rhetoric. “If you can’t sing, you can’t play the piano,” he would tell his pupils, while advising them to go to the opera and listen to Rubini, Pasta and other great singers of the day.
“Apart from his own music, Chopin was happy to recommend pieces by Hummel and Field, even occasionally Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 26 (the only one in his repertoire). He had, however, little time for “avant-garde” music, whether it was Schumann’s eccentric effusions (even Carnaval, which was dedicated to him) or Liszt’s virtuoso extravagancies. Most favoured of all was the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. In fact, Chopin prepared for his own concerts not by practising the pieces programmed, but by spending a fortnight playing the 48 Preludes and Fugues. “Play Bach for me,” he would say to his students as they left at the end of their lesson…”
The article originally appeared in the 8th issue of Chopin Express gazette published for the 16th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition by Adam Mickiewicz Institute and Gramophone.
One of the main reasons is that all the presenters are research students, which means their papers are new and cutting edge, covering a wide array of topics. But it also means that the audiences are primarily research students as well, who can ask insightful questions and (arguably more importantly) sympathise with the research experience. While they may not know a subject area inside and out, they understand the painstaking work and effort that goes into creating a presentation of this nature, and there is an air of support and camaraderie throughout the whole event.
This conference was truly a huge event: apart from two keynote speakers, there were 8 sessions each comprising 12 or 13 parallel panels that constituted three papers each, with topics that were broadly situated within the long 18th-century. Within this kind of event, selection was naturally necessary, but still very difficult. Nevertheless, I managed to find several people with whom to discuss issues related to my research: the presence of several scholars and researchers involved in fields such as history of theatre, performance and spectacle in relation to different contexts surely helped a lot. Sadly, there was not much about music, but the discussions I engaged in helped me thinking about my research within a broader historical and cultural context.
I was pleased to see many of my fellow researchers from Cardiff attending and presenting there, namely Alicia, August, Martin (or, better, Martins, two of them) and Simone. The atmosphere was quite relaxed and nice; my paper, dedicated, again, to Ambrogio Minoja, was maybe a little too specific, but did not fail to generate a nice discussion on broader issues such as propaganda, reception and the availability of primary sources.
On the corner of Jones and Pacific is a series of shops, any one of which might have been home to the piano tuner and the bathrobe-besuited soprano. My hunch was that it was the shop with the three windows, but my research assistants and I failed to reach a consensus on that. What was certain was that the liquor store sign across the street has probably been hanging there since at least 1963.
Although there were plenty of old mansions standing proudly where they’ve probably stood for a century, there were also some unfortunate reminders of the tendency, even in San Francisco, to build unlovely structures that then blight the landscape for decades. In at least one instance these structures block out the one bit of view that City Scale was designed to exploit.
That was a lovely bit of theatre, but it was also a powerful symbolic gesture: City Lights is a vital, living icon of the Beat generation, which was decidedly on the wane in 1963. What City Scale represented was a motion toward progressive artistic production, and certainly the interactions between key players in the Tape Music Center and agents in the nascent counterculture from that point onward affected the ‘next wave’ of artistic production in the city, which is the focus of my book. So we paid due respect to North Beach history by browsing the shelves at City Lights, taking a picture of 
