Countdown to Planyavsky at MIT (19 days)

The following is a humorous explanation by Peter Planyavsky of why he became a composer. (As you will see, he pokes fun both at himself and at the state of music in the Church at one time.)

"Before somebody else comes forward and makes it public, I would rather admit it myself: I ALSO COMPOSE.

"First, I had not planned it, but – I realized it very soon – I was literally forced to become active in that direction. Of course there were a few pieces out there that had been composed, but many of them were not very useful. To name just a few examples: some songs by Mozart and Hugo Wolf were indeed of acceptable quality and were actually usable as Responsorial Psalms; however, the texts were very questionable. Attempts to use drastically abridged scenes (without the scenery) from Wagner operas as Offertories failed, because somewhere in the middle the next Mass would begin.

"And as for solo organ music – ask yourself: will you torment yourself and the audience with such minor masters as Murschhauser or Reger? No, ultimately we must do everything ourselves.

"This train of thought was shared by many. (Not that they all composed for themselves! They gave me commissions. [...]) The train of thought was shared also by some publishers. (Not that they all composed for themselves either! But they printed compositions of mine.) [...] The reasonings of all these people were evidently found to be correct by all the other people who decided to perform my pieces. [...]"

(From the official website of Peter Planyavsky, http://www.peterplanyavsky.at, English translation by Leonardo Ciampa.)

And now, Planyavsky's most popular composition, the Toccata alla Rumba. The sheet music has sold many thousands of copies. (One wonders, however: would this be best used as a Responsorial Psalm or an Offertory?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4sG0497KoI

(performed by Ines Maidre, in concert at Altenberg Cathedral)

Mary B. Davenport (1919-2010)

Friends,

Today, through a random Google search, I learned that more than nine months ago, the great contralto and teacher Mary Davenport passed away in Albuquerque. She died on my birthday, January 17. She was ten days shy of 91.

I am profoundly saddened by her loss. In her memory and honor, I quote in full my chapter on her from The Twilight of Belcanto.

***

"Sundays in Golders Green"

“It’s too easy to describe the singing of Mary Davenport as a miracle. God did indeed bestow a uniquely lovely timbre on her, the brightest and most golden of all deep contralto sounds, without a trace of what Kathleen Ferrier used to call the ‘goitrous hoot’ of the species.
“But that is not what has enabled Mary Davenport to preserve that timbre, unblemished, through more than four decades of singing, preserve the perfect evenness of scale, the clarity of the sound's definition, the absolute steadiness of tone — some of Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody sounded as if an angel had granted a pipe organ the ability to sing legato and phrase poetry with feeling. That is technique and discipline.”
Richard Dyer (Boston Globe, 12 April 1986, p. 20)

Like Patricia Craig, Mary Davenport was a teacher who had had a successful career on European and American stages as a singer. (It’s always refreshing when voice teachers actually sang somewhere!) In 2003 I telephoned the 84-year-old mezzosoprano, to whom I hadn’t spoken in several years. The voice I heard sent shivers down my spine. It was a young voice, shiny like silver, with not a soupçon of age. In pitch and clarity, this voice could have been 35, or 25. My wife also heard the voice on the machine and said, “How old did you say she was?”

This is no accident. Many singers have thought about healthy speech placement. Mary Davenport devoted her life to it.

Davenport was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1919. At age 19 she studied as an exchange student at the University of London. She studied voice with a very nice man at the Royal College of Music, with whom she also studied privately. The nice man’s name was Alberto García (1875-1946), the grandson of Manuel García II and great-nephew of Malibran and Viardot! Alberto was the last in the García singing legacy.

The teenager spent many Sundays with Mr. “Garsha” (as the Brits pronounced it) and his family in Golders Green (a section of London). Alberto spoke often of his famous aunts, grandfather, and of course their father, Manuel García the First (1775-1832). Manuel I was born in Seville. He was baptized “Manuel del Populo Vincente Rodriguez.” Manuel I’s opera troupe — including his three famous children — traveled to New York, and on 29 November 1825 gave the very first Italian opera ever to be heard on the soil of the New World. The work was Il Barbiere di Siviglia; the Almaviva was Manuel I, who had created the role. Due to a rival claque, this New World premiere was an utter fiasco. García attempted to salvage it by singing a Spanish song, accompanying himself on the guitar.

With particular fondness, Alberto remembered the 101st birthday gala for his father, Manuel II, held at Royal Albert Hall in 1906. Alberto told Mary that his father sang a song on the occasion (!). I wondered if such a thing could be true. Sure enough, García’s biographer confirmed that there was a 101st birthday gala on 17 March 1906 and that the old man sang a song. But he added a spinetingling detail: The song in question was Spanish, and García accompanied himself on guitar … exactly as his father had done 81 years previous. Could it have been the same song?

Davenport returned to America, where she studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Her teacher was one of the most famous soprani of the day, Elisabeth Schumann. Ms. Schumann taught mostly soprani and very few mezzisoprani; however, Mary was no ordinary student, and Schumann accepted her. Ms. Schumann was probably not one of those teachers who did much vocal or technical woodshedding (which Mary didn’t much need anyway). What she did have, Mary remembers, was an extraordinary musicality and musical mind. And she couldn’t have hurt Mary’s ease in the high register.

In New York, Davenport made a triumphant debut recital, which was reviewed on the front page of the New York World Telegram & Sun. A career in radio began in the ’40s, when she succeeded Eileen Farrell on the CBS program Invitation to Music. Davenport was accompanied by the CBS Symphony, conducted by Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann (1911-1975) was a famous film composer who wrote the scores for many Hitchcock films, as well as for Citizen Kane, etc.

Farrell and Davenport remained long-time friends, and when the latter was shopping for a new teacher, Farrell said, “Why not Mrs. Mac?” Mary was curious to try out “Mrs. Mac,” who had in Mary’s words “saved” Farrell. “Mrs. Mac” was Eleanor McClellan.

I remember clearly the story of Mary’s first lesson with McClellan, despite the decade that has elapsed since I heard it. Mary was in her 20s. McClellan was at least 90. Mary sang a piece; McClellan said nothing. She went up to Mary, touched her abdomen and said, “You’re holding. Let go.” For the next half-century, Mary kept that advice in her heart.

McClellan also stressed the speech aspect of singing and the huge importance of speaking correctly. Advice that also stuck.

Davenport went on to perform in opera (including many performances of The Medium), concert (appearances with the New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestra), and recital. She enjoyed a successful operatic career in Germany and Switzerland, including thirteen seasons at Zurich’s beautiful opera house. Other operatic engagements in Europe included Barcelona but, unfortunately, did not include any Italian cities.

From there, Davenport returned to Massachusetts and joined the voice faculty of Boston University, where she would remain for 32 years. Gradually she devoted more time to teaching and less to performing. But she did sing with the most important orchestras in Boston, including the Boston Symphony (the first time in 1944, the last time thirty years later). A Mahler performance with Ben Zander’s Boston Philharmonic also remains in the concertgoer’s memory.
Though music critics generally limit their fraternization with musicians, the Boston Globe critic Richard Dyer was unable to conceal a well-justified fondness for Mary, as a musician and person.

Her tone fused brightness with depth, and long past the age when most singers retire, Davenport still commanded a tone that was large, steady, and glowing. What turned out to be her final local appearance was in Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody at Boston University in 1986, her voice still radiant and expressive, the legato technique recalling the golden age of singing. Her students in more recent years report that during lessons Davenport still rang out commandingly over a three-octave range. She was an imposing and elegant presence at concerts, and her unsparing views were never a secret because this was a voice that carried. (Boston Globe, June 20, 1997, p. D16)

Notice that Dyer used form of the word “command” twice in one paragraph. This was appropriate. There was something commanding about Mary. Yet despite her aristocratic upbringing, I always found her to be an affectionate, gentle person uninterested in keeping up false appearances. She just was someone who relished quality, in people and in things. If she had a clock, it was a beautiful clock. If she had a dress, it was one her seamstress made for her. Her library contained the best books, in the best editions. It was as if her stomach couldn’t quite take anything, or anyone, that didn’t exude quality.

As for her silvery mezzosoprano, Dyer’s description of it corroborates my memory exactly. It really was three octaves, low C to high C. I never heard the high C, but I heard many effortless B-flats. Every note in her range had the quality of being firm yet floating. In my earthly existence, I have never heard a singer with such an evenness from top to bottom. Almost stubbornly even. There was not even a vestige of a register break anywhere. And there were no fabricated tones. You never felt, “On that note she sounded like a soprano,” or “On that note she sounded like a contralto.” It was HER VOICE, round and beautiful, at every point in her range.

Never in my life did I meet a person so diametrically opposed to the pushing of the voice. She’d rather cut off her arm, one felt. On the other hand, Mary hardly needed to push. Her voice was so well-placed that she would talk barely above pianissimo, and you could hear her down the hall. Even on the phone the voice was magisterial. Her whole life and heart seemed completely dedicated to placing the vowels. This is why she could be heard without difficulty against an orchestra, why she still had a high Bb and C at age 75.

Mary recorded not a fraction of that which her talent warranted. She did record a major work with Jan Peerce and Martina Arroyo. And I wish I could say that the major work they recorded was Verdi’s Aïda or Trovatore or Requiem. Instead, it was Handel’s Judas Maccabeus. Yuck! I adore Handel, but that piddly little role of the Israelite woman barely gave a taste of what Mary could do.

[Footnote: But the tenor role was meaty, and Jan Peerce really wanted to do it. The recording sessions took place in Vienna. “We were in the control room,” Mary remembered, “and Peerce said to me, ‘Where have you been all my life?’ Peerce was very encouraging to young singers.” (Conversation with the author, October 2003).]

Other recordings which are not on CD include a L’Enfance du Christ recorded for Columbia, with Léopold Simoneau, Martial Singher, and Donald Gramm, conducted by Tom Scherman.

Perhaps Mary’s best recording — at least the one with which she herself is happiest — is the aforementioned Alto Rhapsody, performed at Boston University and conducted by Thomas Dunn. The singer was 67 years old. Though never released commercially, this recording would quickly become a collector’s item were it to be made available.

The major labels should have broken her door down and fought over who would get to record her in a corpus of Brahms and Mahler and Verdi and Duparc and repertoire in English. That they didn’t is to the eternal detriment of their discographies.

As a teacher, Mary was extremely gentle and empathetic — on a personal level. On a musical level she could be terrifying. She let nothing go by, sometimes stopping the student after every note. This was hard on some students, to say nothing of the piano accompanists! I loved every second of it. It sharpened my ears considerably. Often I felt as though I was the one receiving the lesson. I think that’s why Mary took to me; I exhibited some of the enthusiasm that ideally the students would have demonstrated.

It’s not for me to speak of Mary’s “method” or “technique.” Cedo maiori. But I’ll offer a few observations that made an impression on me.

Mary was not vague about what she wanted: She wanted five pure vowels, legate, and in all the languages. And believe me, her French sounded French, her German sounded German, and (as the critics pointed out) one couldn’t have hoped for more beautiful or understandable English.

Of the brilliant mental images that Mary conjured for her students, the two that I most vividly remember are the concept of “dropping in” to the note and that of letting the brain take care of pitch.

With “dropping in,” Mary had the students imagine that the sound was coming down into the placement from above, not up from the throat. Schipa, I later learned, gave similar advice; the tone, he said, should come down “from heaven.” And when Corelli spoke of the “curve” that the sound must make in the cavity, the concept was not dissimilar.

Of course there are two presumptions: (a) the vowels and posizione are correct, otherwise there’s nothing to drop into; and (b) the breathing is correct. Mary would say, “The breath is ready, and you coordinate it with the placement.” (Of course, to make the breath “ready” but not “held” requires study.)

The other notion, that of letting the brain, not the throat, worry about pitch, I felt was extremely useful. When the student thinks, “Oh my God, the high note is coming!” the throat tightens, the tongue tightens, everything tightens. But if the brain negotiates pitch on its own and the students worry more about posizione and breathing, whether it’s a low C or a high C, an easy emission and fluid legato become possible. Mary practiced what she preached: If you were deaf and looked at her when she sang, you could barely tell if she were singing a low note or a high one. That is contrary to what many teachers teach about making a huge opening, in order to “let the sound out.” However, there is no biological reason why a mouth has to be open wide in order for the voice to be heard. Audibility and oral aperture are not directly proportional. If they were, ventriloquism would be a physiological impossibility.

Without my knowing it at the time, Mary’s focus on the vowels was very much in the Italian Belcanto tradition. Like Vittorio Marciano, she spent a good part of the lesson purifying her students’ vowels. She didn’t talk so much about physically shaping the lips, and she avoided any mumbo-jumbo about the tongue. Mary was a firm believer that if you could hear the correct vowel, you could sing the correct vowel. Also like Vittorio, she sang a lot during the lessons. How happy were my ears!

We discussed old-time singers quite often. She’d talk about hearing recitals by Gigli and Tauber in London, or singing Aïda with Helge Roswaenge. “He was about sixty at the time,” Mary remembered. “Amneris, of course, comes on the stage right after Celeste Aïda. He sang the aria so beautifully that when I came on, I almost couldn’t sing.”

Mary’s memories go back even further. “When I was born,” she said, “Caruso was still alive.” She was two when he died, but even into her youth he was “still very much talked about.” She had contemporary knowledge about things that I know only from books. Caruso’s interpretation of La Juive … Lawrence Tibbett’s divorce … I know about those things because I read about them. She knew about them because she heard them being talked about! I know the old recordings as CD re-releases. She owned the original 78s. This was the privilege it was to work on a weekly basis with such legends as Iride Pilla and Mary Davenport. And Mary, who as recently as today was forming five beautiful vowels, is living proof that the twilight of Belcanto has not become night.

The above from The Twilight of Belcanto (Copyright © MMIV, MMV Leonardo A. Ciampa. All rights reserved.)

Musical Prejudice

Last week on PBS was an interesting documentary entitled "The Music Instinct: Science and Song." I caught very little of it (except to hear an excerpt of Mozart's K. 330 played so fast that it sounded like a cheap stunt, even by current standards of cheap-stunt Mozart playing. I don't know who the pianist was. I'm told he was blind; however, he was not deaf).

A point was made during the show -- not one of the salient points, but one that to me was very interesting.

To us Western Hemispherians, a minor scale sounds "sad." But what if that is merely cultural?

(The following, naturally, is my own expansion of this point. I do not wish to implicate the makers of the documentary for it!)

Clearly there are cultures where music in minor keys or modes is not experienced as being "sad" at all, while in our own culture, "classical music" is so often perceived as "dark," no matter how major the key or how joyful the mood. To many, the sound of an organ is "funereal," no matter how many sunny major chords the music radiates. Once I played a Saturday Mass at a Catholic church unaccustomed to anything bearing the slightest resemblance to "classical" music. I didn't play anything "heavy," but at one point I improvised, somewhat in the style of Mendelssohn, and in a major key. (There was not a profusion of minor or diminished chords. It was not "dark" music.) A parishioner stopped me afterwards and said that it sounded like a funeral. I realized that for people like that parishioner, no organ sound can be anything but gloomy.

Even my two-year-old demonstrated some musical subjectivity the other day. We were listening to a CD of Wladyslaw Szpilman, the fine Polish pianist whose life is portrayed in the outstanding movie "The Pianist." Szpilman was playing a composition of his own, the Concertino for Piano & Orchestra (1940). The piece has a jazzy element; it doesn't sound like Gershwin, but it mixes classical and jazz moods with the freedom that Gershwin did. My son said that the music was "scary." My wife opined, "No, it's not scary. I think it's mysterious." To me they were both wrong.

There are infinite examples of people's prejudicial reactions to classical music. Not long ago I played a funeral, and I played a piece by Ted Marier that I've always considered comforting. The celebrant said after that he felt it was "depressing." Yet at the very same funeral was sung Marty Haugen's "Shepherd Me, O God," which is firmly rooted in a minor tonality. What makes the Haugen "happier" if the harmonies are no less minor than the Marier?

Simply put, many people are allergic to "classical" music or anything that bears a resemblance thereof. There's no better way to put it: it's an allergy. At a shopping plaza in a neighborhood of Boston, there was once the problem of not-so-nice kids hanging around and causing trouble. So what did the plaza owners decide to do? Pipe in classical music! Now every time you walk through the plaza, you are treated to masterpieces of the symphonic repertoire. The kids are nowhere in sight. It repels them more effectively than any amount of armed policemen could have.

What causes a person to hate what is beautiful? The only explanation I can come up with is: it is like when you're sleeping, and someone turns on the lights in the room at 3 in the morning. At that moment, you hate the light. It doesn't seem possible that anyone could hate light, but in that instance you do just that. Our culture has become so dark that the light has become distasteful.

It's clear that no instrument of classical music inspires more aversion than the pipe organ. People who will happily go out to hear chamber and orchestral music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert wouldn't be caught dead at an organ recital. To Catholics, perhaps the organ subconsciously represents all of the beatings they received from nuns in parochial schools. It represents something that their parents and grandparents loved, something that belonged to them. Interestingly, many 20- and 30-somethings who are too young to remember the Latin Mass or the mean nuns are fascinated with the organ's technological ingenuity and sonic richness. The 50- and 60-somethings are the opposite. They are the ones who want Kumbaya played by guitars rather than Bach played by the organ. They are married to Vatican II -- for richer and for poorer.

The root of the problem is the connection that people make between the organ and the church. They cannot conceive of the organ as a musical instrument separate from the church. The organ becomes the church. And if people don't like church, they're not about to like the organ. The organ becomes paid indulgences. The organ becomes papal infallibility. The organ becomes the pedophilia scandal. The organ becomes the church. That is the association people subconsciously, or even consciously, make.

But for a millennium and a half, the organ was as secular instrument that no one would have dreamt of bringing into the church. In Roman times, the hydraulis (a small, portable organ) was used in amphitheatres, to accompany the lions' eating the Christians. In the Middle Ages, when the great Gothic cathedrals were being built, organs still weren't thought of for the church. That's why many Gothic cathedrals are difficult to retrofit with an organ, without causing visual or acoustical problems.

At some point during the Renaissance, someone decided to introduce the organ to the church. Churchgoers were scandalized. They passionately believed that the organ was a secular instrument unfitting for the church -- the exact same reaction that many people have today towards electric guitars and drums in the church.

Interestingly, in South Africa the organ is thought of as a secular instrument. (The theatre organ or cinema organ is more popular in South Africa than is the church organ.)

For some reason, music in Latin elicits particularly strong reactions. In my whole life, I have never been able to understand why many clerics fear Latin hymns like they would fear a glass of water during a cholera epidemic. What is it about the Latin language that elicits such trepidation? No Rabbi is afraid to have Hebrew spoken in his temple. Why the Catholic priests' antipathy? In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI gave priests permission to celebrate a Tridentine Mass without first having to consult a bishop. That's all he did. Latin Masses were already allowed, but a priest formerly needed a bishop's approval before holding a Tridentine Mass. Benedict simply eliminated that extra administrative step. But look at the firestorm that resulted! Benedict was accused of trying to "bring back" the Latin Mass (which didn't need to be brought back because it was there all along). And then when word got out that there was one sentence in the Latin liturgy that could be construed as Antisemitic (the sentence has been since taken out), Benedict was seen as some sort of racist, trying to take the church back into the Middle Ages. It was insanity, but Latin inspires such insanity for some reason.

I think, in the end, the clergy are afraid that parishioners will flee from organ music and Latin hymns, just as people at the shopping plaza flee from the piped-in classical music. But I hate to tell you: there will not be one penny less in the collection plate if you do the Latin Agnus Dei instead of the English Lamb of God at a 4 o'clock Mass. If anything they will give more, because people sense quality even when they can't explain it. A person says, "Wow, this is a beautiful church," without being conscious of the fact that the color scheme of the ceiling matches the color scheme of the stained glass windows, or what have you. They know it's beautiful, but they don't know why. For the same reason, people will always respond positively to good music. Almost 25 years in this business tells me that good music is preferred by the majority of congregants but the minority of clergy. It is a musical prejudice not at all unlike that of my toddler who thinks the Szpilman Concertino is "scary." Priests are scared. The difference is: my son will surely grow out of it.

Vous jouerez du Mozart en mémoire de moi

(or, Mozart By Total Immersion)

How is it that Chopin was my favorite composer, yet his final words on his deathbed -- "Play Mozart in my memory" -- never made sense to me?

Mozart? Why Mozart?

I used to think that Mozart was certainly a Wunderkind, and certainly he was on to something with his latest works, but had he only finished his Requiem and lived longer -- I thought -- maybe then would Mozart have written some great stuff. I held it against him that his music didn't seem "crazy" enough.

But my dear teacher, Yuko Hayashi, warned me during my teens, "Don't judge a piece based on how other people play it." This was a genuine fault of mine, and Mozart was the biggest casualty of it. I was poisoned by the profusion of sane Mozart playing.

On June 14th I had the privilege of performing Mozart's Piano Trio (K. 548) with my beloved colleagues, the Lavazza Chamber Ensemble.

I hadn't played any Mozart in years (save an occasional accompanying gig). I had never played a piece of Mozart chamber music. And for various reasons, I didn't begin practicing this piece -- I mean, I didn't even open the book -- until the Monday evening before the concert.

Mozart by total immersion.

No matter what piece I am preparing, I feel the struggle between preparedness and spontaneity. If every note is too secure, the result isn't music-making that lives and breathes. If the notes aren't secure enough, the music sounds spontaneous but reckless. Every composer forces the interpreter to find that balance; but with many composers the balance is quite easy to find. In a 20th-century étude, you'd better be sure and prepare all the notes. In a lyrical, Romantic slow movement, it might be better not to plan the exact rhythm or dynamics of every note.

But what do you do in Mozart? Every note has to be perfect; the tiniest smudge in Mozart is like a coffee stain on a white shirt. Yet if it's too controlled and calculated, it ceases to be Mozart at all.

I suddenly, but begrudingly, started to agree with a former teacher, who a quarter century ago maintained that Mozart was the most difficult composer to play. I would name a composer; she'd answer, "Mozart is still more difficult."

The problem with most Mozart playing in the 20th century: it wasn't just unemotional -- it was antiemotional. This was the greatest defect in "historically informed" musicians. To reason "Romantic = emotional" is in itself not too harmful. But as soon as you reverse it, "Emotional = Romantic," now you have a real problem. All of a sudden, musicians started stripping away the emotions like old paint. Bach became robotic, Mozart became robotic, everything pre-Beethoven became robotic.

I remember Stephen Drury saying in a masterclass, "Never forget that a Mozart concerto is virtuoso music." I would add to that that Mozart is dramatic, operatic music. The Historical types feared that it would be the Mahler type of drama. So they played it safe: throw out all the drama. And the Tchaikovsky type of virtuosity? Better throw out all the virtuosity as well.

To play Mozart without drama is to play Schubert without lyricism. (But then, some people do that, too.)

But how do you make Mozart always elegant and simultaneously always dramatic?

And how do you play Mozart virtuosically? Better play him very fast! The second biggest problem with today's Mozart playing -- and not a problem that with which we Lavazza folk did not wrestle.

So how did I overcome these obstacles and learn K. 548 in mere days? I tried out a new idea. I set a timer, and I practiced for 25-minute sessions. My breaks between sessions varied, but they were never less than 10 minutes and never more than an hour. And I did not listen to any recordings. (To this day, I still have not heard a recording of this work.)

To think that I had held it against Mozart that his music wasn't "crazy" enough. Despite its tonality of C major, K. 548 certainly gets crazy. Mozart tosses you sudden harmonic and melodic shifts all over the place. And yet the music always flows like oil. How Mozart achieved this dichotomy perhaps will never be known.

There's something interesting about C major. Several passages occur twice, first in the exposition and again, in a different key, in the recapitulation. When one of these occurrences was in C major, that was always the more difficult one to play. I have decided that C major is by far the most difficult key to play in on a keyboard instrument. Students learn C major first because it's musically the easiest. But note that Chopin started his students not with C major but with B major. There's no question that the more accidentals a key has, the easier its scale is to play. (Or like my father once said: "If you find the right key, you can play in any flat.")

A very interesting Indian woman came up to me at the post-concert reception. She herself was a pianist. She asked, "Are you a Mozart specialist?" I was floored by the question, but I couldn't help but feel that, at the very least, I must have achieved the musical effects that I was trying to achieve, for her to ask such a question. Then she floored me again by declaring, "Mozart is the most difficult composer, and C major is the most difficult key to play in!" Clearly this woman got it.

Paderewski plays Chopin's Mazurkas

About a month ago I was talking to Dr. Joseph Maneri. We agreed that Chopin was one of the most original composers who ever lived.

Not that that is the only benchmark. Many Brahms pieces sound like Schumann, Schubert, or Beethoven. Bach and Handel imitated everyone. So that is not the only criterion.

However, it's remarkable how little of Chopin sounds like anybody else. A critic once wrote shallowly that the Chopin Nocturne was "a Bellini melody over a John Field bass." Chopin sounds nothing like Bellini or John Field. In fact, Chopin completed both sets of etudes and both concerti by age 20. No other composer, not even Mozart, wrote music that was as original, plentiful, and good by age 20.

But how does one play Chopin? What should his music sound like?

And what about those Mazurkas?

Chopin died in 1849. His last students were dead before pianists started making 78 records. In short, we have no aural evidence of anyone who ever heard Chopin play.

Ten or fifteen years ago, I was on a mission: to figure out how to play Chopin's divine Mazurkas. I bought every recording I could find made by a Polish pianist born before 1900.

I did conclude that only the Poles can play that rhythm. But even among them, there was much variety. Rosenthal's sharp rhythm was more Rosenthalian then Chopinesque. At the opposite end of the spectrum was Arthur Rubinstein, whose rhythm was watered down enough not to offend or confuse the non-Poles.

But then you have Paderewski ...

Pederewski was and is a difficult musician to adjudge. Today the most famous musicians are the ones with the most skillful and aggressive managers. 75 or 100 years ago, the most famous musicians were the greatest by the common consent of their colleagues. Singers agreed that Caruso and Gigli were the greatest. String players agreed that Kreisler and Heifetz were the greatest.

No one agreed about Paderewski.

His pianist-colleagues were unanimous: he stunk. The public was unanimous: he was the greatest pianist in the world. Never the twain did meet.

Was it "A" or "B"? The answer is: "Yes."

That he was the most famous no one questions. Liberace in his prime created nothing like the Paderewski frenzy. Women would rush the stage to touch Paderewski -- and not all of them were paid to do so. In the era between Franz Liszt and Elvis Presley, Paderewski was the world's most hysterically adulated musician (pace Caruso).

Nor does anyone question that Paderewski had his technical defects at the keyboard. He didn't start lessons till age 12. Only by age 24 did he find a great teacher, Leschetitzky. Paderewski tried to compensate by practicing like a fiend -- up to 17 (!) hours a day for certain events. Then one day (so the rumor goes), something in his hand "snapped" during a concert. (A tendon?) He finished the performance anyway. His playing was never the same since.

But forget all that. Forget the hysterical fans. Forget the faulty technique. Just LISTEN.

Listen to Paderewski play Chopin. Who else had that nobility? Or that melting lyricism? Or that golden tone that comes through even the crackly 78s? And who could imbue this music with more patriotism than the future Prime Minister of Poland?

Paderewski was accused of infidelity to the printed score. Yet his Chopin was more Chopinesque than Rosenthal's, Friedman's, Rubinstein's, or that of most any other Pole.

I am grateful that Paderewski recorded much Chopin, including the Mazurkas. His rendering of the Mazurkas in Ab and F# minor from Op. 59 will perhaps never be surpassed.