The Warsaw-born, Paris-based pianist and composer Frédéric Chopin was one of classical music’s early superstars and a phenomenally original music thinker, especially when it came to his own instrument. In over 230 surviving works, all of which involve the piano, he expanded the range and the repertoire of what the keyboard could do and devised many new musical forms.
This glittering little study was supposed to be a means of developing the technique of piano students: the music demands outlandishly wide stretches (especially for the right hand) that would have been considered extremely daring in the early nineteenth century. But it’s so much more than a glorified homework exercise. Chopin revered the music of Bach and Mozart, and in this mini-masterwork of melodic inventiveness and harmonic richness he shows his debt to both.
It can be a funny old day, 2 January, and sometimes a bit anticlimactic, but this two-minute piece seems to me to encapsulate all the promise of a new year – with its attendant hopes and dreams, discoveries, resolutions and potential revolutions...引自第41页
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