When he was just twenty years old, Fryderyk Chopin understood that making a living in Warsaw was an impossible task. His vocation was urging him to look for other scenarios where his talent would be more appreciated and bear at the same time better results. But there was an issue, unresolved, the question of choosing the destination, the place to go.
But Chopin did not really want to do it either. Premonitory, he writes:
"I do not feel strong enough to set the day of my departure, if I leave, I will not see the house again... and I think I will die far ..."On the other hand, the political scene was not the best. Under the tsarist occupation since 1813, the harassment of the Poles is routine in 1830: University of Vilna professors are persecuted and the poet Adam Mickiewicz is deported to Russia. With Duke Constantino leading the way the arrests proliferate, while several of Chopin's friends spread libels and rabble-rousing pamphlets. These circumstances lead Nicholas Chopin to hasten Fryderyk's departure. To the legitimate Nicholas' motivation to make known the talent of his son abroad, must be added the information he had –as a result of his contacts with Freemasonry– about the imminent Polish insurrection.
Chopin leaves Warsaw
Fryderyk spent the summer at Zelazowa Wola in the company of childhood friends. At the end of August, he was in Warsaw working on "a polonaise with orchestra". He will leave on November 2, to Vienna. The day before, together with his classmates and friends, they imbibed, sang and played the piano. At the end of the day, he was given a silver cup with a handful of Polish land.
Four weeks after his departure, on the night of November 29, the insurrection broke out in Warsaw, with the assault on the Duke residence, led by students of the Polish officers' school. Chopin learned about this in a foreign land. He will have to face the uninviting fact that the Viennese bourgeoisie does not welcome the Polish uprising, whose outcome will be the total defeat by the immensely superior Russian army the following year.
Andante Spianato et Grande Polonaise Brillante, opus 22
The polonaise for orchestra in which Chopin was working three months before the insurrection is the Grande Polonaise Brillante for piano and orchestra. Later, in 1834, he will add to it an introduction for solo piano whose title is, curiously, a tempo indication instead of a description. Chopin called it Andante Spianato. If we dip into the opera language, we learn that it means a song without frills, canto spianato, which goes directly, bluntly, to the note you want to reach.
In an intimate manner, the andante precedes moderately the enormous brilliance and solemnity of the polonaise, which some have even called "presumptuous", and well, its author is twenty years old.
Later, Fryderyk will make an arrangement for solo piano of the Grande Polonaise.
The final scene of the film The Pianist –which tells the true story of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman during another occupation of Warsaw a hundred years later– gives us the version for orchestra. I can not omit here that the whole piano music in the film is performed by the Polish pianist Janusz Olejniczak.
Following, the version for solo piano, performed by the Chinese pianist Yundi Li, on the stage of Opera Narodowa, Warsaw, 2010.
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