Chopin: Revolutionary Étude

After leaving Warsaw for Paris in 1830, Chopin stopped for a short time in Breslau, Dresden, Vienna, Munich, and then Stuttgart, where he arrived in 1831. There he learned of the Warsaw occupation by the tsarist troops and, according to some biographers, this news would have led him to compose, enraged, several piano pieces, among which the Étude N° 12, Opus 10, consequently called "Revolutionary Étude", stands out as one of the most energetic.

Before Chopin (and before Liszt, as well) the musical form Étude was linked to the practice of the instrument so that the student could approach other works at a later stage. Expressiveness was not relevant to them, much less the enjoyment of the sounds. On the other hand, if Chopin's Études have acquired their own personality in the history of music, it is not only due to their technical challenges (the pedagogical contribution) but also because Chopin took them as a pretext to create masterpieces, precisely because the inventiveness needed to its construction was going hand in hand with a marvellous musical inspiration.

Frédéric Chopin (1810 - 1849)

Chopin's Études, for the twelve major and minor scales, are contained in two collections of 12 études each, to which are added three others, posthumous. The first of these collections is the Opus 10 and was dedicated to Franz Liszt. The second is Opus 25 and, as the gentleman he was, Frédérick dedicated them to Liszt's mistress in those years, Countess Marie d'Agoult. Composed in Warsaw, probably Vienna, Stuttgart, and then Paris, were finally published in this latter city, between 1832 and 1837.


Étude Opus 10 N° 12, "Revolutionary"
The main technical difficulty demanded by the étude N ° 12 of Opus 10, "Revolutionary", is the handling of fast scales and very large arpeggios entrusted to the left hand, destined to sweep practically the entire keyboard, providing the entire piece with a character that we could call "resounding", condition surprisingly valid also for the diminuendo passages, in which case the challenge is even greater.

However, it should also be noted that, despite the enormous demand, the hand, an indispensable tool in this occupation, remains "comfortable" for a large part of the piece – and large hands will be more comfortable than small hands – that is, the hand (the left hand) is almost always very close to its natural disposition, thus diminishing the possibilities of fatigue and stiffness because the hand repeats structures that suit it, even when it must work at great speed.

In the early Twentieth Century, Polish pianist and composer Leopold Godowsky (1870 - 1938) surprised the musical world with some Études on Chopin's Études, composed perhaps from a somewhat daring consideration that the original demands were not many. In this work, Godowsky addresses the Chopin études and asks the left hand to do what is written for the right and vice versa, or creates versions of them for one hand, or put together two or three études in one.

The video shows the Russian pianist Boris Berezovsky playing the Revolutionary Étude in the traditional way to continue undeterred with the amazing version of Godowsky for the left hand alone. (A nice comment on Youtube about the video points out: "If I was Boris, I would be sipping some tea on my right hand while I play this. That would be Epic.")

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