Chopin is the color
genius of the piano, his eye was attuned to hues the most fragile
and attenuated; he can weave harmonies that are as ghostly as a
lunar rainbow. And lunar-like in their libration are some of his
melodies--glimpses, mysterious and vast, as of a strange world.
His utterances are always dynamic, and he emerges betimes, as if
from Goya's tomb, and etches with sardonic finger Nada in dust.
But this spirit of denial is not an abiding mood; Chopin throws a
net of tone over souls wearied with rancors and revolts, bridges
"salty, estranged seas" of misery and presently we are viewing a
mirrored, a fabulous universe wherein Death is dead, and Love
reigns Lord of all.
II
Heine said that "every epoch is a sphinx which plunges into the
abyss as soon as its problem is solved." Born in the very
upheaval of the Romantic revolution--a revolution evoked by the
intensity of its emotion, rather than by the power of its ideas--
Chopin was not altogether one of the insurgents of art. Just when
his individual soul germinated, who may tell? In his early music
are discovered the roots and fibres of Hummel and Field.
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