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发表于 2011-12-2 23:22
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ENVOICING CHOPIN'S NOCTURNES
JEFFREY KALLBERG
II faut chanter avec les doigts!" While we do not know pre¬cisely what music elicited Ibis exhortation by Chopin, there is no doubt ot its pertinence to his Nocturnes. "Singing with the tingers" would seem to be one ot the most basic require¬ments for a pianist playing this most Iyrical of genres. Indeed we learn from Karol Mikuli that Chopin assigned Nocturnes to his students in order that they learn to produce a beautitul "vocal" tone at the keyboard.
But Chopin's language does more than simply liken pertorm¬ing styles in two mediums. Rather, it begins to lay bare the fundamental alliance of vocal music with both the conception and perception of the nocturne in the first half of the 19th century. The title itself vividly demonstrates this point. For as dictionaries of music, reviews in the press and publishers' catalogues from the time repeatedly tell us, the title "Noc¬turne" most commonly graced a genre of ensemble vocal music that had been popular in salons and other scenes of domestic music-making since at least the late 1790s. When the musical public thought about the "Nocturne" in the first half of the 19th century, they were usually thinking about a vocal piece.
Associations with this earlier genre plainly affected the ways composers and listeners understood the piano nocturne. When the composer-pianist John Field (1782-1837) started writing piano pieces called "Nocturnes" in the early 1810s, he probably conceived of them (and his first listeners cer¬tainly heard them) not as a new type of composition, but as a version of the vocal genre. At this time, composers routinely cralted such "songs without words" - an aesthetic notion that had existed for years before Mendelssohn enshrined the con¬cept in the titles to some of his piano works. These vocal associations could even move full circle: Field published two of his Nocturnes as songs, and Chopin did not object when his good friend Auguste Franchomme set one of his Noc¬turnes to the latin text O salutaris. In other words, through the middle of the 19th century, a nocturne for piano could be transformed into a nocturne for voice without violating the essence of the genre.
Of course, to observe that the tradition of the nocturne that Chopin embraced and altered was somehow complicated by this alliance with vocal music is not to deny that Field's Noc¬turnes for piano served him as significant models. Chopin was flattered to be compared to Field, and a whole range of his contemporaries sensed Field's musical imprint in his writing. At the same time that Chopín introduced a new range of expressiveness into the genre - most notably through rad¬ical shifts of mood into the middle sections of some Noc¬turnes (good examples of thiis occur in the more rapid and agitated central sections of op.15 no.1, in F majar, op.15 no.2, in F sharp major, and op.62 no.2, in E major) - he also continued through most of his career to write Nocturnes in the Fieldian style. In these works, he avoided large-scale contrasting sections, and instead created a sense of form through the juxtaposition of sharter thematic phrases (the Nocturnes 10 E flat major, op.9 no.2, D flat major, op.27 no.2, and E flat major, op.55 no.2, nicely show how Chopin employed and gradually expanded the scope and complexity of the Fieldian model). And this ongoing homage to Field forced Chopin to engage continually wilh the vocal roots that lay s close to the surface of the Irishman's Nocturnes.
This background in turn guided some of Chopin's composi¬tional decisions, as he strove throughout his career to main¬tain a perceptible presence for the vocal nocturne within its pianistic namesake. His success can be gauged during his own lifetime by the frequent vocal metaphors thal conditioned listeners' responses: critics often described the melo¬dies of his Nocturnes as "songs" or as "declamatory." Today we can hear this presence in their textures that give promi¬nence to a lyrical melody over a widely spanned accompani¬ment (evoking, perhaps, the sound of voices supported by a keyboard instrument or guitar), in their style of ornamenta¬tion (in shape and position akin to the ornate decorations found in vocal nocturnes), and in those passages marked with character indications such as "cantabile" and "sotto voce."
Perhaps the most dramatic, if not the most typical, affirma¬tion of the genre's vocal background comes in the recitalive that concludes the Nocturne in B major, op.32 no.1. The dis¬ruption caused by this ending seems perplexing if we ignore the broader generic tradition: that is, il we deny its vocal roots, we might easily hear the recitative as a foreign intru¬sion. But Chopin conceived the Nocturne in the framework of a vocal past that now and then featured bits of recitative. Hence the shift in tone in the recitative really just magnifies the more normal vocal background of the rest of the piece. What it brings to mind, however, is not the reflective Iyricism most typical of the vocal genre, but rather a special kind of singing with a direct, assertive character. This directness of address, this evocation of music that "speaks" to us word¬lessly, helps account for the sense of immediacy that per¬meates the recitative.
Chopin turned to recitative elsewhere in the Nocturnes. His pupil Moll Gutmann remarked that Chopin instructed him to play the middle section of the Nocturne in F sharp minor, op.48 no.2, as a recitative: "A tyrant commands" (the first two chords), Gutmann reported Chopin saying, "and the other asks for mercy." And in the Nocturne in F minar, op.55 no.1, a briel, nine-bar recitative begins the middle section. Perhaps it was the start of this middle section that led one reviewer in 1844 to single out for praise the Nocturne's "warm, declamatory melody." Once again, recitatives reinforce the abiding characterization of the genre as instrumental music that "speaks."
The enduring connection between instrumental and vocal nocturnes also affected Chopin's conception of the proper performing style for the genre. Well before his day it was common to urge instrumentalists to imitate the style of sing¬ers. Yet the frequency with which Chopin expressed himsell on the subject suggests that it represented more than a model for efficacious phrasing and fullness of sound. Over and over again we find similar testimony to the central role of singing in his conception of proper musicianship. For example, Emi¬lie Gretsch, alter hearing Chopin play four Nocturnes, reported that "his playing is entirely based on the vocal style of Rubini, Malibran and Grisi, etc.; he says so himsell. But it's a purely pianistic 'voice' that he uses to recreate the particu¬lar style of each of these artists...True lo his principie of imi¬tating great singers in one's playing, Chopin drew from the instrument the secret of how to express breathing. At every point where a singer would take a breath, the accomplished pianist... should take Gafe to raise the wrist so as to jet it fall again on the singing note with the greatest suppleness imag¬inable." (A succinct note in Chopin's unfinished sketch for a piano method makes the same point: "The wrist: respiration in the voice.")
Chopin recommended a singing style of performance to so many students in order to help him communicate the vocal background of the genre His comments on the value of stud¬ying singers, on the importance of the wrist in articulating how a melody "breathes," and on the cultivation of a vocal tone served an immediate, practical purpose, but they served another pedagogical end as well: students who would be less apt to reflect on relatively arcane compositional strategies could be made to grasp the generic basis of the nocturne by 'singing" on the piano. Tactile understanding fed generic comprehension, and vice versa; some of the rare qualities that Chopin's contemporaries perceived in his playing must have been bound up with this ability to make sound and, structure absolutely interdependent.
Chopin's words resonate strongly with the compositional strategies that he used to elicit memories of song in the Noc¬turnes. They confirm that a vocal model lay at the heart ot Chopin's entire conception of musical expression. It gov¬erned his theories of performance just as much as it con¬rolled his interpretations of the genre's tradition.
MARIA JOÄO PIRES, who was born in Lisbon, received her early musical training with Professor Campos Coelho at the Lisbon Conservatory, where she also studied composition, music theory and music history. Later she studied in Munich with Rosl Schmid and in Hanover with Karl Engel, who played an influential role in her artistic development. In 1970 she won, to international acclaim, first prize at a competition held in Brussels to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Beethoven's birth. Since then she has undertaken tours of Europe, the USA, Canada, Israel and Japan, and has made guest appearances at the world's most renowned festivals, such as Tanglewood, Ravinia and Schleswig-Holstein. She is especially well known as an outstanding interpreter of Mozart. An exclusive artist with Deutsche Grammophon since 1989, she has released recordings of Mozart's com¬plete piano sonatas (Grand Prix du Disque in 1990) and Mozart piano concertos with the Vienna Philharmonic and Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Claudio Abbado, as well as the Chopín Preludes and F minor Concerto, with André Previn and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (Chopin Prize, Warsaw, in 1995). She has also made recordings of solo piano music by Bach, Schubert and Schumann, as well as works by Schumann with the oboist Douglas Boyd. Her principal partner for chamber music is the French violinist Augustin Dumay, with whom she has recorded Mozart, Brahms and Grieg, Franck, Debussy and Ravel. Joined by the cellist Jian Wang, the pair have al so recorded piano trios by Brahms. |
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科幻 Asimov,Gunn,刘慈欣,Bradbury,Heinlein,Vernor Vinge
音乐 Beethoven,Tchaikovsky,Mozart,Chopin,Schubert,Stravinsky
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