LDV98-9

17 FRANÇOIS-FRÉDÉRIC GUY Chopin invented a new language, a way of expressing musical feeling, in new forms such as the nocturne and the ballade, generally focusing on fairly brief forms and employing folklore, in a roundabout sort of way, yet his music is ‘only’ pure. The purest there is, next to Mozart’s. That makes it frightening to play, because the slightest flaw damages it. So his music shows that the quest for perfection does exist in this world? Let’s say that one of the paradoxes of Chopin’s works is that they were written with extreme precision, even though they belong to the period that brings human emotions out into the open. The ‘I’ employed by the Romantics – instead of the ‘we’ and ‘you’ of the Classical period – is quite different from the Beethovenian ‘I’. Like a Promethean god forging matter, Beethoven moves Classicism towards Romanticism. Chopin, by contrast, appears to be a ‘Classical Romantic’. The rigour of his style (rigour not opposed to the expression of fantasy, nor of the German sense of Phantasie , that is, the imagination), the clarity of the counterpoint, the unprecedented accuracy of his pedal markings, the instrumental phrasing, all this in the service of the cantabile line, is something entirely new in the history of music.