Exploring the Depths of Chopin's Scherzos

For many a capable teenage piano student, the first big romantic piece their teacher assigns them is a scherzo by Chopin. Often it's his first, which starts with an outcry. But maybe just as popular is his second, which starts with a question and then answers with an outcry. Chopin's scherzo No. 2 in B-flat minor was my first big piece. In fact... That's me you're hearing play it, recorded when I was 17 for the classical radio station in my hometown of Austin, Texas. Tonight I've decided to play my bread and butter, Chopin's second scherzo in B-flat minor. Scherzo means joke in Italian, but this music is no laughing matter. Chopin was being ironic, I guess. And like all of his scherzos, the second is strange and beautiful. And I loved it. Until I didn't. This is the piece that, it doesn't matter where I am or if I've warmed up, I can just sit down and play it. So, I thought it'd be a good choice for tonight. See, I played this piece so much that I lost feeling for it. It's like if you say a word over and over again, it eventually loses its meaning. Scherzo. Scherzo. Scherzo. Scherzo. And now, we have Ben Lottie performing music by Chopin. So for almost 20 years, I was estranged from my first big teenage musical romance. But recently we reconnected, started flirting again, and rekindled the flame. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, I suppose. Welcome to the Chopin Podcast. I'm your host, Ben Laude, and over the course of this 12-part series, we're diving deep into the music of Friedrich Chopin. With one episode dedicated to each of Chopin's major compositional genres, this is episode four, Scherzos. In this episode, pianist Garrick Olson examines the Beethovenian brilliance of Chopin's four Scherzos. Silver medalist and top prize winner of the 1990 International Chopin Competition, Kevin Kenner, reacts to his own performance of the third scherzo from Warsaw. 2015 National Chopin Competition medalist and renowned music educator Josh Wright breaks down signature passages from each scherzo. And finally, music critic Jed Disler recommends some very special recordings of Chopin's scherzos from the past century. You can listen to full episodes of the Chopin podcast on the day of release. Or watch video segments from each episode in the following days on my YouTube channel. Just search for my name, Ben Laude. That's B-E-N-L-A-U-D-E. This podcast is produced in partnership with the Chopin Foundation of the United States, with whom I'm proud to share a mission to make Chopin's music accessible to anyone and everyone around. To find out more, visit Chopin.org. The honorary chairman of the U.S. Chopin Foundation is none other than Garrick Olson, who will be with us every step of the way during this podcast series. To this day, Garrick is the only pianist from the United States to ever win the first prize at the International Chopin Competition. And in October 2025, he will become the first non-pole to ever chair the jury in Warsaw. Garrick is just one of a handful of pianists in history to have ever recorded Chopin's complete works, published on the Hyperion label. Many of the recordings heard during this series are taken from that set, and digital downloads of the complete cycle are available for purchase on the Hyperion website. And like many concert pianists, Garrick's affair with the Chopin scherzos began in his early teens. My teacher, Sasha Gorodnitsky at Juilliard, assigned me the C-sharp minor scherzo when I was 14, and I found it bewildering and very, very difficult. And I never really started thinking about them as a group until I heard Richter play them all. in sequence in a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1965. Suddenly there they were. I don't think I'd even... heard the first scherzo before then. That Richter recital exists on recording and I've been listening to it lately. But there's a video made in the decade before from Moscow with Richter playing the second scherzo that is so incredibly compelling that I have to play a little bit for you just to elicit some reaction and maybe bring back some memories of the great Sviatoslav Richter. Wow, it's amazing, of course. And he's thought of and solved all the little sort of problems that we piano teachers have in teaching this piece. You know, there are myriad subtle problems in playing this. That often sounds so ugly when not wonderful students play it because which is so singing is hard to approximate on the piano. And Richter does a real nice job of just that little thing. He doesn't try to make it big and expressive, and so on. I mean, that's one of about a thousand things I think I've heard in Mr. Richter there. It's fast. I've rarely heard it that fast, which speaks not only to his extraordinary ability to play the piano fast and really well, but his musical conception, it's also stricter than many people would have it. It's more Beethovenian, if you will, which I subscribe to later in my life also, especially this opening section, not as a grandiose sort of rhetorical piece, but as a very strict four-bar phrase thing. And it was only first when I heard Rubinstein play it that I began to understand the dramatic thrust of those syncopations. I just never knew what Da-wa was doing there. But somehow, sitting close to Rubinstein, who obviously felt not the rhythm, but the pulse, um-bum-bum-bah! Yum! You know, I don't know exactly how many quarter notes or eighth notes he counted. He probably didn't. He felt it, as we say. But, you know, you often hear... It's just placed there. It's one, two, da-bop, which then leads you back to that. Something's got to happen inside of you. And certainly Richter understands that, and all good pianists do, and Mr. Rubenstein made me feel it. All the scarces are marked presto, and in classical... We learn in music history or from our teachers that presto means basically one per bar. So it's not one, two, three. The pulse, not the rhythm. The pulse is one to a bar and almost always, I would say virtually always, a four bar unit makes one large beat of one, two, three, So you actually feel that. So that's a very important thing to keep in mind for all these four pieces and other people's scherzos too. One of the most famous scherzos that also is in a quick triple meter, but then has a hyper meter in four, as you're describing, is from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. And I wonder if you could sort of compare this little joke to maybe Chopin's third scherzo's little joke, because they have an interesting similarity that didn't occur to me until actually you told me a few years ago. That hyperbrythm, it's fugato. That gets into your body, you know, and it inflects the same kind of figuration. If you think of Beethoven and Chopin. They're not brothers and sisters, but you might say they're cousins. Yeah, and I especially find the yuppa-puppa-puppa-puppa-puppa, yuppa-puppa-puppa-puppa, this long, slow buildup where the left hand has it. This is Beethoven for me. That's how Beethoven builds drama. Completely. And by repetition and by adding voices and by making a long crescendo. It's a device which composers have used a lot and Beethoven really used it. So that's 70 minutes of a symphony, whereas Chopin's Scherzo is about seven. How does Chopin do this? Such a compact form. Yet it feels like you've played a whole symphony by the time you're done with it. I remember the writer on music, Michael Steinberg, once heard me play this piece, and he said, there's almost more music than will fit into one piece. You've got this incredible drive, which only lets up when suddenly a chorale appears out of nowhere. You know, this churchly kind of very, very diatonic music. And suddenly, oh, by the way, for those who were... follow such things. That's the first full cadence in the whole piece. He's had momentary ones, but they don't count. But finally, finally we have a cadence of what, a minute and a half into the piece. When I was 14 learning with Sasha Gorodinsky, he basically told me it went the way most people played it. When the chorale comes in, and i remember even thinking that i would i was not a questioner i didn't confront him with it but i thought chopin doesn't stay to go much faster there however it sounds really nice when you do it that way in that more traditional that's why you ended up winning the chopin competition gary because you were already having critical you questions and thoughts at a young age about the score. You wouldn't want to hear in Chopin interpretation something this square. First of all, you can't jump to the top of the keyboard, so you have to do something graceful. But you also don't have to go... On the other hand, it's beautiful in and of itself. And that's where Chopin interpretation and traditions have accumulated like barnacles. And, you know, if you hear somebody who's convinced of that interpretation, does it beautifully, it never occurs to me to say, well, that's not correct. The most haunting moment. And let's remember, Chopin did compose this at the same time as the preludes in Mallorca, in that haunted house in Voldemossa. He wrote this whole scherzo. we hear these kinds of creepy sounds and lurking intonations down the hallways when it goes to E minor. that when that chorale theme is the most hauntingly beautiful moment in all of Chopin, dare I say, I'm going to make that statement. Incredible. Now you sound like me. I say things like that all the time. But of course, there are many other most hauntingly beautiful moments, one must say. This has to be top five, at least top five. Oh, I think so. Because it's always been in major. Even heroic in E major. So done. I agree with you on this one so much. But then the chorale extends and extends and extends in an almost Wagnerian or Lisztian-Wagnerian way. And then you come crashing down the mountain, right? For me, it's one of the most hair-raising crescendos in all of music, because it's not just a great crescendo, it has so much musical significance in the context of the piece, because we've heard that chorale now six or seven times in different formats, and we know it so well, and suddenly it grows up and comes true, and then it turns tragic, as Chopin often does. The first scherzo is a depiction of war and a dream of peace. It's violent. Schumann asks the question, how is gravity to clothe itself in jest and go about in dark veils, questioning the work's title? Why did he call the first scherzo a scherzo? I would just like to ask the question, what solo piano piece begins like that? Wow. That's pretty astonishing. We have to forget that there's been 194 years of music since then. I've judged a few competitions. I don't know why I hear so many 14-year-olds playing this piece. Why is this the Chopin piece that we assign, you know, talented young people? It just seems like there's too much to it. It's too hard. It's too emotionally taxing. But I have a very pedestrian answer for that. It repeats so much. Once you learn the notes to the main bass section and its second half, you play each of them again and again and again until it changes in the coda. As pure piano playing, it's not that hard. It sure sounds hard. Could you maybe... It sounds unbelievably hard. And it is, by the way, to play it at a proper burning tempo. So let me just try to play a little bit of the opening. after well i shouldn't do that it's been 20 years okay i mean it's fantastic music if you leave out the dissonances Except he throws in as many, almost as many dissonances as consonants his own. The yard is littered with ugly grass, or whatever you might want to say. It's incredible harmony. He piles dissonance upon dissonance upon dissonance. And also, I always think the left hand of that sounds very almost Brahmsian, or maybe Beethovenian. Anyway, it doesn't sound very Chopin-esque, does it? No, and it has such a striking middle section, striking in its contrast, which is something that's common, I think, to all of these skiercy. And here we have a kind of Polish Christmas carol. Yeah, a kind of version of Lulajże Jezuniu, which is a sleep baby Jesus, you know, he would be rocking, which you can probably find on YouTube now. Lula e gulumpiony me pieści dełko I don't think it's an exact quote because Chopin hardly ever exactly quotes, but it's there. So it's as peaceful as the opening is not. And then there's such a poignant moment just before the recap, if we call it that. There's something sonata form-esque in these. But where we get the opening outcry again, those chords again, but then they're interpolated with the carol. Could you just wax poetic on what that might mean? What that might symbolize? I don't know what it might mean. Let me play it first because it's really shocking. And it reminds me of a good friend of mine who... heard me play lots of Chopin years ago and was not a musician, but listened a lot and said, one thing that struck him is that there are no two transitions in Chopin that are ever the same. He never writes the same one twice. And he never did anything like this and almost never did because the third iteration of the chorale falters or falls asleep and becomes indecisive. Let me just play it. And the storm returns. I mean, if that were written by a composer tomorrow, it would say, what modern music? My poetic reading is, these are not happening concurrently in time. The dreaming child, it's unaware of this present horror. And so in a way, you're getting a cinematic effect of two different scenes at the same time that are unaware of each other. And then it's very modern cinematography, post-World War II anyway, where you can actually have both at once melding, just as it does in our psyche and our imagination. Yeah, it's pretty incredible, even if you don't invoke cinema. Speaking of cinema, I have a little movie here I want to play. Let's see if you recognize the pianist. Do you remember this recording? Where was that even from? Very well. It's from the BBC, probably about 1973 or so, in what was called a studio recital. I used to play well and have talent. I don't know what happened to me. And I certainly, of course, was younger and had more hair and was better looking, as younger people often are. as a pianist, I don't know if I could match that today. I don't know if I have the sheer drive. I mean, I know I can do it physically, but I mean, I don't know. You know, one thing it brings up is since so much of this piece occurs again and again and again, that's one of the classic interpretive decisions a Chopin player has to make is every time this happens. For example, at the end, I think and many pianists do. Before that, I get more excited because we've heard this thing now five times in the piece. You want to say it with more intensity. So those are decisions you make as a player and you change your mind as the years go by. I was listening to Richter play it on April 15th, 1965, Carnegie Hall. You were in the hall. Were you on stage? I was sitting on stage. Yes, lucky me. Wow. And when there's the calm, the hush. Towards the beginning. He gets much slower. Oh, he does. It's haunting. It's like he just pulls the music down into this other realm. Oh, I agree. And I recall it. He was very strict, as I mentioned, generally. But he had this ability of, I mean, Mr. Richter, it doesn't say go twice or even more slower. But suddenly he brought you into a different imaginative space. Yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't have been able to say that when I was 17. But I felt it, that's for sure. Schumann said of Chopin's second scherzo, he compared it to a poem of Lord Byron. He said, it's so overflowing with tenderness, boldness, love and contempt. Another funny story is that Franz Liszt, he wouldn't let his students bring this to him. He said, every governess plays the second scherzo. I'm wondering if we could dive into this piece with respect to the persistent recurring triplet figuration that lasts throughout the piece in many guises. But just right from the beginning, I had trouble with it when I was a kid. What makes this hard? It says presto sotto voce. People are often shocked to learn that it's most of the time more difficult to play soft than it is loud, because you have to control this mechanism, which... gets between you and the actual sound of the instrument. You have to learn how to manage the machine. So it'd be much easier to play it loud, right? Wow, listen to those notes. They're all clear. They're all crystal clear, except that's not the mood of the piece. It's not what he needs and asks for. He was more than fussy about this. What does it say? It could never be played to Chopin's satisfaction. It must be a question taught Chopin. It was never played questioningly enough, never soft enough. never round enough, and then never sufficiently weighted or important. Chopin would dwell at length on this bar again and again. It's the key to the whole piece. The triplet group is generally snatched or swallowed. He was exacting about that. Now, isn't that interesting? This triplet figuration comes back in surprising places. So we have a B section with a very different landscape. The triplet starts creeping in. I'm wondering if you can share the development of this motive with us. Yes, exactly. This rhythmic motive rather than the actual steps. Extremely beautiful poetic, but quite insistent or obsessive. I mean, he keeps on playing with us to the point of it's almost maddening, right at the climax. He develops that in a Beethovenian way, and he keeps at it. Where else does he, in the development? The whole thing is permeated and saturated with this kind of Beethovenian insistence. The fact that Chopin says that that opening figure is the key to the whole piece reminds me of a really brilliant observation made by the great pianist professor Logan Skelton at the University of Michigan. And whether or not it's true in fact, and Chopin intended it, I don't care because it's just so cool. Take the notes of that figuration. You have a B flat, obviously, is the second of the notes, and that's the key of the piece, B flat minor. You have a D flat, which is the relative major. It's how the piece ends. Then you have two other notes. A, which is the key of the B section. And then you have F, which keeps coming back as a harmony in dramatic places right at the beginning. F major, F major, F major. And so Skelton points out that the whole work's harmonic conception lies in microcosm in that opening triplet figure. It's just very consistent and I feel in a lot of good pieces of music they set up worlds with certain harmonic tensions. characters playing different roles in the drama. And those characters keep coming back. And I don't know, we will never know how conscious a composer is of doing that sort of thing. But it is there. There's no question. And it's just a beautiful aesthetic thing to just bask in, you know, when you're learning the piece that... that the small and the large are somehow united, you know, in this way. It's kind of like the Big Bang. It all grows out of that. Yeah. Thank you for that. It's more than a story. It's absolutely accurate. It shows what a musical scientist Chopin was, too. There's a quote from a critic that when Chopin is at his happiest, most outwardly serene, then for the pianist, he is at his most treacherous. The fourth scherzo is the only one in a major key and its mercurial brilliance and whimsy are notoriously hard to control. In any case, let's talk about this most scherzo-like opening. And would you agree that this really does live up to its name, maybe more than the others, at least at the beginning of the piece. Oh, absolutely. This is the only one that might satisfy people who want a scarecrow to sound, if not jokey, at least jolly or slightly humorous or good-natured. And it certainly does for the most part. In some ways, this is one of the more elusive and complex ones because it doesn't have, until the middle section, any of Chopin's soulful, melancholy long tunes or even ecstatic long tunes. Well, how would you describe these opening unison notes? Rather sort of square, ordinary. I don't know. How do you describe them? I don't know. I think it's why I kind of. the piece went over my head at first. You know, I was listening to lots of Chopin in my teens, and this was one I never paid attention to. I didn't until I heard Mr. Richter play it at that same 1965 recital. One of the most scherzo-like... aspects of it are these sort of laughing motives of arpeggiated double notes, which I have to say, I think Camille Saint-Saëns really fell in love with because it's used in the second movement of his G minor concerto. I wonder if you find that parallel. It's absolutely the same texture, yeah. Very similar in its texture. But I think one thing that you need to understand as you begin to learn the fast portion of this piece is that this more staid, not-so-laughing-but-not-unhappy theme happens a lot. Then something else happens, then we have laughter. And it goes throughout the whole piece and sometimes it takes different forms, not legato. And so on. Once you get the kind of clue of the design, you can follow that antus firmus, if you will, or that slightly more ordinary chorale melody, and that will be the anchor for all the laughter and all the figurations. Because really, once you get to bar 65, you've got a really nasty little passage in the right hand. And that's what we get very preoccupied with, but it has to... That's the leading motive. And as I like to joke with my students, if you play that leggero run in the right hand, absolutely pianissimo, you're gonna hear it. It continues all the way through the whole piece, even... as all the steel brillant of the early pieces. That could have come from much earlier music, but look what the left hand's doing, or left and right hand. So in that sense, is that not a lot more complicated? then that early style is such a uplifting and jovial feeling when one's listening to it, which is so contrasted by the dark and simple textured two-part What, what, Barcarolle of the middle section? Exactly, it's Barcarolle-like. It has that on-the-water, slightly wavy feeling, but isn't the theme. Sort of related to this. So in other words, it's quite integrated at the same time. So it's very simple, it's very beautiful, it is mournful. In the Chopin way it sometimes breaks into subsidiary voices. and completely magical things that just insert themselves. Over the years, this has become my favorite scarcer to listen to. And I found a wonderful video performance of a young beardless man in Warsaw in 1970. We'll just hear the just part of the end of the coda here. Wow. Not bad. That used to be good. Every segment of the Chopin Podcast with Garrick Olson and other special guests is cut from much longer interviews, which you can view in full by signing up to my Patreon. Consider joining any membership tier by visiting patreon.com slash benlotti. This episode in particular required some big cuts from very lengthy interviews, including some really fascinating material that it was painful to part ways with. So be sure to check out those extended interviews with Garrick Olson, Kevin Kinner, and Josh Wright on my Patreon. On the next episode of the Chopin Podcast, we'll explore the pieces that revolutionized piano technique in the 19th century, Chopin's etudes. Starring, as always, Garrick Olson, and featuring special guest pianist Claire Huangsi, gold medalist of the National Chopin Competition in 2010. We'll revisit a couple of her etudes from Warsaw that same year. And we'll welcome back 1975 Chopin Competition silver medalist Dina Jaffa, who has unique insights on Chopin etudes, having performed the complete cycle in public multiple times. Stay tuned.

In fact... That's me you're hearing play it, recorded when I was 17 for the classical radio station in my hometown of Austin, Texas. Tonight I've decided to play my bread and butter, Chopin's second scherzo in B-flat minor.

Scherzo means joke in Italian, but this music is no laughing matter. Chopin was being ironic, I guess. And like all of his scherzos, the second is strange and beautiful.

And I loved it. Until I didn't. This is the piece that, it doesn't matter where I am or if I've warmed up, I can just sit down and play it.

So, I thought it'd be a good choice for tonight. See, I played this piece so much that I lost feeling for it. It's like if you say a word over and over again, it eventually loses its meaning.

Scherzo. Scherzo. Scherzo. Scherzo. And now, we have Ben Lottie performing music by Chopin.

So for almost 20 years, I was estranged from my first big teenage musical romance. But recently we reconnected, started flirting again, and rekindled the flame. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, I suppose. Welcome to the Chopin Podcast. I'm your host, Ben Laude, and over the course of this 12-part series, we're diving deep into the music of Friedrich Chopin.

With one episode dedicated to each of Chopin's major compositional genres, this is episode four, Scherzos. In this episode, pianist Garrick Olson examines the Beethovenian brilliance of Chopin's four Scherzos. Silver medalist and top prize winner of the 1990 International Chopin Competition, Kevin Kenner, reacts to his own performance of the third scherzo from Warsaw.

2015 National Chopin Competition medalist and renowned music educator Josh Wright breaks down signature passages from each scherzo. And finally, music critic Jed Disler recommends some very special recordings of Chopin's scherzos from the past century. You can listen to full episodes of the Chopin podcast on the day of release.

Or watch video segments from each episode in the following days on my YouTube channel. Just search for my name, Ben Laude. That's B-E-N-L-A-U-D-E. This podcast is produced in partnership with the Chopin Foundation of the United States, with whom I'm proud to share a mission to make Chopin's music accessible to anyone and everyone around.

To find out more, visit Chopin.org. The honorary chairman of the U.S. Chopin Foundation is none other than Garrick Olson, who will be with us every step of the way during this podcast series.

To this day, Garrick is the only pianist from the United States to ever win the first prize at the International Chopin Competition. And in October 2025, he will become the first non-pole to ever chair the jury in Warsaw. Garrick is just one of a handful of pianists in history to have ever recorded Chopin's complete works, published on the Hyperion label. Many of the recordings heard during this series are taken from that set, and digital downloads of the complete cycle are available for purchase on the Hyperion website. And like many concert pianists, Garrick's affair with the Chopin scherzos began in his early teens.

My teacher, Sasha Gorodnitsky at Juilliard, assigned me the C-sharp minor scherzo when I was 14, and I found it bewildering and very, very difficult. And I never really started thinking about them as a group until I heard Richter play them all. in sequence in a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1965. Suddenly there they were. I don't think I'd even...

heard the first scherzo before then. That Richter recital exists on recording and I've been listening to it lately. But there's a video made in the decade before from Moscow with Richter playing the second scherzo that is so incredibly compelling that I have to play a little bit for you just to elicit some reaction and maybe bring back some memories of the great Sviatoslav Richter.

Wow, it's amazing, of course. And he's thought of and solved all the little sort of problems that we piano teachers have in teaching this piece. You know, there are myriad subtle problems in playing this.

That often sounds so ugly when not wonderful students play it because which is so singing is hard to approximate on the piano. And Richter does a real nice job of just that little thing. He doesn't try to make it big and expressive, and so on.

I mean, that's one of about a thousand things I think I've heard in Mr. Richter there. It's fast. I've rarely heard it that fast, which speaks not only to his extraordinary ability to play the piano fast and really well, but his musical conception, it's also stricter than many people would have it. It's more Beethovenian, if you will, which I subscribe to later in my life also, especially this opening section, not as a grandiose sort of rhetorical piece, but as a very strict four-bar phrase thing.

And it was only first when I heard Rubinstein play it that I began to understand the dramatic thrust of those syncopations. I just never knew what Da-wa was doing there. But somehow, sitting close to Rubinstein, who obviously felt not the rhythm, but the pulse, um-bum-bum-bah!

Yum! You know, I don't know exactly how many quarter notes or eighth notes he counted. He probably didn't. He felt it, as we say.

But, you know, you often hear... It's just placed there. It's one, two, da-bop, which then leads you back to that. Something's got to happen inside of you.

And certainly Richter understands that, and all good pianists do, and Mr. Rubenstein made me feel it. All the scarces are marked presto, and in classical... We learn in music history or from our teachers that presto means basically one per bar.

So it's not one, two, three. The pulse, not the rhythm. The pulse is one to a bar and almost always, I would say virtually always, a four bar unit makes one large beat of one, two, three, So you actually feel that. So that's a very important thing to keep in mind for all these four pieces and other people's scherzos too. One of the most famous scherzos that also is in a quick triple meter, but then has a hyper meter in four, as you're describing, is from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

And I wonder if you could sort of compare this little joke to maybe Chopin's third scherzo's little joke, because they have an interesting similarity that didn't occur to me until actually you told me a few years ago. That hyperbrythm, it's fugato. That gets into your body, you know, and it inflects the same kind of figuration.

If you think of Beethoven and Chopin. They're not brothers and sisters, but you might say they're cousins. Yeah, and I especially find the yuppa-puppa-puppa-puppa-puppa, yuppa-puppa-puppa-puppa, this long, slow buildup where the left hand has it. This is Beethoven for me. That's how Beethoven builds drama.

Completely. And by repetition and by adding voices and by making a long crescendo. It's a device which composers have used a lot and Beethoven really used it. So that's 70 minutes of a symphony, whereas Chopin's Scherzo is about seven. How does Chopin do this?

Such a compact form. Yet it feels like you've played a whole symphony by the time you're done with it. I remember the writer on music, Michael Steinberg, once heard me play this piece, and he said, there's almost more music than will fit into one piece.

You've got this incredible drive, which only lets up when suddenly a chorale appears out of nowhere. You know, this churchly kind of very, very diatonic music. And suddenly, oh, by the way, for those who were... follow such things. That's the first full cadence in the whole piece.

He's had momentary ones, but they don't count. But finally, finally we have a cadence of what, a minute and a half into the piece. When I was 14 learning with Sasha Gorodinsky, he basically told me it went the way most people played it.

When the chorale comes in, and i remember even thinking that i would i was not a questioner i didn't confront him with it but i thought chopin doesn't stay to go much faster there however it sounds really nice when you do it that way in that more traditional that's why you ended up winning the chopin competition gary because you were already having critical you questions and thoughts at a young age about the score. You wouldn't want to hear in Chopin interpretation something this square. First of all, you can't jump to the top of the keyboard, so you have to do something graceful.

But you also don't have to go... On the other hand, it's beautiful in and of itself. And that's where Chopin interpretation and traditions have accumulated like barnacles.

And, you know, if you hear somebody who's convinced of that interpretation, does it beautifully, it never occurs to me to say, well, that's not correct. The most haunting moment. And let's remember, Chopin did compose this at the same time as the preludes in Mallorca, in that haunted house in Voldemossa.

He wrote this whole scherzo. we hear these kinds of creepy sounds and lurking intonations down the hallways when it goes to E minor. that when that chorale theme is the most hauntingly beautiful moment in all of Chopin, dare I say, I'm going to make that statement. Incredible.

Now you sound like me. I say things like that all the time. But of course, there are many other most hauntingly beautiful moments, one must say.

This has to be top five, at least top five. Oh, I think so. Because it's always been in major.

Even heroic in E major. So done. I agree with you on this one so much. But then the chorale extends and extends and extends in an almost Wagnerian or Lisztian-Wagnerian way. And then you come crashing down the mountain, right?

For me, it's one of the most hair-raising crescendos in all of music, because it's not just a great crescendo, it has so much musical significance in the context of the piece, because we've heard that chorale now six or seven times in different formats, and we know it so well, and suddenly it grows up and comes true, and then it turns tragic, as Chopin often does. The first scherzo is a depiction of war and a dream of peace. It's violent. Schumann asks the question, how is gravity to clothe itself in jest and go about in dark veils, questioning the work's title?

Why did he call the first scherzo a scherzo? I would just like to ask the question, what solo piano piece begins like that? Wow.

That's pretty astonishing. We have to forget that there's been 194 years of music since then. I've judged a few competitions. I don't know why I hear so many 14-year-olds playing this piece.

Why is this the Chopin piece that we assign, you know, talented young people? It just seems like there's too much to it. It's too hard.

It's too emotionally taxing. But I have a very pedestrian answer for that. It repeats so much. Once you learn the notes to the main bass section and its second half, you play each of them again and again and again until it changes in the coda. As pure piano playing, it's not that hard.

It sure sounds hard. Could you maybe... It sounds unbelievably hard.

And it is, by the way, to play it at a proper burning tempo. So let me just try to play a little bit of the opening. after well i shouldn't do that it's been 20 years okay i mean it's fantastic music if you leave out the dissonances Except he throws in as many, almost as many dissonances as consonants his own. The yard is littered with ugly grass, or whatever you might want to say. It's incredible harmony.

He piles dissonance upon dissonance upon dissonance. And also, I always think the left hand of that sounds very almost Brahmsian, or maybe Beethovenian. Anyway, it doesn't sound very Chopin-esque, does it?

No, and it has such a striking middle section, striking in its contrast, which is something that's common, I think, to all of these skiercy. And here we have a kind of Polish Christmas carol. Yeah, a kind of version of Lulajże Jezuniu, which is a sleep baby Jesus, you know, he would be rocking, which you can probably find on YouTube now. Lula e gulumpiony me pieści dełko I don't think it's an exact quote because Chopin hardly ever exactly quotes, but it's there.

So it's as peaceful as the opening is not. And then there's such a poignant moment just before the recap, if we call it that. There's something sonata form-esque in these.

But where we get the opening outcry again, those chords again, but then they're interpolated with the carol. Could you just wax poetic on what that might mean? What that might symbolize?

I don't know what it might mean. Let me play it first because it's really shocking. And it reminds me of a good friend of mine who... heard me play lots of Chopin years ago and was not a musician, but listened a lot and said, one thing that struck him is that there are no two transitions in Chopin that are ever the same.

He never writes the same one twice. And he never did anything like this and almost never did because the third iteration of the chorale falters or falls asleep and becomes indecisive. Let me just play it. And the storm returns.

I mean, if that were written by a composer tomorrow, it would say, what modern music? My poetic reading is, these are not happening concurrently in time. The dreaming child, it's unaware of this present horror.

And so in a way, you're getting a cinematic effect of two different scenes at the same time that are unaware of each other. And then it's very modern cinematography, post-World War II anyway, where you can actually have both at once melding, just as it does in our psyche and our imagination. Yeah, it's pretty incredible, even if you don't invoke cinema. Speaking of cinema, I have a little movie here I want to play. Let's see if you recognize the pianist.

Do you remember this recording? Where was that even from? Very well.

It's from the BBC, probably about 1973 or so, in what was called a studio recital. I used to play well and have talent. I don't know what happened to me.

And I certainly, of course, was younger and had more hair and was better looking, as younger people often are. as a pianist, I don't know if I could match that today. I don't know if I have the sheer drive.

I mean, I know I can do it physically, but I mean, I don't know. You know, one thing it brings up is since so much of this piece occurs again and again and again, that's one of the classic interpretive decisions a Chopin player has to make is every time this happens. For example, at the end, I think and many pianists do. Before that, I get more excited because we've heard this thing now five times in the piece. You want to say it with more intensity.

So those are decisions you make as a player and you change your mind as the years go by. I was listening to Richter play it on April 15th, 1965, Carnegie Hall. You were in the hall. Were you on stage? I was sitting on stage.

Yes, lucky me. Wow. And when there's the calm, the hush. Towards the beginning. He gets much slower.

Oh, he does. It's haunting. It's like he just pulls the music down into this other realm.

Oh, I agree. And I recall it. He was very strict, as I mentioned, generally. But he had this ability of, I mean, Mr. Richter, it doesn't say go twice or even more slower.

But suddenly he brought you into a different imaginative space. Yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't have been able to say that when I was 17. But I felt it, that's for sure.

Schumann said of Chopin's second scherzo, he compared it to a poem of Lord Byron. He said, it's so overflowing with tenderness, boldness, love and contempt. Another funny story is that Franz Liszt, he wouldn't let his students bring this to him.

He said, every governess plays the second scherzo. I'm wondering if we could dive into this piece with respect to the persistent recurring triplet figuration that lasts throughout the piece in many guises. But just right from the beginning, I had trouble with it when I was a kid.

What makes this hard? It says presto sotto voce. People are often shocked to learn that it's most of the time more difficult to play soft than it is loud, because you have to control this mechanism, which... gets between you and the actual sound of the instrument. You have to learn how to manage the machine.

So it'd be much easier to play it loud, right? Wow, listen to those notes. They're all clear. They're all crystal clear, except that's not the mood of the piece. It's not what he needs and asks for.

He was more than fussy about this. What does it say? It could never be played to Chopin's satisfaction.

It must be a question taught Chopin. It was never played questioningly enough, never soft enough. never round enough, and then never sufficiently weighted or important. Chopin would dwell at length on this bar again and again. It's the key to the whole piece.

The triplet group is generally snatched or swallowed. He was exacting about that. Now, isn't that interesting?

This triplet figuration comes back in surprising places. So we have a B section with a very different landscape. The triplet starts creeping in.

I'm wondering if you can share the development of this motive with us. Yes, exactly. This rhythmic motive rather than the actual steps. Extremely beautiful poetic, but quite insistent or obsessive. I mean, he keeps on playing with us to the point of it's almost maddening, right at the climax.

He develops that in a Beethovenian way, and he keeps at it. Where else does he, in the development? The whole thing is permeated and saturated with this kind of Beethovenian insistence. The fact that Chopin says that that opening figure is the key to the whole piece reminds me of a really brilliant observation made by the great pianist professor Logan Skelton at the University of Michigan. And whether or not it's true in fact, and Chopin intended it, I don't care because it's just so cool.

Take the notes of that figuration. You have a B flat, obviously, is the second of the notes, and that's the key of the piece, B flat minor. You have a D flat, which is the relative major. It's how the piece ends.

Then you have two other notes. A, which is the key of the B section. And then you have F, which keeps coming back as a harmony in dramatic places right at the beginning. F major, F major, F major. And so Skelton points out that the whole work's harmonic conception lies in microcosm in that opening triplet figure.

It's just very consistent and I feel in a lot of good pieces of music they set up worlds with certain harmonic tensions. characters playing different roles in the drama. And those characters keep coming back. And I don't know, we will never know how conscious a composer is of doing that sort of thing. But it is there.

There's no question. And it's just a beautiful aesthetic thing to just bask in, you know, when you're learning the piece that... that the small and the large are somehow united, you know, in this way. It's kind of like the Big Bang. It all grows out of that.

Yeah. Thank you for that. It's more than a story. It's absolutely accurate. It shows what a musical scientist Chopin was, too.

There's a quote from a critic that when Chopin is at his happiest, most outwardly serene, then for the pianist, he is at his most treacherous. The fourth scherzo is the only one in a major key and its mercurial brilliance and whimsy are notoriously hard to control. In any case, let's talk about this most scherzo-like opening.

And would you agree that this really does live up to its name, maybe more than the others, at least at the beginning of the piece. Oh, absolutely. This is the only one that might satisfy people who want a scarecrow to sound, if not jokey, at least jolly or slightly humorous or good-natured.

And it certainly does for the most part. In some ways, this is one of the more elusive and complex ones because it doesn't have, until the middle section, any of Chopin's soulful, melancholy long tunes or even ecstatic long tunes. Well, how would you describe these opening unison notes? Rather sort of square, ordinary. I don't know.

How do you describe them? I don't know. I think it's why I kind of. the piece went over my head at first.

You know, I was listening to lots of Chopin in my teens, and this was one I never paid attention to. I didn't until I heard Mr. Richter play it at that same 1965 recital. One of the most scherzo-like... aspects of it are these sort of laughing motives of arpeggiated double notes, which I have to say, I think Camille Saint-Saëns really fell in love with because it's used in the second movement of his G minor concerto. I wonder if you find that parallel.

It's absolutely the same texture, yeah. Very similar in its texture. But I think one thing that you need to understand as you begin to learn the fast portion of this piece is that this more staid, not-so-laughing-but-not-unhappy theme happens a lot. Then something else happens, then we have laughter. And it goes throughout the whole piece and sometimes it takes different forms, not legato.

And so on. Once you get the kind of clue of the design, you can follow that antus firmus, if you will, or that slightly more ordinary chorale melody, and that will be the anchor for all the laughter and all the figurations. Because really, once you get to bar 65, you've got a really nasty little passage in the right hand.

And that's what we get very preoccupied with, but it has to... That's the leading motive. And as I like to joke with my students, if you play that leggero run in the right hand, absolutely pianissimo, you're gonna hear it. It continues all the way through the whole piece, even...

as all the steel brillant of the early pieces. That could have come from much earlier music, but look what the left hand's doing, or left and right hand. So in that sense, is that not a lot more complicated? then that early style is such a uplifting and jovial feeling when one's listening to it, which is so contrasted by the dark and simple textured two-part What, what, Barcarolle of the middle section?

Exactly, it's Barcarolle-like. It has that on-the-water, slightly wavy feeling, but isn't the theme. Sort of related to this. So in other words, it's quite integrated at the same time. So it's very simple, it's very beautiful, it is mournful.

In the Chopin way it sometimes breaks into subsidiary voices. and completely magical things that just insert themselves. Over the years, this has become my favorite scarcer to listen to.

And I found a wonderful video performance of a young beardless man in Warsaw in 1970. We'll just hear the just part of the end of the coda here. Wow. Not bad.

That used to be good. Every segment of the Chopin Podcast with Garrick Olson and other special guests is cut from much longer interviews, which you can view in full by signing up to my Patreon. Consider joining any membership tier by visiting patreon.com slash benlotti.

This episode in particular required some big cuts from very lengthy interviews, including some really fascinating material that it was painful to part ways with. So be sure to check out those extended interviews with Garrick Olson, Kevin Kinner, and Josh Wright on my Patreon. On the next episode of the Chopin Podcast, we'll explore the pieces that revolutionized piano technique in the 19th century, Chopin's etudes.

Starring, as always, Garrick Olson, and featuring special guest pianist Claire Huangsi, gold medalist of the National Chopin Competition in 2010. We'll revisit a couple of her etudes from Warsaw that same year. And we'll welcome back 1975 Chopin Competition silver medalist Dina Jaffa, who has unique insights on Chopin etudes, having performed the complete cycle in public multiple times. Stay tuned.

Transcript for:Exploring the Depths of Chopin's Scherzos

Transcript for:
Exploring the Depths of Chopin's Scherzos