Chopin Filling the House

In this bicentennial year of composer-pianist Frederic Chopin's birth, there will of course be several celebrations. Chopin was one of the great composers for solo piano; unlike what came before, and unlike what followed. Concert pianist Byron Janis has reminisced about the composer, the man, and his legacy.

I remember my mother, the concert pianist and piano teacher, always playing Chopin. He was her favorite. There would be times when she would sit down at the piano in the living room and a series of Chopin Preludes or Nocturnes would fill the house. I might be in the basement, or in my room, or I might be sitting reading at the breakfast nook table, and music would fill the air. This is one of my fondest memories of my youth. My mother's playing would pull at me, and I would stop what I was doing to listen. Sometimes, because I have an apparently innate talent for stealth, I would sneak into the living room without her noticing, curl up on the couch behind her, and listen. She would play on while I listened; inevitably she would startle when she finally realized I was there, and pretend to be mad at me for sneaking up on her (again).

Once or twice when I was very young, I remember lying under the piano itself while she played: really in some ways the best way to listen, because you become fully immersed in the sound.



Of course, since my mother was a piano teacher, she insisted that my older sister and I both study piano. I started piano lessons when I was six years old, and continued through college. I'm not a concert pianist, or even a great pianist of any kind. I know my way around the keyboard, though, more than well enough to be able to compose, or play some easy jazz. I play a diverse array of musical instruments now; yet piano is still "home plate," in a way, and when I sit down at the keyboard, there is a sense of familiarity and known territory unlike anything else. It feels indeed like returning to my musical home.

And of course I learned to play some Chopin. I can still work my way through some of the Preludes, although Chopin's most challenging pieces such as the Ballades remain beyond me, and I never really mastered them. As a pianist, I was always more interested in the avant-garde of 20th C. music (Debussy, Ravel, Bartok, Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, Alan Hovhaness, John Cage, etc.). But Chopin was avant-garde: his music was very original, very different, for its time. And his way of playing, by many reports—which combined classical restraint with emotional power, never letting sentiment cross the line into sentimentality—is an attitude I deeply appreciate. Of the early Romantic composers, I felt closer to Chopin than many others, and played more of his pieces than any other. So of course I once wrote a piano etude of my own, in honor of Chopin's memory.



Artur Rubinstein was my mother's favorite pianist, of his generation. She left me, when she died, Rubinstein's autobiography and dozens of recordings. (The complete Rubinstein Chopin solo piano recordings have been reissued as a huge boxed set.) I still listen to the Rubinstein recordings of Chopin I have on CD; I play them so that the music can fill the house once again. As I listen, I remember my childhood, my mother playing piano, my own playing, many hours filled with the joy and sorrow of music.