# Did you see the doco: The Art of Chopin?



## RonPrice

CHOPIN
CREATING A NARRATIVE MOOD

Part 1:

Chopin(1810-1849) composed in obedience to inner promptings, dictated by his own musical instincts and tastes, feelings and predispositions. Chopin's techniques and methods, his epic compositional modus operandi, his creative processes were explored this afternoon in an *ABC1 TV* program _The Art of Chopin_.(1) His first composition came in 1817, the year of the birth of the Founder of the Baha'i Faith, a world religion I have been associated with now for nearly 60 years.

Chopin infused new ideas into known forms. The Ballade, for example, which had formerly been a vocalized poem, he cast into an instrumental mold. Back on 15 February 2006, more than six years ago now, I was listening to Chopin's _Ballade in G Minor Op. 23_, and I wrote the following: "This ballade's opening phrase creates a narrative mood, a mood which is forever changing and a mood which the Polish-born pianist Arthur Rubenstein defined as epic grandiosity in 1959."(2) Perhaps this narrative mood was responsible, in part at least, for the creation of my narrative prose-poem here.

Part 2:

Written at some time in the years 1831 to 1835, this Ballade may have had its origins in a particular aspect of the world of the spirit. Perhaps Chopin was moved by elements in a musical ether or a romantic-erotic ether. At the time he had fallen in love with a 17 year old girl, Maria Wodzińska. Chopin's star of fame was also rising high in the early 1830s.

Perhaps some virtue of an artistic grace was exercising an influence on his soul. The American existential psychologist Rollo May(1909-1994) states in his book *Love and Will*(1969) that the artist, the creative person, is often predictive of coming changes by at least a generation. An approaching narrative was to be played on another part of history's stage, in Iran's religious history within the Shaykhi school of the Ithna-Ashariyyih sect of Shi'a Islam. This is a serendipitous connection, or perhaps just a long-bow I have drawn, invoking a synchronicity of events that have personal meaning. I'm sure others here will find this connection curious, indeed, mystifying. Such is the nature of much modern poetry and the conceptual directions taken my modern poets.

The episode of the narrative I am thinking of was one in which Siyyid Kazim, the then leader of the Shaykhi community within Shi'ah Islam met the Bab in the city of Karbila. In a chamber bedecked by flowers and redolent of the loveliest perfume, the Bab gave him a pure beveridge which Siyyid Kazim, we are told, drank from a silver cup.(3) The last stages of the preface, the prelude, to the narrative of explosive and revolutionary Babi and Baha'i history were being enacted in the dozen years 1831 to 1843. -Ron Price with thanks to: (1)"The Art of Chopin," *ABC1TV*, 3:55 to 4:50 p.m., 16 September 2012; (2)"Internet Sites on Chopin and Chopin's Ballades," Pioneering Over Four Epochs, February 15th 2006; and (3)Muhammad-i-Zarandi, *Nabil's Narrative*, Baha'i Publishing Trust, Wilmette, 1974(1932), p.26.

This narrative mood set upon me
for many a year in obedience to 
inner promptings, dictated by my 
literary and experiential instincts, 
tastes, feelings & predispositions 
as they chanced, changed, flowed 
with an epic grandiosity; perhaps
Arthur Rubenstein and others had 
set the stage back in '59 & totally(1)
…..unbeknownst to me then--now.

Perhaps a mysterious dispensation 
of watchful Providence scattered 
abroad fragrances uttered in other
places and exercised a series of
influences on my soul as I played 
baseball, hockey, football, studied 
grade ten subjects, and fell in love 
with a girl near where I lived, and 
half a dozen other girls in my life, 
my adolescent years in the 1950s 
before the world exploded with its 
rock-'n-roll, trips to outer space and 
those immense tempests of the 1960s.

1 Arthur Rubenstein was the first to record Chopin in stereo in 1959. He interpreted Chopin in the context of an epic grandiosity so writes Mark Jordan in "Burkard Schliessmann---Chopin:Ballades," in an SACD review at *High Fidelity Review.com *on 9/03/'04. I joined the Baha'i Faith in 1959.

Ron Price
February 15th 2006 and
Updated on:18/9/'12


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