# Chopin and Partimento: How did Chopin learn music and who were his teachers?



## nikhilhogan (Jul 6, 2020)

Link to video: 




Featuring Professors Philipp Teriete and Enrico Baiano.

Philipp Teriete

0:00 Who were Chopin's first teachers?
1:23 What's the proof that Jozef Elsner's curriculum was modeled after the Paris Conservatory?
2:31 The popular misconception that Chopin was self-taught
4:31 Treatises that Chopin may have studied
5:18 Chopin and the Rule of the Octave
5:46 Chopin and Partimento
8:09 Was Henri Reber a music theory teacher along the lineage of Catel and the Neapolitan tradition?
8:47 How would Chopin have analyzed his own work?

Enrico Baiano
10:54 How does your mind analyze the music of Chopin?

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The central point being that Jozef Elsner modeled his curriculum at the Warsaw conservatory after the Paris Conservatory, which in turn was modeled after the Neapolitan Conservatories of the 18th century that taught a traditional of hexachordal italian solfeggio, partimento and counterpoint.

As a result, Chopin would have been very familiar with basse donńees or chant donńes, Marches harmoniques, rule of the octave and counterpoint. Under the old Neapolitan conservatories this would mean moti del basso.

Also, the idea that Chopin was entirely self-taught doesn't match the historical evidence which showed he had a very high quality of instruction from many top teachers at the time.

Interesting, for people who are interested in this beloved composer for the piano!


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

"Throughout most of the eighteenth century, only counterpoint was taught to young composers, and any knowledge of harmony was informally picked up by experience or by reading the few theorists who tried to deal innovatively with the subject. Counterpoint was absolutely fundamental. Beginning with harmony was an early nineteenth-century novelty, introduced, I think, by the Paris Conservatoire. Chopin attributes what he thinks of as Berlioz's clumsiness to the newfangled system of music instruction. He himself, Having grown up in a backwater like Warsaw, had studied the old-fashioned way. He insists that counterpoint must precede the study or harmony, or else the harmonic movement will have no inner life-it will be laid on from the outside, as he says, like a veneer.
As we see from Chopin's remarks, the idea of putting part writing (counterpoint before chords (harmony) is not surprisingly modern idea-it is the old traditional way, and Chopin deplored its disappearance. It was the late eighteenth-century development of large harmony areas, of modulation, in fact, that made the teaching of harmony independent of counterpoint. The same stylistic development also gave Rameau's theory of classifying chords by their roots an importance it did not have when it appeared in the early eighteenth century: his theory became of central importance to musical education in early nineteenth-century France. Berlioz seemed to think naturally in Rameau's terms. He chose the harmonies often because of the roots and then employed the inversion which sounded most expressive.
It seems to me that Chopin's claim of a failure on Berlioz's part is partly true-and nevertheless that this failure accounts for much of that is powerful and original in Berlioz's music. Until the nineteenth century, music education began with what is called species counterpoint. In this exercise the student is given a simple phrase of long, even notes like part of a Gregorian chant, called a cantus firmus, and is asked to write another phrase of long, even notes that could be played or sung with it. The first species is one note of the countermelody for one note of the cantus firmus; the different species then advance in rhythmic complexity, the last being a free rhythm against the original cantus firmus. The student advances from two voices to three-, four-, and five-part counterpoint."
< The Romantic Generation, by Charles Rosen, P. 552~553 >

"He [Chopin] said the problem with the way they teach nowadays is that they teach the chords before they teach the movement of voices that creates the chords. That's the problem, he said, with Berlioz. He applies the chords as a kind of veneer and fills in the gaps the best way he can. Chopin then said that you can get a sense of pure logic in music with fugue and he cited not Bach-though we know that he worshiped Bach-but Mozart. He said, in every one of Mozart's pieces, you feel the counterpoint."
< The Art of Tonal Analysis: Twelve Lessons in Schenkerian Theory, by Carl Schachter, P. 57 >


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## nikhilhogan (Jul 6, 2020)

hammeredklavier said:


> "Throughout most of the eighteenth century, only counterpoint was taught to young composers, and any knowledge of harmony was informally picked up by experience or by reading the few theorists who tried to deal innovatively with the subject. Counterpoint was absolutely fundamental. Beginning with harmony was an early nineteenth-century novelty, introduced, I think, by the Paris Conservatoire. Chopin attributes what he thinks of as Berlioz's clumsiness to the newfangled system of music instruction. He himself, Having grown up in a backwater like Warsaw, had studied the old-fashioned way. He insists that counterpoint must precede the study or harmony, or else the harmonic movement will have no inner life-it will be laid on from the outside, as he says, like a veneer.
> As we see from Chopin's remarks, the idea of putting part writing (counterpoint before chords (harmony) is not surprisingly modern idea-it is the old traditional way, and Chopin deplored its disappearance. It was the late eighteenth-century development of large harmony areas, of modulation, in fact, that made the teaching of harmony independent of counterpoint. The same stylistic development also gave Rameau's theory of classifying chords by their roots an importance it did not have when it appeared in the early eighteenth century: his theory became of central importance to musical education in early nineteenth-century France. Berlioz seemed to think naturally in Rameau's terms. He chose the harmonies often because of the roots and then employed the inversion which sounded most expressive.
> It seems to me that Chopin's claim of a failure on Berlioz's part is partly true-and nevertheless that this failure accounts for much of that is powerful and original in Berlioz's music. Until the nineteenth century, music education began with what is called species counterpoint. In this exercise the student is given a simple phrase of long, even notes like part of a Gregorian chant, called a cantus firmus, and is asked to write another phrase of long, even notes that could be played or sung with it. The first species is one note of the countermelody for one note of the cantus firmus; the different species then advance in rhythmic complexity, the last being a free rhythm against the original cantus firmus. The student advances from two voices to three-, four-, and five-part counterpoint."
> < The Romantic Generation, by Charles Rosen, P. 552~553 >
> ...


Great quotes! I especially enjoyed the demonstration at the piano in the video.

I believe they might be sourced from the artist Eugène Delacroix's diary where he wrote about having conversations with Chopin:

"I have interminable discussions with Chopin, of whom I am very fond and who is a man of rare distinction. He is one of the truest artists I have ever met."

"We had discussions of music, and it seemed to brighten his mood. I asked him to explain to me how logic in music was expressed. He taught me the definitions of harmony and counterpoint; and how the fugue would relate to pure logic, and that to be skilled in the art of the fugue would be to comprehensively understand all logic in music."

".. and things brings me back to the chief difference between Mozart and Beethoven. As Chopin told me,"Whereas Beethoven appears to lack unity, it is not, as people claim, from this wild originality - the aspect which they admire about him - it is because he violates the eternal laws of music. Mozart never does that. Each part in his music has its own unique movement which, although it blends harmonically with the rest, it makes its own song and accompanies it perfectly. This is what is meant by the term counterpoint, or punto contrapunto. He added that it was normal to learn harmony before learning counterpoint, which is to say, learning the succession of notes that lead to complementary harmonies. In the music of Berlioz, the harmonies are set down beforehand and he tries to fill in the intervals as best he can afterwards. These types of composers, who are so obsessed with style that they put it before all, prefer to be ignorant rather than not to appear serious." (April 7, 1849)

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It would appear that some time earlier in 1841, 31-year-old Chopin wrote a letter to an unnamed friend to acquire the Counterpoint treatises of Luigi Cherubini and Jean-Georges Kastner.


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## Caryatid (Mar 28, 2020)

Partimento is really fascinating stuff. It's just a shame that the recent books about this lost art are so expensive...


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## nikhilhogan (Jul 6, 2020)

Caryatid said:


> Partimento is really fascinating stuff. It's just a shame that the recent books about this lost art are so expensive...


Here you go my friend:

http://partimenti.org/

All the PDFs in there are free!

May I suggest beginning by reading the introductory PDFs:
http://partimenti.org/partimenti/about_parti/index.html

and then downloading the Regole ("rules") of Furno, Insanguine and most importantly Fedele Fenaroli:
Furno: http://partimenti.org/partimenti/collections/furno/index.html
Insanguine: http://partimenti.org/partimenti/collections/insanguine/index.html
Fenaroli: http://partimenti.org/partimenti/collections/fenaroli/index.html

It's been suggested by the experts that the best way to learn partimento is with a teacher but if you want two free lessons to get you going, here are two beginner lessons I made for Furno's first two partimenti (approved by the master Ewald Demeyere):
Furno 1: 



Furno 2:


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

nikhilhogan said:


> It would appear that some time earlier in 1841, 31-year-old Chopin wrote a letter to an unnamed friend to acquire the Counterpoint treatises of Luigi Cherubini and Jean-Georges Kastner.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

"The most original invention of Chopin's polyphony, however, is the melody displaced over two voices, which I discussed earlier. One of the most famous examples of this, with the two voices more than an octave apart, comes from the Scherzo in B minor, op. 20, in the section _Molto più lento_:







The principal voices is mostly the alto, but in bars 310 and 311-and 319 and 320-the melodic interest moves to the soprano (note the neutral tole played just preceding the shift by bars 309 and 317-318). It is typical of Chopin that later at the return even the left-hand figure should take on momentarily a quasi-melodic interest in bar 374, as our attention is drawn delicately and fleetingly to the tenor by the accents within the pianissimo:







What Chopin achieved, therefore, was not the constant independence of the voices in classical counterpoint, but a latent independence of each voice, consistent and continuous, which could break into full independence only when the listener need be aware of them: elsewhere they remain buried in an apparently homophonic texture. When only latent, they may be hidden but they can always be uncovered-which has given so many pianists the delicious possibility to bring out apparently irrelevant and insignificant inner voices in Chopin, a practice almost traditional earlier in our century. In bars 361 to 368 of the page of the scherzo quoted here, the preparation of the return of the melody shows how Chopin himself on occasion even directs the performer to emphasize an inner voice when it seems to have still only a harmonic function, and becomes fully melodic five bars later. The voice is standing in the wings, so to speak, waiting to make its entrance on the stage-for once, Chopin wants us to catch a glimpse of it behind the scenes. This idiosyncratic but powerful approach to contrapuntal detail can help us understand Chopin's mastery of large forms. He is one of the rare composers who knew how to sustain not only a melody and a bass but the inner parts as well. Perhaps this interest in the inner parts accounts for Chopin's idolization of Mozart's music, where the inner part writing is richer than in any of Mozart's contemporaries."
< The Romantic Generation / Charles Rosen / P.357~358 >


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## nikhilhogan (Jul 6, 2020)

Also, Jozef Elsner may have utilized Karol Kurpiński's treatises for Chopin's instruction, modeled after the Paris Conservatory.

For instance:

"Systematic exposition of the principles of music for the clavichord" 
https://imslp.org/wiki/Wykład_systematyczny_zasad_muzyki_na_klawikord_(Kurpiński,_Karol)

which draws from Emanuel Aloys Förster's high regarded thoroughbass exercises:

https://derekremes.com/teaching/historicalimprovisation/ (scroll down to Förster)


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