Chopin Etudes (and Godowsky!)

You might be thinking, "Why on earth would anyone want to devote
an entire podcast to etudes?"


For most instrumentalists, etudes are the bane of our existence.
They are studies, meant to develop technique on an instrument.
Etudes are an essential part of any instrumentalists work, but
they had never been known for their musical content. As a
violinist, I had practiced dozens of etudes by Kreutzer, Rodé,
Dancla, Sevcik, Schraideck, Kayser, Mazas, and more, lamenting
the day I chose the violin as my instrument. But pianists have
the same dreaded names, like Czerny for example. Chopin changed
all of that. Chopin was the first composer to integrate musical
content into his etudes, which meant that Chopin's etudes were
both extremely difficult technical exercises, but they also were
musically interesting enough to be performed live. LIke
everything Chopin did on the piano, this was revolutionary, and
Chopin's 27 etudes have been part of the piano repertoire ever
since. We'll discuss some of these etudes today, along with the
nature of virtuosity itself. We'll also spend a lot of time
talking about Leopold Godowsky. Leopold Godowsky is not a name
you’ve probably heard very often. But he was one of the great
pianists of the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the
20th century, with legions of admirers including legendary
pianists like Josef Hoffman, Arthur Rubinstein, Sergei
Rachmaninoff, Claudio Arrau, and the composer Ferrucio Busoni.
Godowsky’s pianistic gifts were well known, but what about his
compositional ones? Well, to speak of one is to speak of the
other.


During the 1890s, when Godowsky was in his late 20s, he began
making arrangements of famous piano works of Chopin and other
composers music. Over the next 20 years, he became engrossed with
Chopin’s legendary etudes, or studies, and began writing his own
arrangements of them. Now Chopin’s etudes are extremely difficult
just on their own, but Godowsky’s studies are on another level of
difficulty.  In fact, Godowsky’s transcriptions are so
difficult that many pianists don’t even dare to play them, though
some, like the great Marc-Andre Hamelin, have made them an
integral part of their repertoire. So today on the show, we’ll
take a look at some of the studies on Chopin’s etudes, analyzing
both the original Chopin etudes and then the changes that
Godowsky makes to them. This will be a show as much about Chopin
as it is about Godowsky, because you can’t understand Godowsky’s
achievement without understanding the Chopin first. Join us!