Alan Walker > Quotes

“It was the same with Chopin’s old compatriot Józef Nowakowski, a former composition student of Elsner’s at the Warsaw High School for Music, who had planned to travel down to Nohant and be reunited with Chopin.”
― Alan Walker, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times

“By leaving the organization of his concerts to others, Liszt sometimes fell victim to amusing errors. He once played in Marseille and included in the programme his arrangement of Schubert’s “La Truite” (“The Trout”). Owing to a printing error the piece appeared as “La Trinité,” and the unsuspecting audience sat through this bubbling music with quasi-religious reverence. When Liszt realized the mistake he got up from the piano and made an impromptu speech, asking the audience not to confuse the mysterious idea of the Trinity with Schubert’s trout, a helpful interjection which caused great hilarity.”
― Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847

“He also became better acquainted with Czerny, who invited him to his house to play some music for two pianofortes. “He is a good fellow, but nothing more,” Chopin remarked of the renowned pedagogue. And he added the revealing comment, “There is more feeling in Czerny himself than in all his compositions.”
― Alan Walker, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times

“Until then he had made do with an inferior local piano, which, in Sand’s words, brought him more vexation than consolation, and had been abandoned in Palma. He quickly put the finishing touches to his Preludes, and by January 22 had sent the manuscript to Fontana with instructions to make a fair copy for Pleyel, who had agreed to pay Chopin the large sum of 2,000 francs for the entire set. That agreement soon started to unravel, as we shall presently discover.”
― Alan Walker, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times

“An inspection of the only remaining autograph fragment of the Trio reveals that Chopin placed the date November 28, 1837, beneath the closing bars, and then signed it.20 It was the eve of the anniversary of the November Uprising, the date on which the Polish diaspora in Paris marked this national catastrophe. We join with the Polish scholar Mieczysław Tomaszewski in saying that the Funeral March was originally a lament for Chopin’s homeland, a connection that was lost after the movement was incorporated into the wider context of the Sonata.”
― Alan Walker, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times

“Paris continued to offer Chopin its usual array of attractions, including dinner parties with Auguste Léo and the ever-faithful Delacroix, and an occasional visit to the opera. At this time, too, his friendship with Alkan deepened. Alkan still lived in the Square d’Orléans, and Chopin occasionally went over to his apartment in order to spend the remains of the day with him.”
― Alan Walker, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times

“Watching all this from the sidelines was Chopin’s pupil Jane Stirling, who was only too ready to move into the space vacated by Sand. She and her wealthy elder sister Katherine Erskine had been part of Chopin’s Paris circle for the past four years, and Stirling, his pupil since 1844, was now receiving up to three lessons a week.”
― Alan Walker, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times

“Solange’s infant did not survive beyond the first week of life. She was lowered into the ground on March 7, bearing the name Jeanne-Gabrielle.”
― Alan Walker, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times

“Until the hands are truly "interlocked," such fingerings will seem perverse. The difficulty is mental, not physical. Once the pianist has grasped the notion that he does not have two separate hands, but a single unit of ten digits, he has made an advance towards Liszt”
― Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847

“Born into prosperity, the two sisters were inseparable; they traveled widely in pursuit of culture, and in the early 1840s they settled for a time in Paris, where Jane took piano lessons from the English pianist Lindsay Sloper, who was himself a pupil of Chopin’s.”
― Alan Walker, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times

“Until the hands are truly "interlocked," such fingers will seem perverse. The difficulty is mental, not physical. Once the pianist has grasped the notion that he does not have two separate hands, but a single unit of ten digits, he has made an advance towards Liszt.”
― Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847

“Since their playing lacked nuance, they deprived themselves of speech—for nuance, after all, is where meaningful speech resides. Without it, the language of music is ineluctably returned to its postnatal beginnings, where the only sounds to be heard are the inarticulate cries of an infant.”
― Alan Walker, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times

“But it is in the variations on Mozart’s “Là ci darem la mano” from Don Giovanni that the seventeen-year-old’s mastery of the keyboard stands revealed. The work probably started out as an end-of-term assignment, set by Elsner in the early summer of 1827 to encourage his protégé to try his hand at a large-scale piece for piano and orchestra.”
― Alan Walker, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times

“In the summer of 1845 she buckled down to the task of making ends meet by writing a novella, La Mare au diable (The Devil’s Pool), which she claimed to have thrown off in four days. It is generally regarded as one of her more beautiful stories, a pastoral fairy tale set in the heart of the rustic countryside around Berry. We gather from one of her letters to Delacroix that she had intended to dedicate the book to Chopin, but for reasons unknown she changed her mind.13 It is an interesting fact that has drawn scant attention, that neither Chopin nor Sand dedicated a single work to each other.”
― Alan Walker, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times