Let’s leave aside for the moment that gilded 19^th century vision we tend to attribute to Chopin and Liszt, and look back to other types of “romanticism” – our own thoughts and fond memories. When we listen to music it can be nice to let our imagination run free, to ruffle around in places we have seen in the past and among things that really belong to us, avoiding the patina of official history. Music has no trouble accompanying those images and feelings. So without neglecting our freedom to make whatever associations we like, here we’ll just mention briefly the story of that composer’s music born between 1837 and 1853.
In our imagination Chopin is depicted as the “poet of the piano”, an image largely related to his Nocturnes, which he composed off and on for 20 years. The Nocturne can be visualized as a simple narration, in three parts: ABA. First of all it makes a point, then something happens to shift it a bit, but then the composer picks up the reins again, with some variant. Among all his works, it is the Nocturnes that illustrate the composer’s fertile relationship with form, translating a pattern into a rich and complex play of meanings. These can be sensed in the shifts, for example, from major to minor scales in both the Nocturnes op. 32, leaving traces in our memories that make the themes familiar. Simple means and density of content are in close symbiosis in the two beautiful Nocturnes op. 48. The second is considered one of the most “sentimental” with its shifting melody that somehow remains the same, ebbing and flowing repeatedly until it clouds our mind. The first, in C minor, is more complex, with a chorale and terrifying double octaves – most unusual.
The Macedonian composer Pande Shahov wrote Songs and Whispers in 2010 for Chopin’s bicentenary. As we said, music has no trouble claiming any emotional terrain, cultural background or evocative gesture as its own. It is in this spirit that Shahov pays homage to the “poet of the piano” using Macedonian folk melodies mixed with jazz harmonies, and turning Chopin quotations in completely new directions. The suite offers a series of episodes: Oro is a popular dance for parties and weddings, its gaiety masking an atavistic melancholy; then comes a Scherzo on the lines of the beginning of Chopin’s Scherzo in E major; Elegia is another traditional song, a lament of love and death; the Mazurka closely follows Chopin’s Mazurka op. 17, aiming at linguistic affinities with Ravel and Satie; Quasi Toccata, with a folksong built in (Serbez Donka), moves towards Scriabin, and dialogues with other 20th century voices.
Liszt too kept up a dialogue with the past. For instance he transcribed some of Bach’s works, such as the Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV 543 for organ, whose rhapsodic power and chromatic richness flood the piano version. He also “translated” three of Petrarch’s sonnets into music and with the V canto of Dante’s Inferno they are found in the second series of the Années de pèlerinage: Italie. In the third series he does it again, turning the magnificent Italian gardens at Tivoli into an exaltation of the sound of fountains, grottos, plays of water and liquid sonority: Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este.
His Hungarian Rhapsodies were inspired by the patriotic uprisings of 1848, in music that proclaims the principle of freedom of form, with echoes of popular dances, spasmodic crescendoes and a wonderful creative turbulence. Narrations and strategies in music.

Monica Luccisano