In a candlelit Parisian salon, the pale young man, his features heavy with longing for his native Poland, caresses the keys of his piano with graceful fingers while well-dressed ladies swoon into the shadows.
Is any composer other than Frederic Chopin remembered in so sensual an image?
Unfortunately, this romantic picture of Chopin has obscured the quality of the man's music. Chopin was most successful in small pieces where imagination counts for more than form. Because Chopin wrote no academic fugues or grand symphonies, and because he did indeed play mainly for swooning ladies in candlelit salons, the snobs among us still try to dismiss Chopin's works as musical cotton candy spun onto an elaborately decorated cone.
But the music is too substantial to melt in one's ears. Its form may be simple, but its harmonic wanderings are daringly wayward, and the style is thoroughly individual. Chopin was born in Warsaw in 1810 to a Polish mother and a French father. He was brought up among children of nobility at his father's private school, wrote his first composition - a polonaise - when he was 7, and gave his first public piano performance at age 8.
He began playing abroad in 1829, and two years later he settled permanently in France, mingling with the aristocracy and the leading musical and literary figures of the day. He seemed satisfied to live in France instead of politically unsettled Poland, but a nostalgia for an idealized version of his homeland crept into many of his compositions.
Chopin's mature pieces cannot be mistaken for the work of anyone else. Chopin manipulated a few elements into a highly personal style that would influence the major figures in the next generations of French composers, especially Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy.
First among those elements are long, sad lyric lines inspired in part by Polish folk songs. In Chopin's hands, though, the melodies become florid and ornate, an instrumental counterpart to the arias of Italian opera composers of the period.
Second are the uncommonly detailed gradations of dynamics, the loud and soft of the music. As a player, Chopin was especially noted for the delicacy of his touch at the pianissimo, or softest, end of the dynamic spectrum.
Third is a recognition that the piano has special characteristics of its own that are worth exploiting. Franz Liszt treated the piano as a condensed orchestra, emphasizing its clang potential. Chopin did not use the piano to imitate any other instrument; instead, he explored its every natural sonority through variety of touch and careful manipulation of the pedals.
Fourth is the poetic nature of the pieces. Beethoven's piano sonatas are musically equivalent to weighty novels. Chopin's music, with its wispy themes and unexpected modulations, corresponds more to poetry - in some cases, especially the preludes, even haiku.
The rhapsodic nature of Chopin's works has led some commentators to search for the music's literary inspirations. But, unlike some of his contemporaries and successors, particularly Liszt, Chopin did not try to translate specific poems, stories or characters into music.
So when we listen to Chopin, it's like studying the shapes of clouds. We may think we detect certain images, but that has more to do with our perception than with the clouds themselves.
The final element that sets Chopin apart from most of his contemporaries is his preference for dance forms, especially two Polish dances, both in three-four time - the stately polonaise and the more intricate mazurka, with its accents tending to fall on weak beats.
Bach, Mozart and Beethoven had written polonaises before Chopin, and an Irish composer named John Field had already turned out some very good examples of another favorite Chopin nugget, the nocturne. Yet the prolific Chopin's highly personal approach has made his name synonymous with these genres.
On the whole, Chopin's polonaises tend to be extroverted. As evidence, consider the titles other people have given his two most famous polonaises - ``Heroic'' and ``Military.''
In contrast, the mazurkas seem more privately expressive, even though their melodies can be quite busy. The slow and dreamy nocturnes, or night pieces, are the most introspective of all. Some are as calm as a spring evening, others as sinister as a gnarled moonless grove.
The dramatic ebb and flow of Chopin's ballades, impromptus and scherzos suggest that the composer had certain stories in mind as he composed, but the composer never admitted to any such inspiration. At any rate, trying to fit tales to these works just distracts one from the remarkably complex music.
Chopin's waltzes are perhaps his most appealing works, although each waltz winds around itself so quickly and intricately that it cannot serve as dance music. By the way, the famous ``Minute'' waltz is not so called because it should be played in 60 seconds; it actually takes twice that long. The title is invariably given the wrong English pronunciation. The waltz is minute in the sense of ``small.''
The 24 preludes - one in each key - are the most gnomic (as well as gnomish) of Chopin's works. Many of these, unlike the aforementioned waltz, do go by in a minute or less, establishing an intense mood, then quickly evaporating.
Chopin's poetic imagination was active even in his 24 Ctudes, or studies. These are not dry musical exercises, but full-blown compositions that happen to take off from some technical challenge.
Chopin also wrote a few larger compositions, but they are the work of a talented miniaturist not quite sure of himself in large forms. His second and third sonatas (the first is rarely played) seem less like unified sonatas than like a string of ballades.
His two concertos and four other, more modest pieces for piano and orchestra contain many wonderful ideas, but do not show the orchestra to best advantage. In these works, Chopin seems most comfortable when he can make the piano sing like an opera star or dance like a Polish farmer.
Chopin listening suggestions
On compact disc, Chopin's music is covered most extensively, and perhaps best, by Artur Rubinstein and Vladimir Ashkenazy. For RCA in the 1960s, Rubinstein made his last recordings of all Chopin's principal works and a few trifles. These have been reissued by genre - all the mazurkas together, the polonaises in another box, and so on.
In the 1970s and '80s, Ashkenazy recorded every single Chopin scrap for London Records. In the LP edition, the pieces were issued in chronological order, mixing different types of music. They are being sorted out for CD in Rubinstein style, but the whole series has not yet been transferred from LP format.
RCA and London have also culled sampler discs from these series, each offering, in effect, some of Chopin's greatest hits on single CDs.