Cardiovascular Chopin: Ending at the Beginning with Guido Van der Werve

“Know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.”

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Light of the Stars”

As the camera slowly pans down the richly engraved walls, the rising, euphonious sounds of the Warsaw Chamber Opera Choir and Orchestra fill the baroque space of the seventeenth-century Church of the Holy Cross. The plaintive, modal piano lullaby that initially accompanies this purview gently gives way first to the muted sounds of strings, and then the reverent, echoing voices of a small choir resonating from the organ loft above. While the chamber orchestra is impressively arrayed in the church’s imposing central apse, the camera fixates on the figure of the pianist (also the composer) hunched over an impressive grand piano shoehorned into the transept. The pianist himself also cuts an incongruous figure. Though the oneiric logic that led the pianist to perform clad in a hooded wetsuit is far from clear, the unusual attire appears not to hinder his performance.

Following his elegant opening solo, the pianist appears to wait, with hands folded, for a clausula vera, a moment of tonal rest. Anticipating such a pause—which elides deceptively with the introduction of a new theme in the choir—he silently stands up from the piano, walks stiffly out of the church, and runs through the city center onto the banks of the nearby Wisla river. (In music-theory parlance, this is an example of enjambment, or the ending of one musical idea overlapping with the introduction of another.) He dons goggles, zips his wetsuit, then leaps into the placid water, embarking on the first leg of a triathlon that will cover 1703.85 kilometers, the equivalent of seven-and-a-half consecutive Ironman distances.

So opens Nummer veertien, home (“Number fourteen, home”), the most recent and ambitious production from artist, filmmaker, composer, and endurance enthusiast Guido van der Werve. Following the artist in elegantly shot panoramas as he swims, pedals, and runs along the historic route between Warsaw and Paris, home was conceived as van der Werve’s homage to the Romantic composer and virtuoso pianist Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849). Chopin—born Fryderykowi Chopinowi—died in Paris, where he had spent the majority of his life in exile from his native Warsaw. Though he was buried in the renowned Père Lachaise cemetery, he requested that his heart be returned to his native Poland. His sister Ludwika ferried the organ, preserved in a jar filled with alcohol, back to Warsaw. The heart now rests immured in a pillar in the Church of the Holy Cross in which home opens. The film is animated by van der Werve’s attempt at a reciprocal gesture: carrying a cup full of Polish soil on his journey, which he eventually places, at the film’s conclusion, on the composer’s tomb in Paris.

Although home elegantly builds upon many of the themes that are most significant within the artist’s oeuvre—physical and emotional endurance, virtuosic performance, and a sense of smallness within the natural world—our interest in this film lies less in the window it provides into van der Werve’s work than in way it seems to encapsulate an important thread of contemporary investigation that has received insufficient scholarly attention. While our own moment is experiencing a resurgence of explorations that cut across the traditional art/music divide, the more highly visible concerns of “sound art”—with an emphasis on sculptural installation and the sonification of space—provide just one example of the kind of work being done in the artistic and musical borderlands. Another, less well-analyzed thread of exploration can be found in the productions of artists such as van der Werve, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Luke Fowler, who produce long-form film, video, and performance works that are underpinned by both themes and structures integral to the history of music. As such, interpretation and historicization of these works require an analytic lens that bridges gaps between art history, musicology, and musical analysis.

Nowhere is this need more apparent than in van der...