Trois fugues de Luigi Cherubini: mises en partition de piano by Frédéric Chopin (review)

It is well known in the Chopin community that the composer studied strict counterpoint with his teacher Józef Elsner as a teenager—he says so in a letter of 2 October 1826 to his friend Jan Białobłocki—and that counterpoint itself would remain a lifelong fascination. In the introduction to this volume, Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger assembles the traces of this preoccupation thereafter, through Chopin's youthfully dismissive descriptions of counterpoint pedagogues Luigi Cherubini and Anton Reicha (in a letter of 7 December 1831), to a written request to his friend Julian Fontana (sent mid-June 1841) that the treatises of Cherubini and Georges Kastner be sent from Paris to him in the village of Nohant, in central France, to the many contrapuntal passages that show up in late works such as the op. 65 Sonata for Cello and Piano, "in particular in the reversible counterpoint of the Largo—a sublime Preghiera—and in the rondo finale, with its richly chromatic principal theme" (p. xxx).

Harder to pinpoint is precisely how Chopin pursued such study, in the absence of either teacher or study partner, as Brahms and Joachim later found in each other. With the appearance of this publication, we now have a much better idea. Eigeldinger, a towering figure in Chopin studies, now presents Chopin's arrangement, in piano score, of three fugues from Cherubini's Cours de contrepoint et de fugue(Paris: M. Schlesinger, 1835), which were originally published in score, with three C clefs (soprano, alto, tenor) and the familiar F clef for the bass. Instructive excerpts from Cherubini's treatise are provided in the appendix.

Eigeldinger observes that Chopin must have been less than completely comfortable reading from score in relatively unfamiliar clefs. Few would blame him if so, and it is no surprise that he would have seen fit to transcribe these pieces into his preferred piano idiom. It has already been established (by among others David Kasunic) that however much Chopin attended the opera, his closest encounters with it took place via commercially available piano-vocal scores—in other words, in reduced and user-friendly form. Moreover, the act of music copying was a study technique with a long, long history; the familiar stories of J. S. Bach sneaking down to his older brother's music cabinet in the middle of the night for unsanctioned copying projects testify to this. Far from a mechanical exercise, Chopin's Cherubini transcriptions reflect a traditional learning strategy that clearly benefited him for the remainder of his compositional life. And despite Cherubini's sometime reputation as a dry and static figure (Chopin himself, in the 1831 letter), a less dynamic and creative teacher than Reicha (Berlioz, Mémoires, quoted here on p. xxiii), or as less visionary than the opera composer Gaspare Spontini (the artist Eugène Delacroix, quoted on p. xxxi), he clearly had sufficient credibility and authority for the now more mature Chopin to learn from and respect. Eigeldinger points out (p. xxx) that the British scholar Gerald Abraham was among the first to stress Cherubini's intermediary role in Chopin's attraction to Bach's counterpoint. Whether or not an intermediary was needed (I personally suspect it was not), Cherubini did represent a kind of Bachian representative, a systematic tutor of the learned art and aesthetic Chopin had studied and played since his youth. And the fugue transcriptions presented in this book—beautifully presented, thoroughly glossed and explained, and now (for the first time) readily available—are proof of that...