- Fantaisie Impromptu
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Fantaisie Impromptu. That’s Chopin, of course. The record—held in a pink sleeve (or it should be pink)—was a pirated copy: ten yuan apiece, or nine if you buy more. It wasn’t mine though. It was lent to me by a high-school classmate of my classmate from primary school. They were attending an all-girls high school.
I was eighteen then and just about to graduate from a seaside high school. I loved Western classical music with the same surging passion as I did Chinese classical literature. At midnight, I wrote long, long letters (and paginated them), on blue papers, in black Parker ink—with a Parker pen (Parker, of course). I quoted the classics copiously—Classic of Poetry1 said this, Tao Yuanming2 said that, and one particular Ci poem from the Song Dynasty said this and that. Back then Romanticism was defined as staying up past twelve o’clock (in the a.m.), but not for the sake of college entrance exam, or as riding a bike alone to the beach to watch the sea, watch the sea, watch the sea. You sat on the tatami in front of the desk, writing with flying strokes, painstakingly—as the classics were about to be quoted—yet gleefully. Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu twirled around you time and again in the dead of night, especially that tuneful and engrossing melody in the middle section.
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Back then, needless to say, you had yet to find this score. Nonetheless, in your head, under your pen, on the paper, on the envelope and the 2.5-yuan, special-delivery stamp that was glued onto it, were nothing but musical notes. [End Page 729]
Youth. Love. In a barren, mediocre life, nobility and beauty beckoned.
Obviously, you knew Chopin is not just Fantaisie Impromptu; you knew Romantic music is not just Chopin, nor is it the only wrapping paper for dreams in a barren, mediocre life. Nevertheless, you let a borrowed pirated record fill your heart, all the time.
Returning home to teach after graduating from college, I bought a CD featuring Fantaisie Impromptu, in order to copy some beginner’s music for the middle-school students I spent time with every day. I told them it’s one of my favorite pieces of music. Those students—boys and girls, not all from the same class—often borrowed each others’ cassette tapes and CDs for their listening pleasure. One student’s tape of Chopin broke from being overplayed. Another asked his parents to buy him a piano and started taking private lessons to learn how to play, despite the pressure of his high-school entrance exam. Still another—a girl who was good at playing the piano—had everyone come over to her home and listen to her play at times. After getting into high school, she invited us once again. She opened the lid and sat in front of the piano; unexpectedly, that very piece—Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu—started to flow out through her fingertips. What a pleasant surprise to see the music from inside the record and cassette tapes suddenly turned into concrete musical notes, fluttering between the white and black keys in front of your eyes—especially when the pianist was someone you knew. She said she’d been eager to learn that piece well and play it for me. I recall the first time she and her classmates visited my home; when she saw I was living in an old wooden house with low ceilings, she muttered in surprise, “I’d thought my teacher must be living in a big white house, with the blue sky, blue sea, and white clouds right outside!” She had such assumptions because she thought the music, literature, and arts that I talked to them about in class were all so beautiful. I took them to the Mazu temple next to my house, with messy vending stands and trash in front of it.
I rarely replay this piece for myself. But if someone happens to be playing it on the...