The Chopins: Bringing Music and Literature Together

This week my daughter, Clara, came home from school and announced she likes Chopin. Both Kate Chopin, whose book, The Awakening, she is reading for high school English, and Frederic Chopin, the 19th century composer. Clara’s fabulous English teacher (thanks, Mr. Anderson!) had the students listen to Chopin, to see if the piece referenced in the book matches the mood of the story. Talk about value added. I love this class.

So as Clara played Chopin through Pandora (do you know about this? Tell the web site what music you like and it will play it, plus music like it, for hours), I recalled how I once played Chopin on the piano, myself. I don’t play much anymore, but, inspired, I took out the old music books.

Playing a piano is a little like riding a bike – once you’ve done it, it comes back quickly. But if you’ve been away for long, there’s a whole lot more wobbling, and if you could fall down on a piano, there would be a lot of pileups and scraped knuckles on the keyboard. The muscle memory in my fingers allows me to run pretty accurately over grace notes and trills and magically land (some of) the right chords, but precision and consistency are long gone. And if I start to actually think about the individual notes, they leave me stumbling.

Still, going through my old piano books and trying some of these pieces was a little like going through an old photo album. Things are familiar in an “oh, yeah, I remember this!” way. I was amazed at how much I could play – and so very grateful to my parents for giving me lessons (and enforcing practice time) for so many years.

These occasional forays into reviving my piano playing always bring to mind the salons of the 19th century, when instead of turning on the television, people would play music for one another in the parlor. I get the feeling that most people (of a certain stature) learned music of some sort. And I often wind up thinking about how much more beautiful our world would be, if we chucked the t.v. and instead played music and read novels and poetry to one another each evening (a little needlework, anyone?)

On our Chopin night, Clara wound up turning off Pandora and I played for her (and, admittedly, myself) while she did her homework. Turns out that in addition to Chopin, she likes Mozart, too. Later, she dug up “Bastien Piano Basics, Primer Level,” and reviewed what she’d learned at around age 11, when I (briefly) sat her down on the piano bench and gave her lessons. And yesterday, she came home from school and made a beeline for the piano to play some more. I can’t tell you how lovely it was to sit in my office and hear I’m a Little Teapot, Skip to My Lou and Scarborough Fair drifting up the stairs.