Greatness in Music
And Chopin's Waltz in Ab, Op.69
BY EDWARD GREEN
Part 1
People have felt for a long time that some works of art deserve the
word great. Yet just what greatness is has been hard to define--and the
reason is: before we can say a work of art is great or beautiful, we need
to know what beauty itself is.
It moves me very much, giving this paper just a few days into the 21st
century, to know that all of history will look back on the 20th century
as the turning point in humanity's comprehension of art--because it was
in the midst of the 20th century that Eli Siegel understood, and articulated
for all time, the nature of beauty. "All beauty," he explained, "is a making
one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going
after in ourselves." And in an Aesthetic Realism class of June 20, 1975,
he explained that greatness in art is "related to greatness as we think
of it in ordinary terms:" that is, the "size" of something. To see how
big a work of art is, he showed, is to ask: how much of what reality
itself is--its dimension, motion, depth, variety, grandeur--is present
also in that work. I hope to show tonight that within the modest dimensions
of Frederic Chopin's Waltz in Ab, Op.69 , written in 1835, there
is, especially in its opening measures, music that deserves to be called
great. Here is that famous opening melody: [Play opening 16 bars]
1. How Much World?
To see why these sixteen measures of Chopin are great--with that exquisite
mingling of quiet and agitation, fluidity and interruption, cautious circling
motion and the sudden leap into space--I'd like to contrast them with music
written just a few years earlier by the Austrian composer, Anton Diabelli.
This is his Waltz in C of 1819, and it is a good representative
of what the waltz was like before Chopin. Beethoven, in fact, cared for
this bounding and rough-hewn waltz very much; he made it the theme for
one of his most important works for the piano--the Diabelli Variations
:
[Play Diabelli's Waltz]
Now, in contrast, once again, those immortal 16 measures of Chopin:
[Play again, 16 bars of Chopin]
I feel this short excerpt immediately impresses one as larger in meaning
than the entire waltz of Diabelli. Why do we feel this? Does it have to
do with the size of what we are
meeting? Is there more honesty about the world? I think there is.
I learned from Aesthetic Realism that reality itself is the oneness
of opposites. Diabelli's music is affected by the fact that the world it
presents seems less rich; is limited. We hear energy, crispness; a certain
brightness, speed, and thrust--but very little of their opposites. In Chopin's
waltz we hear energy and gracefulness, neatness and atmosphere,
assertion and haltingness: both the bright confidence and the dark
uncertainty of things. Chopin is giving us a larger, truer picture of the
world. And because it is larger and truer, it is also more beautiful.
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