Chopin: Keyboards And Butterflies

One of my favorite things about doing this blog is that often I will do a post that has one or another link to some topic I’m interested in, but that post will one way or another lead me to some other topic that I never would have pursued without the prompting of doing research for the original blog post.

That happened recently with last week’s post Yellow Dress: A Keyboard Odyssey.

I was, for the most part, mainly interested in the yellow dress part of that post, and the keyboard. But I became interested in the Chopin music.

I am kind of conflicted about classical music.

Some classical music I like very, very much. But I have had bad experiences with people from the classical music world. I’m not going to dwell on this right now, but it is not an accident that one of the running themes of Impossible Kisses has been to link Beethoven to Britney Spears.

But after posting the Chopin piece last week—mainly, as I said, for the image of the yellow dress by the keyboard—I read up a little about Chopin and he was a very interesting musician. Chopin was a profoundly piano-centric composer and he used the piano for inspiration and expression in a very personal way.

A friend of Chopin, a writer, described Chopin by saying he, “...is neither Polish, nor French, nor German, he reveals his higher origin; he comes from the country of Mozart, Rafael and Goethe. His true country is the country of Poetry.” [Quoted in, “Chopin: His Life & Music”]

And from an Impossible Kisses point of view, one of Chopin’s compositions has come to be known as the “Butterfly Etude.”

I will be writing more about classical music at some point in the future and Chopin has made that possible. For me Chopin has rescued classical music—and the keyboard in particular—from the unpleasant shadows of the Beethoven/Britney Spears references. And that’s a good thing.

Here’s the “Butterfly Etude,” Chopin’s Opus 25, Number 9.

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Beautiful Music