When the bulldozers devastated a sector of Chacabuco Park in the late 1970s, for the construction of the 25 de Mayo Highway, part of its heritage in sculptures, fountains, staircases and rose gardens was lost.
Designed by Thays more than a century ago, a charming Buenos Aires neighborhood without much press, despite the studies, enthusiasm and actions of neighbors or historians, the park preserved, among others, the bronze bust of Frederic Chopin, the work of the Italian sculptor Pedro Juan Ferrari.
Originally from Ferrara and living in our city since the 1920s, Ferrari's work was inaugurated on November 22, 1944 during Music Day, in 1944. It included a sculpture park, the pride of the neighborhood, which was later reduced.
“Musical genius,” indicates the plaque alluding to Chopin.
And although its location changed, fortunately it was preserved.
Chopin, who, like his admired Mozart, “lived intensely and died young” also left a work that is moving for its beauty.
A must in Argentine musical organizations, the Chopiniana Foundation is included here with the impetus of an outstanding pianist, Martha Noguera, who celebrated the 22nd last November.
edition of its international festival.
To maintain the legacy.
Martha Argerich
Chopin's name in Argentina is now closely linked to that of Martha Argerich.
Curiously, when she entered the most famous piano competition in the world – the Frederic Chopin at the Warsaw Philharmonic concert hall – she was not an expert on romantic genius.
“She Solo had a fragmented vision of her work,” explains Oliver Bellamy in his biography of our star.
But Argerich was already an established pianist and her participation in Warsaw meant returning to the scene after four years of distance and doubts about her future.
For her preparation, she had a Chopin expert like Stefan Askenase, a Polish pianist based in Brussels.
The Chopin Competition was established in 1927 by personalities from Poland such as Professor Jerzy Zurawlew, who tried to maintain his legacy in the face of rising fascist tendencies, which abhorred melancholy and romanticism.
Totalitarianism tried to erase Chopin from the study plans.
“Maurizio Pollini's victory in the 1960 Competition
– wrote Bellamy –
meant the birth of a new era due to the more rigorous and objective interpretive style of the Italian pianist.
Without diminishing her degree of demand, Martha Argerich's triumph in 1965 appeared as the return of the romantic breath and recalled the importance of naturalness and intuition in interpretation
."
The competition brought together 76 virtuosos since February 22 – the date of Chopin's birth – and the jury, chaired by Zbigniew Drzewicki, had Argerich as a favorite from the beginning.
Each presentation by the Argentine pianist brought the audience to ecstasy and, when her triumph was proclaimed, after the ovation, the entire room sang “Slata Lat” (may you live 100 years), a privilege that only Artur had enjoyed. Rubinstein.
Second place went to another notable performer, the Brazilian Artur Moreira.
Lime.
One of Warsaw's leading newspapers wrote:
“No one can dispute this first prize awarded to Martha Argerich.
Her dazzling execution, her technical perfection, her interpretation full of brilliance and romantic virtuosity won the public's favor from the first moments.
Her interpretation of her mazurkas revealed itself to be as dancing and melodious as it was truly suspended from the highest peaks.”
An EMI executive persuaded her to record her competition works, including the Heroic Polonaise, at the Abbey Road studios.
“The broad chords sounded gigantic, alternating with impeccable passages,” she described.
However, the album did not go on sale: Deutsh Grammophone, the label with which Argerich had exclusivity, prevented it and made him record the same program in Munich.
It was not until 2000 that the work that Martha recorded in The Beatles' studios became known.
From that time on, Argerich became one of the most notable Chopin interpreters.
Even though her classic expression was:
“Chopin is an impossible love.
"Sometimes I think I have mastered it, then I realize I haven't."
Park Village
“Nobody Remembers Frederic Chopin Anymore” is a brilliant piece by Roberto Cossa, performed for four decades.
In an atmosphere of nostalgia, skepticism, utopias and neighborhood goodness, one of the central characters dreams of installing a monument to Chopin in a square in Villa del Parque.
“Tito” Cossa once told another anecdote, a distant antecedent of his work: when he was in high school at the Nacional Sarmiento, a teacher ordered her students to write a composition about Chopin, to evoke him on the day of her death, December 17. October.
In his school textbook, Cossa apparently made some irony about the date, nothing less than the symbol of Peronism... And they kicked him out of school.
Chopin can be enjoyed in multiple places and on multiple platforms.
Among films, series and shorts alone, there are more than a thousand that include his music.
Polanski's “The Pianist” is among the most relevant works: about the memoirs of musician Wladyslaw Szpilman, surviving the Holocaust, it was awarded three Oscars, including Adrien Brody's as lead actor.
The tension between the musician and the Nazi officer, with Chopin's melodies surrounding it, turns several of its passages into an almost religious experience, especially in the passages of the Ballad No. 1 and the Great Brilliant Polonaise.
Even the most recent “50 Shades of Grey” offers passages from Chopin.
And “My life is my life” – not so widespread in Jack Nicholson's filmography – is pure Chopin: there Jack stars in the life of a pianist.
Intensity
“Neither the orchestra, chamber music nor opera tempted Chopin. The piano is his universe. But considering that this universe is until then quite limited, despite the Beethovenian conquests, it will prodigiously broaden its horizon to the extent of its dreams. In truth, Chopin simply creates the modern piano. In the history of art there will be the piano before and after Chopin
”, wrote Bernard Gavoty, one of his biographers.
A child prodigy who in Warsaw was called “the new Mozart” – he had been composing since he was 7 years old – was born in Zelazow Wola, near Warsaw.
He was the son of a French immigrant, Nicolas Chopin, and a Polish woman, Justina.
He received a refined education, spoke six languages fluently, and was also an excellent draftsman.
He excelled by offering concerts before the nobility, in a country occupied by the boots of the Russian tsars, but since he was a teenager he was also linked to the peasants and popular music, the source of many of his works.
Dietrich Schwanitz wrote:
“Chopin built a bridge between Poland and France.
He was attracted by the exciting atmosphere of Paris, which Liszt and Paganini had turned into a mecca for virtuosos, and set out to revolutionize the field of piano performance.
As a result of his delicate health, Chopin did not frequent the concert halls and although his hands were small, his lyrical and virtuoso piano playing at the same time enthused everyone.
Afterwards he became a pioneer of tourism, he discovered Mallorca with the writer George Sand and decided to conform to the Mozartian cliché and die young
.
Pain in Paris
After a trip through the cultural capitals of his time (Vienna, Berlin, Prague), at the age of 22 Chopin left permanently for France.
His teachers and classmates at the Warsaw high school – which his own father administered – saw him off next to his carriage with a cantata by Elsner, one of his teachers: “May his talent, which is from here, radiate everywhere, to everything.” the world".
Chopin's future - his relationship with George Sand, the fragility of his health, the poverty of the end - are better known.
He died on October 17, 1849 in a house on Place Vendóme, in Paris, where his friends paraded for their last farewell.
The newspaper Debats wrote that day: “
It was music itself and inspiration itself.
He barely touched the ground we walk on and his talent seemed like a dream.
Only those who heard him can get an idea of that talent so fine, so delicate and so varied that pointed to what is most honest and charming in the human soul.
He had grown up in exile, he died surrounded by exiles like him, to whom he reminded them of their absent homeland.
(…) Of all the artists of our day, Chopin is the one who most seized the soul and spirit of women.”
At the funeral ceremony, in the Church of the Madeleine and fulfilling his last will, Mozart's Requiem was heard.
He was later buried in the Pere Lachaise cemetery but his heart was taken to the Church of the Holy Cross, in Warsaw.
And until there he remains forever, along with the intensity of his music.
A Poland finally free, after so much blood and pain in these almost two centuries, counts him as one of its national heroes.