chopin's fantaisie-impromptu and a shout-out to bing

I'd like to take this opportunity to give a shout-out to Bing for being there for me when I needed it most. For a while now I've been searching high and low for the urtext edition of Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu that no one other than Rubinstein seems to have played, but to no avail. The story behind its discovery is an interesting one. The original manuscript of the Fantaisie-Impromptu was among several of Chopin's works that he had singled out for burning during his lifetime but that miraculously escaped the conflagration owing to the timely intervention of his sister and possibly other prudent members of his inner circle. As a result it was published posthumously by a man named Julian Fontana, based on a manuscript written in 1834. For over a century the Fontana edition was thought to be the final edition of the piece - that is until one fine day in 1960 Arthur Rubinstein came upon an album belonging to the Baroness d'Este at an auction in Paris and found within it a manuscript of the piece written in Chopin's own hand and dated 1835, with a dedication to the Baroness. This was taken as evidence that the Fontana edition was not in fact the fished version of the work, and the Rubinstein edition was included in every urtext edition of the Fantaisie-Impromptu that was published henceforward. In vain I searched for this edition. I feared that, given that it was published in 1960, every copyright law in the land would operate to make it seem as if it had never been published at all. And indeed for a long time this seemed to be the case, and I flirted with the idea of writing off the Rubinstein edition as nothing more than a myth born out of the wild imaginations of bored musicologists. I knew that a noble soul named Wiener had incorporated the Rubinstein edition among his many urtext editions of Chopin's works, but unfortunately, the Wiener catalogue did not include the Fantaisie-Impromptu, and even Amazon proved a disappointment. Then I went on Bing, and all it took were a few clicks on shady-looking links on sketchy ill-maintained websites that looked like they had somehow escaped being expunged from the Internet to find a Henle urtext edition of the piece that seemed to be exactly the one that Rubinstein played in his immortal recording.

In some ways the Fantaisie-Impromptu has suffered the ineluctable fate that befalls every popular composition that middling pianists undertake to play in droves and has become hackneyed and overplayed. The classical music aficionado squirms when another no-name pianist walks on stage only to play the Fantaisie-Impromptu and depart in an even profounder anonymity than before. But in my opinion, the Fantasie-Impromptu falls under the category of things that are famous for a reason. Musicologists of a certain generation fell in love with the notion that the Fantasie-Impromptu was a sort of metamusical commentary on Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Why they would think such a thing and why Chopin would do such a thing utterly surpasses all understanding. But whether or not it's true is a discussion for another occasion.

The middle section of the Fantaisie-Impromptu kills me every time. I associate it particularly strongly with my early years at UIUC. There was a kid named M. F. who played the piece. He was a remarkably good pianist, though I don't recall ever hearing him play the middle section. As it happens the bulk of my nostalgia can be traced back to a few brief bars in the middle section that just so happen to exist in several versions (loosely speaking - several of them are improvisations).

The first is the Fontana version:

In the Klindworth edition, the reprise of these bars expands the third bar into a more elaborate and ad libitum run that starts an octave above the original (other editions based on the Fontana version repeat the same figuration as is the second time):

The little turn in the middle of the run, where it forms sort of a crest, gives it a somewhat ornate and anfractuous character that seems to build up momentum as it reaches the end, like the whiplash of a serpent's tail. There was a time when the most prominent pianists favored this little cadenza from the Klindworth edition: Godowsky, Hofmann, and von Sauer, for instance. Now it's somewhat rarer, though there was one contestant in the XVIIth International Chopin Piano Competition who was brave enough to play it to a crowd and a jury that no doubt clove to archaic ideas about authenticity in performance - Dmitry Shishkin, who received the sixth prize. I also heard someone at GT once desperately attempting to play this run on the graffiti piano outside Clough. It was only a profound sense of the proprieties and a reluctance to step into the limelight that prevented me pushing him off the piano stool and demonstrating how it was done.

Moving on, the Ornstein version, as I call it, is really an idiosyncratic improvisation that Leo Ornstein masterfully worked into his recording of the piece - one of the few recordings he left. The audio quality was rather unfortunate, but I took a stab at transcribing it by ear, and the result in my opinion was not half bad:

And finally, the one we have all been waiting for: Rubinstein's version. Observe the dramatic rewriting of these bars. As a matter of fact, the Rubinstein version departs dramatically from the Fontana version in more places than this, but for the purposes of this discussion, we shall stick to the four bars from before:

The accompaniment in the second half of the second bar breaks for the first time with the simple arpeggiation prevalent throughout the piece. The effect is shocking, to say the least, but it makes a lot more sense harmonically than the earlier version. The descending arpeggio in the melody is right-shifted by half a beat, and the little syncopation at the end of the run is eliminated. Rubinstein's stately rendition of the piece compels the listener to hold his breath in several places, and indeed it is possible now to see that the music was written just that way.