Poles celebrate Chopin with marathon week
WARSAW - Poland is celebrating the 200th birthday of one of its most famous sons, composer Frederic Chopin, with a week-long marathon of recitals of his music, a commemorative bank note and a new state-of-the-art museum. Internationally famed pianists including China's Lang Lang, Israel's Daniel Barenboim, Polish prodigy Rafal Blechacz and American Garrick Ohlsson are playing to packed concert halls and Chopin's wistful face gazes from posters on every street corner.
Long considered a national treasure, Chopin's bicentenary provides a timely opportunity to market Poland as a land of high culture, firmly back in the European mainstream after a tragic 20th century, and should help lure large numbers of tourists.
But a recent poll shows many ordinary Poles know woefully little about their illustrious compatriot and some say Poland would honour Chopin's memory much better by investing more in music education than in paying foreign artists to come here.
With experts split on whether Chopin was born on February 22 or March 1, 1810, festival organizers have decided to bridge the two dates with round-the-clock recitals of his work lasting 171 hours at a neo-classical building in Warsaw's old town.
"People of all ages are coming to our recitals and that is exactly what we were aiming for," said Edyta Duda-Olechowska, one of the organizers.
"Pensioners who have not been to a concert for more than 10 years are very happy, they can't believe it is all for free."
Japanese pianist Ai Kayukawa, 25, performed last Monday, one of the first of around 250 musicians taking part. "When I started listening to Chopin, it was the beauty that struck me. That is why I decided to come and study music here in Warsaw," she said.
Chopin's oeuvre, ranging from elegiac sonatas and concertos to lively Mazurka folk dances, is revered in Japan and China as well as in the West and concerts marking his bicentenary will be held in many countries, including at the Shanghai Expo 2010.
Poland's central bank has unveiled a special 20 zloty bank note bearing Chopin's image and a refurbished, multi-media museum devoted to Chopin's life, housed in a Warsaw palace, will open its doors on his second "birthday" on Monday.
A new concert hall has opened on the renovated estate of Zelazowa Wola near Warsaw, also a museum, where Chopin was born to a Polish mother and French father 200 years ago.
Chopin left Poland at the age of 20 and spent most of his adult life in Paris but he remained a staunch patriot and his work is suffused with nostalgia for his homeland, at that time partitioned between Russia, Austria-Hungary and Prussia.
"The language Chopin's music speaks is perhaps the most intimate in the whole canon of Western music," wrote historian Adam Zamoyski in his book Chopin, Prince of the Romantics.
"It transcends everything we know about the man and draws the listener into a world of spirit which is the very essence of the Romantic artistic experience."
"In one sense, Chopin is the antithesis of modern Poland, a society full of rules... because he is a man who broke all the rules... He is a role model for young Poles because he was ready willy nilly to follow his own instincts, ideas and creativity," said Richard Berkeley, a Warsaw-based British musician.
(China Daily 03/01/2010 page10)
