The Chopin etude in the snow

Looking out the front window tonight with all the snow, I thought of this video I made some years (!) ago, of Leonard Pennario playing Chopin's famous Etude in E.

I had just bought this antique stereo. It had come to me under unusual circumstances.. I had answered an ad from these people selling it, and I got lost on the way to their house. And when I was lost I thought: Wouldn't it be odd if they had a Pennario record on the stereo?

And sure enough, they did!

They had the Chopin waltzes and I recognized them when I walked in. I could not believe my ears. Well, I wrote about it on this blog so I should just link to it. But it is a memory I kind of like, you know? Walking in there hearing this waltz, thinking... I think it is.. I think it is ... it can't be... I think it is...

That was the way I was thinking then. He had just died and I was sad. And I had sort of been through the emotional wringer. You cannot just go through something like what I did and be yourself again immediately afterwards. It takes a while to come back

Anyway, so that is the stereo in the video. And I played Pennario's own copy of the record with this beautiful Chopin etude. It was the one and only video I ever put on YouTube. I will have to teach myself to do it all over again.

I loved the winter background in the video. The snow, the cars, the bus.

Looking in on it now I realize I have not been good at tracking the comments. One gentleman wrote, "One of the greatest performances ever." I agree!

Pennario is underrated. If you just listen, and forget about anything negative you might have heard, you hear it. Just the first notes of this Etude, the sound is different from anyone else I have ever heard. It has such sorrow and soul.

Got to get back to this project, you know? Gotta wind it up.

Maybe now I can.

The big sleep

The good news: A new photo of Frederic Chopin has been discovered.

The bad news is that it is of when he was dead.

That is the photo up above. Supposedly Chopin is lying in his coffin in the Madeleine Church in Paris. I do not think I ever knew the church Chopin was buried out of. Subsequently I did not go to it when I was in Paris. I would imagine the church was named for St. Mary Magdalene.

I did not expect the Madeleine Church to look like this. But it does!

Here is the interior where Chopin was lying when he was photographed. It looks kind of like my old church, St. Gerard's, which is now being shipped to Georgia.

Here is Gerard's, for comparison's sake.

I always thought it was kind of ghoulish that Chopin's heart was separated from his corpse at one point and brought to Warsaw. But it was, and there it still is, in Warsaw's beautiful Holy Cross Church.  

I do not get the idea that Chopin was much of a churchgoer during his life. After his death, though, he seems to have made up for lost time.

Here is a brain teaser for today, something you can think about as you go about your Tuesday.

Were you to choose an elegy for Chopin what would you choose?

Imagine you are making a movie about Chopin and you need something to play as the closing credits roll. What would it be?

A Nocturne?

That beautiful E major Etude?

So many choices.

So little time.