Now Chopin taps his toes!
- Source: Global Times
- [10:03 September 07 2010]
- Comments
Wladimir Jaroszenko as Chopin in Chopin, The Romantic Artist. Photo: Courtesy of Shanghai Oriental Art Center
By Hu Bei
This is the year we are hearing more of Chopin's music than ever before. And this is the year we will see Chopin dance.
On the 200th anniversary of his birth, Chopin's music is echoing through concert halls around the world as leading musicians pay tribute to this great composer.
But a unique memorial to him has been created in the land of his birth. The ballet Chopin, The Romantic Artist premiered in Warsaw on May 9 under the direction of Waldemar Dabrowski, the director of the Polish National Opera and Polish National Ballet.
"Chopin is a treasure in the world's culture. He is a symbol of excellence," Dabrowski said.
"Almost two centuries have passed since Chopin's music began to light Warsaw up and then went on to dazzle Europe and the world. No other composer has as many associations established in different continents in his memory. His influence on our culture since the mid-19th century is a phenomenon. There are some who now call him the Elvis of his time."
After being performed at this year's White Nights Festival in St Petersburg in July, this ballet Chopin, comes to Shanghai for the first time to the stage of the Shanghai Oriental Art Center this Saturday.
The ballet focuses on Chopin's life in Paris, the city which ultimately became his home and the place where he found fame and friendship.
Chopin came to France when he was very young and spent nearly his entire life there. Yet his heart was committed to his native Poland and he praised his homeland constantly in his captivating and passionate music, often using native folk songs. Chopin was buried in Paris at the?Père Lachaise cemetery.
He was one of the most brilliant composers of all time and invented a new style of piano playing. He was a dedicated and totally committed artist as well, struggling constantly for perfection.
His one-time passionate lover and companion George Sand once wrote: "He would lock himself up in his room for whole day, weeping, pacing back and forth, breaking his pens, repeating or changing one bar a hundred times, writing and erasing as many times, and beginning again the next day with an infinite and desperate perseverance. He sometimes spent six weeks on one page, only in the end to write it exactly as he had sketched at the first draft."
The story of the?ballet was created by the renowned Polish writer Antoni Libera. "For a writer, the life of Chopin is amazing material. His bittersweet love, his triumphant concerts, the?acceptance of his musical genius and his interminable loneliness as well as those who were connected with his destiny?– George Sand, Eugene Delacroix, Franz Liszt, Alfred de Musset and Robert Schumann - and his whole life suffering from the pain that he could not return to Poland," Libera related.
