Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Opus 11  

Composition and premiere: Chopin completed his Piano Concerto No. 1 (composed after the Concerto No. 2, completed a few months earlier) in the fall of 1830 and was soloist in the first performance on October 11, 1830, in Warsaw, Poland. First BSO performances: December 22-23, 1882, Georg Henschel conducting, Madeline Schiller, soloist. First Tanglewood performance: August 13, 1960, Charles Munch conducting, Gary Graffman, piano. 

Chopin composed all of his works for piano and orchestra—including the two piano concertos—before he turned 21, when he was still undergoing or had barely finished his formal studies. He had begun the study of composition in 1822, when he was 12, with Jozef Elsner, director of the Warsaw Conservatory. His talent as a performer had been recognized even earlier. In February 1818, a month before Chopin’s 8th birthday, he made his first public appearance as a pianist, playing a concerto of Gyrowetz. And even at that time he was constantly improvising little pieces—polonaises and the like. But formal composition studies were to lead ultimately to his greatest and most enduring fame. Elsner attempted to teach Chopin the traditional classical forms, supervising the composition of the First Sonata, Opus 4, which is almost completely un-Chopinesque. Eventually, though, Elsner recognized that Chopin simply had such gifts that it was useless to impose an outside taste on them. He retained the private hope that Chopin would one day compose the great Polish national opera, but that hope was vain, since the young man desired only to write music for the piano.  

Few composers, indeed, have so consciously limited their output. Chopin never wrote a piece that did not include the piano, and the bulk of his works are for piano solo. But since it is on that instrument that he is most original, we are not inclined to complain. Despite his years of piano studies, he never became academic in the technical mechanics of performing, and his boundless imagination soon came up with new sonorities and devices that set him apart. 

Warsaw was something of a musical backwater, but visiting celebrities gave Chopin a sense of the larger musical world. In 1828 he heard Hummel perform, and he quickly adopted the decorative elegance of that composer in his ensuing works. The following year he heard Paganini, who was such a powerful influence on instrumental music of the 1830s and 1840s by demonstrating the degree of virtuosic proficiency that might be possible. 

Chopin composed a Fantasia on Polish Airs in 1828, during his last year of formal conservatory training, following it up with another brilliant piece for piano and orchestra based on Polish melodies, Krakowiak, Opus 14. The following year, when he was 19, he finished his formal studies and visited Vienna, where the exotic Polish character of works like the Krakowiak attracted a great deal of attention. When he returned home on September 12, he began work on his F minor piano concerto (published as No. 2, though it was the first to be composed). It was premiered on concerts of March 17 and 22. On the whole, the F minor concerto was favorably received, especially its slow movement, and this encouraged Chopin, a few months later, to compose the E minor concerto, later published as No. 1, though it was second in order of writing. A few months after that, in November 1830, he left Poland to study abroad, never to return. 

It would be unrealistic to expect a piano concerto written by a budding young virtuoso not out of his teens to display a command of the symphonic style of concerto writing—the careful balancing of soloist and orchestra, the intricate development of thematic ideas, and so on—that we have come to recognize in the earlier works of Mozart and Beethoven. Not only was such a style inimical to Chopin’s original genius, but he had not even encountered the concertos of Beethoven. (This is not to say that he disliked Beethoven’s music; while working on the F minor concerto, he had taken part in a private reading of the Archduke Trio and wrote to Titus Woyciechowski, “I’ve never heard anything so great; in it Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world.”) But the musical life of Warsaw had not yet admitted Beethoven to the pantheon, especially with his larger works. Hummel was the major composer whose concertos provided a basic model for Chopin, along with works of Ries, Gyrowetz, and Moscheles—concertos by keyboard virtuosi written to display their own technical prowess. 

But for all of Chopin’s youth and relative inexperience, his concertos are extraordinary in that special way that makes all of his best music personal and immediately identifiable; and this in spite of the fact that Chopin avoids the expected key relationships, which typically help create the shape of the music by setting up the drama of musical incident. Chopin’s first movement, most unusually, keeps to the tonic key for both first and second subjects, a procedure that Donald Francis Tovey regards as “suicidal.” Yet it is full of surprising and poetic and majestic moments for all its apparent lack of a strong ground plan. The second movement, “Romance,” is nearer to the heart of Chopin, a pure outpouring of elegant and spontaneous melody. The finale, like the middle movement, is in E major. Its most characteristic element appears in the third theme, a krakowiak of great verve and rhythmic subtlety, which brings the concerto to a vigorous close. 

STEVEN LEDBETTER 

Steven Ledbetter, a freelance writer and lecturer on music, was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998.