![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Indeed, pace Huneker, some of the most important recorded performances of Chopin were made by a Frenchman who was rarely flip or colorless and who made "poetic divination" a musical religion: Alfred Cortot. The achievements of Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz are inseparable from their Chopin interpretations. Many of this century's greatest pianists were Chopinists. The genealogy eventually included such pianists as Nikita Magaloff, Guiomar Novaes, Moriz Rosenthal, Mischa Levitzki, Mieczyslaw Horszowski and Wanda Landowska. In Huneker's time, an entire school of pianism had evolved out of the teaching of the composer's students. There are no pianists whose reputations are primarily based on Chopin performance or whose playing of Chopin is consistently compelling. Today there are many players of unusual abilities playing Chopin - players who seem at home in his melancholically lyrical style, who can apply rubato to a melody without breaking the pulse and attend to the music's inner voices - but there are no Chopinists. The American music critic James Gibbons Huneker, who studied piano with one of Chopin's most important pupils, attacked two national styles of Chopin performance in 1900: "If the Germans treat him in a dull, clumsy and bruted manner, the Frenchman irritates you by his flippancy, his nimble, colorless fingers and the utter absence of poetic divination." Huneker didn't know how good he had it.
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