Chopin’s “Revolutionary”

Music Appreciation
Written By Edward Wolfe

Some of the great music for the keyboard has earned nicknames showing the high esteem in which musicians hold it. The 48 preludes and fugues in Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier sometimes are called “The Old Testament of Piano” and the 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven “The New Testament of Piano.” These profoundly great collections of piano music written by master composers have not lost their impact even today.

Another collection of great pieces for piano are the 27 etudes of Chopin in three collections: 12 etudes in Opus 10, 12 in Opus 25, and 3 etudes without an opus number. These are amazing—and amazingly difficult—pieces for piano encompassing the entire required technique for the piano at the end of the nineteenth century, and still relevant today. (An etude is a study for mastery of a particular technical problem for pianists.)

Although a “study” sounds like a dry, unmusical, and repetitious piece (think scales and arpeggios), Chopin’s etudes are little musical gems. One of them, perhaps his most famous is Opus 10, number 12 in C Minor, nicknamed the “Revolutionary.” It is a study for the left hand and has a deeply insurgent and earth-shattering feel to it. It certainly is anything but dry or pedantic. The difficult, left hand part of the etude, ironically is not the foreground of the music. And yet its restless unrelenting motion provides tension throughout. Performed by Aldona Dvarionaité, piano; Futurex 5 907577 170127




Edward Wolfe

Edward Wolfe has been a fan of Christian apologetics since his teenage years, when he began seriously to question the truth of the Bible and the reality of Jesus. About twenty years ago, he started noticing that Christian evidences roughly fell into five categories, the five featured on this website.
Although much of his professional life has been in Christian circles (12 years on the faculties of Pacific Christian College, now a part of Hope International University, and Manhattan Christian College and also 12 years at First Christian Church of Tempe), much of his professional life has been in public institutions (4 years at the University of Colorado and 19 years at Tempe Preparatory Academy).
His formal academic preparation has been in the field of music. His bachelor degree was in Church Music with a minor in Bible where he studied with Roger Koerner, Sue Magnusson, Russel Squire, and John Rowe; his master’s was in Choral Conducting where he studied with Howard Swan, Gordon Paine, and Roger Ardrey; and his doctorate was in Piano Performance, Pedagogy, and Literature, where he also studied group dynamics, humanistic psychology, and Gestalt theory with Guy Duckworth.
He and his wife Louise have four grown children and six grandchildren.

https://WolfeMusicEd.com
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