Raoul Koczalski's place in the history of pianism is secure and unique: Secure, because of his dozens of beautiful Chopin recordings; unique, because many believe him to be the one pianist who most accurately absorbed and passed down Chopin’s own pianistic approach. This “absorption” occurred reputedly through his childhood studies with Chopin’s student, Karol Mikuli, a connection Koczalski himself stressed. In a concert flyer for the 1937/38 season, he mentioned his studies with Mikuli in the first sentence, and continued, “I have been raised up by the press and public alike as a Chopin specialist, and I happily fulfill their wish that I put together my programs mainly from the works of my great fellow countryman.”

 

Koczalski’s Chopin discography is one of the largest of any pianist before World War Two; his corpus of Chopin recordings, about equal to Artur Rubinstein’s, is only slightly smaller than Alfred Cortot’s. (No other pianist is even close to these three.) 

 

Koczalski wrote about his connection to Chopin’s “spirit” in an essay about his studies with Mikuli. He was just a boy, only twelve at the conclusion of his lessons, but the study was intense: five months a year for four years, with daily two-hour lessons. “[Mikuli] neglected nothing,” wrote Koczalski: “the position at the piano, the fingering, the use of the pedal, legato, staccato and portato playing, octave scales, fiorituras, the building of the phrase, singing tone of a musical line, dynamic contrasts, rhythm and above all the exactness with which to approach the master's works.” He says his youth was a help, not a hindrance: “[I]t was like children who learn foreign languages faster than adults. I took in everything without criticizing and was so full of enthusiasm that within a short time I saw in Chopin's work the A and O of music.”

 

Even so, the depth and authenticity of Koczalski’s connection to Chopin remains speculative. Chopin died long before the invention of recording, and it is distressing that so many who wrote down their impressions of his playing chose to label it merely “indescribable.” All we have to go on are highly subjective and often contradictory verbal descriptions, and recordings by pianists who did not hear Chopin but studied with someone who did. It is true that Mikuli passed on his memories of Chopin's playing to his students including Koczalski, Aleksander Michalowski and Moriz Rosenthal; the remarkable musician and singer Pauline Viardot-Garcia passed on her memories to Camille Saint-Saëns; another of Chopin's pupils, Georges Mathias, passed his to his students Isidore Philipp and Raoul Pugno; most important of all, Liszt passed on his memories of Chopin to a slew of students and acolytes like Vladimir de Pachmann; and so on.

 

To complete posterity's bewilderment, consider that many of these pianists had strongly individual musical personalities. Imagine inferring Cortot’s own interpretive approach based on the playing of his students Dino Ciani, Clara Haskil, Eric Heidsieck, Raymond Lewenthal, Marcelle Meyer,Vlado Perlemuter, and Solomon - and to be accurate to the analogy of Chopin and Koczalski, now move one generation further, and limit our intimated knowledge of Cortot’s playing to the playing of their students!

 

This uncertainty makes the value of Koczalski’s legacy controversial. Among his admirers are Chopin scholar Jean-Jaques Eigeldinger and 19th-Century performance practice scholars Jonathan Bellman, James Methuen-Campbell and Robert Philip. But some of his detractors are at least as illustrious. His countryman and rival Artur Rubinstein described Koczalski when both were members of the 1938 Ysaÿe competition jury: “Poland sent Raoul Koczalski, an ex-child prodigy who was covered with medals when he was six, some of them hanging on his little bottom; he lived in Germany and developed into a very bad pianist” while Claudio Arrau said “in Germany, a man named Koczalsky was an idol. He played only Chopin. It was awful.”   Koczalski was a better colleague and warmly praised at least a few other pianists, including Alfred Cortot for his Chopin playing, an area in which Koczalski could reasonably have felt defensive. But his own name is conspicuously absent from most other pianists’ memoirs. Just why this is remains a mystery. 

 

Fortunately, we have his recordings, if not his complete history.  Of course Chopin's own playing was inimitable, and the effect it had upon his hearers could not be easily recreated.  No one today thinks Koczalski played “just like Chopin,” but after much study, I am convinced that Koczalski’s many recordings in fact do indeed tell us a great deal about Chopin’s own approach to the piano - at least, as recalled by Mikuli. I make this claim confidently after comparing Koczalski’s performances to those by other pianists born both around Koczalski’s era and earlier.

 

Piano performance practice has never been static, but it’s hard today to comprehend how rapidly it was changing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Only forty-three years separate the births of the arch-Romantic Ignacy Paderewski from the arch-modernist Rudolf Serkin. (Birth dates are meaningful, for pianists rarely make dramatic changes in their musical approach, once their artistic personalities are formed in their early to mid-twenties.) Beginning with the earliest surviving recordings by concert pianists starting in 1889, over 11,000 recordings by more than 500 pianists born between 1830 and 1900 amply document these changes in performance practice. Earlier pianists are even better represented if we include piano rolls, which can be helpful as long as the listener is aware of what they can and cannot provide.

 

Koczalski was born in the middle of the 1880s, a very rich decade for pianists: Among the others born within five years of Koczalski are Egon Petri, George Copeland, Lazare-Levy, Ignaz Friedman, Artur Schnabel, Percy Grainger, Olga Samaroff, Elly Ney, Wilhelm Backhaus, Leo Sirota, Robert Lortat, Edwin Fischer, Artur Rubinstein, William Murdoch, Heinrich Neuhaus, E. Robert Schmitz, David Saperton and Alexander Borovsky; Myra Hess and Benno Moiseiwitsch miss the five-year cutoff by just a few weeks. Depending on one’s definition of modernity, Petri and Schnabel are arguably the first modern pianists, but they are not the outliers here. Only Friedman and Lortat approach Koczalski in their embodiment of an earlier Romantic style, and neither looks back as far. (One of that decade’s other backward-looking pianists was Bela Bartok, but that’s the subject for another essay.)

 

Here I’ll mention just three archaic aspects of Koczalski’s playing: 1) his quiet “strumming” of accompaniment chords; 2) his use of grace notes, and specifically the eschapee (or “escape tone,” a term used in counterpoint instruction) - a melodic ornament in which a dissonant grace note is resolved by a leap; and 3) his use of evolving interpretive gestures.

 

• Strumming: The most archaic feature of Koczalski’s recorded playing is his tendency to “strum” chords. This is not rubato, which has an expressive function, but is purely sonic: It softens the piano tone by breaking up what would otherwise be simultaneous attacks. Common in the earliest recorded pianists, it’s rare in pianists born after the 1860s. Paderewski’s two recordings of Schubert’s Moment Musical D. 780  No. 2 are prime examples, as he almost continually arpeggiates the chorale-like outer sections. (Paderewski also adds a bit of expressive function by slowing the arpeggiation at phrase peaks, blurring the distinction between arpeggiation and full-blown rubato in a way that drives music theorists mad.) Aside from the earliest recorded pianists, it is most commonly found on recordings of the pianists with the oldest pedigrees: The Leipzig school, which includes the students of Clara Schumann. You can hear the Leipzig-trained Wilhelm Backhaus strumming chords during his final recital in 1969. (Backhaus, of course, was also the last pianist to play improvised introductions as part of a living tradition.)

 

But few pianists go as far as Koczalski in such places as the opening of Chopin’s Ballade  No. 2, where virtually every chord is rapidly arpeggiated. Though common in his playing, it’s also a conscious choice, not a mannerism: Koczalski was capable of squarely striking quiet chords, as at the start of the middle section of the Nocturne, Op. 48 No. 1.

 

• Grace notes: Use of the eschapee - dissonant grace note resolved by a leap - creates a conflict between two common Romantic practices: (1) Romantic pianists played grace notes before the beat; and (2), they emphasized melodic dissonances by delaying them. According to these practices, the eschapee could be played either before the beat or after it, and presumably any place in between.

 

Pianists born before 1870 show wide variations in placing the eschapee, with no clear priority of either of the above rules; but later practice becomes much more homogeneous, giving (1) precedence and playing the eschapee before the beat and the resolution on the beat. Koczalski is almost alone among pianists of his era in placing the eschapee not just on, but even after the beat, as he does in bar nineteen of Chopin’s Nocturne, Op. 48 No. 1 (at 1 minute 10 seconds). Hess and Jan Smeterlin also play the bar this way, but they de-emphasize the eschapee by playing it quickly and quietly. The little-known Olof Wibergh is the pianist of Koczalski’s generation who comes closest to Koczalski’s approach, while other pianists play the eschapee ahead of the beat and the resolution on the beat. In his 1937 recording of the Nocturne Op. 15 No. 2, Koczalski plays the eschapee in bar 12 ahead of the bass and the resolution after the bass - a more modern, but not quite modern approach (at 44 seconds) - but when the passage is repeated in bar 52 he intensifies the gesture by playing the eschapee just after the bass, but shortening it (at 2 minutes 38 seconds).

 

• Evolving Interpretive Gestures The example from Op. 15 No. 2 is also an “evolving interpretive gesture,” which is just a fancy way of saying that a pianist changes something in a passage when it’s repeated, usually to intensify it. Composers often write it in. The most common instance is a theme that is initially stated piano and returns forte. It’s more common in Romantic pianists, who placed a high value on narrative drive and variety, than in modern pianists, who are more concerned with interpretive consistency - at analogous passages, they are more inclined to do more or less of what they’ve previously done than to change the gesture itself.

 

Such interpretive details have to be carefully worked out. This points out a paradox in some Romantic pianists’ interpretations, for in reality these gestures had been carefully constructed beforehand to give the impression of spontaneity. The opening bars of Koczalski’s two recordings of the Op. 53 Polonaise - recorded about 15 years apart - are about as identical as two performances can be. (The earlier recording is on Marston 52063-2.) There’s the extremely sharp staccato on the first beat of bar 2, so abrupt that you can hear a little room ambiance even on the earlier acoustic recording; the blurred pedal between the third beat of bar 2 and its resolution on the first beat of bar 3; the much more extreme “sigh” motif between bars 6 and 7 than between bars 2 and 3; and the A-flat instead of A on the first beat of bar 10 (not a known variant from Chopin).

 

On the other hand, Koczalski could also be genuinely spontaneous. For instance, his three recordings of the Nocturne Op. 32 #1 all have the same broad outline but variety in the details, and the dynamic schemes of his two recordings of the Mazurka Op. 68 #3 differ significantly.

 

Some Details and Highlights in the Performances

 

The “push and pull” effect in Koczalski’s elegant performance of Chopin’s Berceuse comes from an earlier era. He generally speeds up when the note values are shorter and slows down when they are longer, increasing the contrast between the lyrical passages and the brilliant ones. Koczalski also shares one striking detail with Rosenthal and Michalowski, the other Mikuli students who recorded this piece: The enormous slowing of tempo for the trills in bars 43 and 44  (2 minutes 26 seconds to 2 minutes 34 seconds on the Homochord recording, and 2 minutes 22 seconds to 2 minutes 30 seconds on the Polydor). Could this tradition come from Chopin?

 

Maybe, but maybe not. This tradition is remarkably widespread, appearing in nearly every early recording of the Berceuse. The possible link to Chopin is further weakened by the fact that two of the recordings in which it is least noticeable are the two oldest - Pugno’s in 1903 and Paderewski’s in 1912 - suggesting that this tradition may had become widespread as recording took off in the early 20th Century. (It’s also significant that like Koczalski, Pugno is one of Chopin’s “grand-students.”) The slowing is also only slightly in evidence in Alfred Reisenauer’s 1905 Welte piano roll, and local tempo modifications are one thing that piano rolls reproduce very accurately.

 

Koczalski’s performance of Chopin's funeral march follows a well-known earlier tradition, but not Chopin’s: He performs the piece with the Anton Rubinstein dynamic arch that also appears in recordings by Rachmaninoff, Pugno, and Nat. The first section is a continuous crescendo interrupted by the pianissimo trio, followed by a repeat of the first section with the opposite dynamic scheme, going from loud to soft, as if a funeral cortege were first arriving and then leaving. Rubinstein’s interpretation was so famous that it rated a reference in Eduard Hanslick’s obituary of the pianist-composer. Not traditional is the minor third Koczalski adds to the first chord of the fff return.

 

Koczalski’s buoyant 1937 performance of the Mazurka Op. 68 No. 3 makes us regret that he recorded so few of them. It sparkles with dynamic contrasts and varying treatments of the meter, as the upbeat is sometimes attached to the following downbeat, and sometimes detached from it. It is far better than the recording he made 11 years later for the Polish Mewa label.

 

His three Gramophon/Polydor Nocturne recordings are among his most important, showing him in the slow, lyrical repertoire that highlights the contrast between Romanticism and modernism - and indeed, between the earlier tradition Koczalski represents and the more streamlined Romanticism of his peers.  The Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2 is the most-annotated of any of Chopin’s works, with 14 known variants that Chopin wrote in his various students’ scores (seven of these are near-duplications from different sources.) Koczalski recorded this nocturne three times, but only in this one - the second - does he includes variant readings.

 

Koczalski plays the eight variants from Mikuli that are listed in the Paderewski edition: Bars 4, 8, 14-15, 16, 22-23, 24, 31-32, and the end. In addition, he plays slight variants in bar 15 (adding an F sharp between the grace-note F and the second-beat G), bar 21 (adding another G before the grace notes preceding the first beat) and bar 25 (C instead of C-flat on the first beat of the left hand). The Paderewski editors write, “Though they are subtle, elegant, and certainly the work of a master, in our opinion they may easily give rise to a certain préciosité and overburden the work, especially if they are not executed with the greatest precision and delicacy.” Koczalski is up to the challenge, and the results are enchanting.

 

Comparing Koczalski’s recording of the Nocturne, Op. 32 No. 1 with Artur Rubinstein's from the same period throws Koczalski’s archaisms into sharp relief. The first difference one notices is mood:  Rubinstein’s narrative is clear and direct, while Koczalski’s wealth of detail is almost bewildering at first hearing, with such nuances as the finger legato in bar 7 (24 to 29 seconds), where he holds the right-hand B through the change of harmony, or the lingering on the chromatically ascending bass line in bar 11 (37 seconds).

 

Rubinstein’s hands are not always exactly together - for instance, the right hand slightly lags at the climactic notes in bars 39 and 60 - but these instances are rare. In contrast, except for the first beat of bar one, Koczalski’s right hand lags behind the left on all accented beats and most of the unaccented ones until the 3rd beat of bar 6. Koczalski’s non-simultaneities are not capricious: for instance, bars 1 to 2, and 3 to 4 have the same pattern of accompaniment arpeggiation, with the third-beat dissonance prominently rolled, the on-the-way-to-resolution downbeat slightly rolled, and the third beat resolution not rolled at all. In this instance, non-simultaneity is used to highlight harmonic tension. Koczalski’s hands-apart approach actually enables him to keep a stricter tempo than Rubinstein. For instance, Rubinstein broadens slightly in bar 3 to give the 16th notes time to breathe, while Koczalski lets these 16th notes breathe by slowing them without modifying the tempo, so the last note arrives late.

 

Koczalski gives the new material beginning in bar 8 (29 seconds) a very different approach - the hands are much more together, the tempo slightly faster, and subtle voicing creates a hushed mood. The contrast is greater here than in Rubinstein’s recording. In this nocturne, the sound world Koczalski creates is richer and more intimate than Rubinstein’s, but one that is not as easily penetrated.

 

In the Nocturne Op. 48 No. 1 the ravishing tone quality in the opening of the middle section (bar 25, 1 minute 32 seconds) is notable indeed. 

 

Koczalski took justifiable pride in this recording of the Chopin Etudes. His approach is singularly delicate and un-muscular and he plays them as music first and etudes second. Not that they are technically deficient, as Koczalski’s spare pedaling leaves no room for bluffing, and the few blemishes are no more than you’d expect from the days before editing, when pianists generally recorded two etudes per side. His tempos are mainstream. Compared to other 78-rpm era cycles, Koczalski’s Op. 10 set lasts about a minute longer than Edward Kilenyi’s and a minute less than Robert Lortat’s (the shortest and longest, respectively); his Op. 25 is also roughly in the middle.

 

Several of the etudes are unusually dry, or dry in unusual moments: At the end of Op. 10 No. 4, Koczalski ignores what is in most early editions Chopin’s only pedal marking. Op. 25 Nos. 1 and 11 are possibly the least-pedaled renditions of these popular etudes. Another common feature in the more lyrical passages is the rapid strumming of chords discussed above, especially noticeable in Op. 10 Nos. 3 and 6 and the Nouvelle Etude in A-flat.  Mikuli’s admonition to avoid “the smashing fortissimo that insults every sensitive ear” is very much in evidence: The endings of Op. 25 Nos. 5, 11, and 12 hardly sound like the fff for which Chopin calls, and when Koczalski changes Chopin’s dynamics, it’s nearly always to reduce them.

 

The most inexplicable moment in this set occurs in Koczalski’s light and atmospheric Op. 10 No. 2: He omits one bar, from the end of the first beat of bar 23 to the end of the first beat of bar 24 (37 seconds). Whether intentional or not, this crept in somewhere after his earlier Polydor recording of circa 1928 (Marston 52063-2). He plays the end of bar 35 leggiero (:55) - exactly the spot where Chopin writes sempre legato.

 

In Koczalski’s performance of the famous “Black Key” etude (Op. 10 No. 5), his lingering at the start of bar 57 (55 seconds) is such a striking gesture that one wonders if it comes from Chopin via Mikuli. (He does the same thing in his 1924 recording on Marston 52063-2 and on the Odeon recording on CD One of this set.) In this case, the evidence is only slightly more persuasive than it is with the Berceuse. Michalowski and Rosenthal both recorded this piece, and while it is true that they both emphasize this bar, they don’t do it in the same way. Like Koczalski, Michalowski lingers, but much less; Rosenthal marks bar 57 by slowing the tempo in the preceding two bars, and resuming tempo at bar 57. But the fact that they do anything at all is intriguing, because there is no widespread tradition among other early pianists who recorded the piece. Only Friedman and Carlo Zecchi do what Koczalski does - Friedman much more, Zecchi much less. Backhaus and Leopold Godowsky follow Rosenthal’s practice in their recordings, though doing less, and many pianists - including Cortot, Mark Hambourg, Vladimir de Pachmann, Paderewski, and Francis Planté - do nothing special with the tempo at these bars. Ferruccio Busoni as usual stands apart, slowing slightly before bar 57 but not immediately resuming tempo.

 

In the Op. 10 No. 6 Etude Koczalski plays the grace-note in bar 8 in an archaic manner, after the bass note (22 seconds). As is common with Koczalski in slow, expressive repertoire, the left hand generally anticipates the right on strong beats, with a prominent exception being the melodic climax at bar 32 (1 minute 27 seconds.) In this instance Koczalski uses non-simultaneous attacks as his default method, and a squarely struck chord as an accent.

 

Koczalski’s performance of Op. 25 No. 7 is one of the most beautiful of all recordings of this piece. His rubato is restrained, but a look at bars 21-24 shows what a rich interpretation it is. There’s the subito piano on the third beat of bar 21 (1 minute 29 seconds), the slight lingering on the beginning of the left-hand ascending figure in bar 22 (1:31), the expressively delayed left hand accent in bar 23 (1 minute 33 seconds), and the impetuously early left hand in bar 24 (1 minute 37 seconds). The middle section from 2 minutes to 2 minutes 27 seconds is lushly pedaled, giving a dreamy effect that’s all the more ravishing for being such a rarity in Koczalski’s playing.

 

The forceful Op. 25 No. 10 is surprisingly successful. The accents in bars 17-18 are marvelous (32-:35 seconds); of the early pianists who recorded this piece, Koczalski is alone in making the triple forte, marked in bar 27, the arrival, instead of the preceding eighth-note (54 seconds); and the middle section is meltingly beautiful.

 

Op. 25 No. 11 is one of Koczalski’s most audacious interpretations, substituting nimbleness and clarity for power. It especially sounds as if the performer could be Chopin himself - a pianist sometimes criticized for being unable to create a large tone. Nowhere else does Koczalski ignore Chopin’s dynamic markings as he does here. For instance, Chopin marks bar 23 forte, but Koczalski plays piano, if not pp (51 seconds). It’s a compelling effect, but in this case it’s difficult to reconcile Koczalski’s dynamics with Chopin’s.

 

His set of Chopin’s Preludes is more of a mixed blessing. Here the most satisfying performances are, not surprisingly, the pieces most suited to Koczalski’s light and fleet fingers: No. 3 in G, sinuously undulating and framed by moments of leggiero playing; the ethereally fluttering No. 10 in C sharp minor, and the delicate and suave No. 23 in F. Other highlights are the famous No. 4 in E minor, which Koczalski begins with a four-bar decrescendo and presents at a brisk pace that brings out Chopin’s designation of two beats per bar, instead of the usually-heard four; and No. 18 in F minor, which builds impressively after an unusually subdued opening. (Chopin, not-unusually for him, does not designate an initial dynamic level.)

 

By now the reader will have the idea that Koczalski is something of a hit-or-miss interpreter; one prelude - even one phrase within a prelude - will enchant you while its neighbor puts you off. But these CDs show that the pianist had great range. He’s a consummate miniaturist, but the few larger works he recorded also display a strong architectural sense.

 

The ballades show Koczalski in large-scale works, and as a rule these performances have a sweep and grandeur that is absent from his recordings of smaller works - almost as if Koczalski took Chopin's dynamic marking of double forte to mean something else in an eight-minute piece than in a two-minute piece. The Ballade No. 1 features a lovely, limpid tone in the opening theme, though it is achieved partly at the expense of Chopin’s notation, which calls for the lower notes in the right hand to be held. Robert Philip (in his book, Performing Music In the Age of Recording) has pointed out Koczalski’s insightful interpretation of the left-hand accents in bars 24-25 (1 minute 9 seconds to 1 minute 14 seconds.) Instead of hammering the notes out, he begins them slightly before the beat, imparting elasticity to the phrase.

 

Ballade No. 2 is the least satisfying. The left-hand anticipations in the middle section’s lyrical passages (i.e., bars 98-107, beginning 3 minutes 6 seconds) seem unmotivated and repetitive, and the coda, despite many exciting touches, is marred by too many memory slips. The un-notated clearing of the sound in bar 123 (3 minutes 50 seconds) is not an interpretive choice, but the break between the two sides of the original recording. In bars 169 and 173 of the coda (beginning 5 minutes 2 seconds), Koczalski plays D-natural on the 3rd beat. The original editions are inconsistent here. Chopin’s manuscript and the French edition have D sharp, the English edition has D-natural, and the German edition has D sharp in bar 169 and D natural in bar 173.

 

Aside from its subdued ending, the Ballade No. 3 is the best of Koczalski’s ballades. The repeated left hand E-flat in bar 7 (14 seconds) is from the German edition. At the end of this bar and the beginning of the next, Koczalski interprets Chopin’s hairpin crescendo-diminuendo as a ritard-a tempo. Eric Heidsieck has suggested that, originally, hairpins denoted tempo first and only secondarily volume, and Koczalski’s adoption of it here supports Heidsieck’s thesis. (Heidsieck cites this very passage from the Ballade.) Like most pianists, Koczalski brings out an un-notated countermelody in bars 109 to 112 (for 6 seconds starting at 3 minutes 26 seconds) by emphasizing certain left-hand top notes and right-hand bottom notes. This tradition dates back at least to de Pachmann, who was the earliest-born pianist to record this piece, as well as the first to record it.

 

It’s easy to quibble with the light and detached left-hand chords near the beginning of Ballade No. 4, but they leave Koczalski plenty of space from which to build, and build he does, to a thrilling climax and a remarkably clear coda. As with the Second Ballade’s similarly lyrical theme, Koczalski arpeggiates the first statement of the Ballade’s second theme (bars 80 to 99, 2 minutes 58 seconds to 3 minutes 36 seconds).

 

To mention one of his few non-Chopin recordings:  The remarkably Schubert-like German Dances by Mozart (called “Waltzes” on the original record label) are very freely transcribed, very possibly by Koczalski himself.

 

Conclusion

 

The Ballades bring us full circle. Several features of Koczalski’s playing definitely come from Mikuli, including the generally spare pedaling (when Koczalski diverges from Chopin’s pedal indications, he usually uses less than the composer asks for, not more) and the avoidance of prolonged loud playing. Many of his interpretive techniques are holdovers from an earlier era. His lavish use of non-simultaneous attacks - especially to emphasize downbeats but also to heighten expression in other parts of a phrase - is far more typical of earlier pianists than those of his own generation. Even his tendency to treat interpretive marks as suggestions instead of commands is far more common among Koczalski’s elders than among his peers. All this suggests that Koczalski’s performances represent an earlier aesthetic approach, and given his education, there’s no reason to doubt that much of it is Chopin’s.

 

But the picture isn’t at all clear when it comes to any particular interpretive conception or gesture, such as the striking interpretive details in Op. 10 No. 5 or Op. 57. Even if we could verify that some gesture came from Chopin, it may have been a momentary inspiration that the composer didn’t deem important enough to notate. (The situation is different for the authentic variants in, for example, the Op. 9 No. 2 Nocturne.)

 

The likelihood that Koczalski’s interpretive approach resembles Chopin’s own does not mean that we have to like it. On the other hand, it’s illogical to downplay Koczalski’s importance simply because one dislikes his interpretations. As Olga Samaroff wisely wrote, “Tastes and standards change; contemporary criticism reflects existing taste and it is difficult to know - in later periods - whether musical performance that has been praised in one era would arouse the enthusiasm of succeeding generations.” Whether one finds him enchanting, irritating, or both, Koczalski's legacy of recordings is additional evidence that the road to authentic Chopin interpretation lies through knowledge of the earliest recorded pianists …. as well as the scores.

 

Mark Arnest is a composer, pianist, music director and music theory teacher in Colorado Springs, Colorado