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Cortot’s ‘Berceuse’

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

Introduction*

An increasing quantity of music analytical work in recent years has drawn on

recorded performances, including (perhaps especially) recordings from the past. It’s

now widely agreed that the things performers do with notes can influence more than

simply the local relationships listeners perceive among them, and to that extent they

offer an analytical perspective on a composition.1 In some recent studies a stronger

claim has been made,2 which it will be helpful to restate before we go on to look at an

example. This claim has three parts. The first is that most music analysis cannot be

done without implicitly calling on performance.3 There may be exceptions—certain

kinds of statistical or symbolic analysis, for instance, in which the sounding result is

not considered—but any kind of analysis that speaks of relationships between notes,

or of the meanings or effects of elements within compositions—that deals, in other

words, with music as it is or might be experienced—depends on assumptions about

how notes sound. And those assumptions can only be based upon the analyst’s

experience of performances.

The second part of the claim draws on the evidence of the history of recorded

performance. Now that we have over a century of recordings we can hear that the way

performers sound notes changes greatly over time. What is changing is the way

performers are expressive, the ways in which they do not sound a score literally, but

adjust timings, loudness, pitches, timbres in the process of joining notes together into

performances that make music. A particular set of such habits of adjustment defines

the performance style current at a particular place and time, and as they shift, so does

performance style as a whole. Performance style provides the context in and through

which music seems to have meaning or to create a sense of communication:4 it

constitutes a language of musicianship. As the language changes, notes in scores

acquire different significance and scores as a whole come to sound different, they

acquire different flavours, sometimes even different characters, and in the process

different associations, implications and meanings.5 The compositions we

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conceptualise as lying behind current soundings of the scores (and often imagine as

musical works)6 therefore seem also to change.

Thirdly (following from the previous two), any ‘reading’ of a score—reading it

through, imagining it, thinking about how notes function in relation to one another,

for example—involves imagining sounds it might make, and that cannot avoid being

subject to the performance style assumed by the reader. As analysts, then, what we

think about pieces of music depends on when we think it. This is obvious enough in

broader cultural terms. The style of writing about music changes. But we can now see

that that is not just a matter of local literary and social communicative style – that

listeners heard the same thing we do, but wrote about it differently. It arises also from

the fact that music sounded and meant differently. Following the same logic, it seems

probable that when we listen to early recordings, or imagine performances drawing on

their performance styles, we hear something different from what contemporaries

heard. So the picture is greatly complicated by performance style changing so much.

But however complex, there is no escaping the imagined hearing of scores within

some performance style. Typically that will be the performance style within which

one matured as a musical performer and thinker; 7 although it may well adjust as time

passes, either as general performance style changes around one or as one absorbs and

develops a taste for performance styles from the past. But whatever its characteristics,

the style on which our musical thoughts rest will determine their nature.

So, analysis depends on performance as it is practised at particular places and times.

We need, therefore, to free ourselves from the delusion that we are telling truths about

compositions. We are offering views of them that rest on the way they are or have

been played. Performance affords analysis.

This conclusion is perhaps not the best way to win the hearts of readers of Music

Analysis, but what is the alternative? How might one’s auralisation of a score bypass

one’s experience of sounding music? Jonathan Dunsby’s proposal, of which Joel

Lester reminds us, that ‘More often than not what the analyst is working on is his or

her own “performance” in his or her head, and more often than not this performance

will be second-, third- or worse-rate’, will scarcely be more welcome as an escape

clause. I think we should assume more of a skilled music analyst than this.8 She has,

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after all, throughout her professional life been intimately engaged with ‘listening’

(whether to performances imagined or real). Analysis in turn seeks to enhance

listening,9 to deepen understanding, to intensify appreciation. It hardly lies beyond

listening. The more accurate one’s aural imagination, the more fully rooted one’s

sense of the music must be in a fully-specified manner of performance.10 But at the

very least, the analyst’s sense of how notes matter will, I suggest, have been

significantly mediated by—indeed mediatized by—the ways of thinking about,

playing and singing music with which she is most comfortable. As analysts we need

to be much more aware of this and explicit about it.

One may object, ‘granted, the way people imagine and play scores changes, but the

structural fundamentals—which are the important notes, where the phrases go—

remain agreed, they are just differently marked.’ This remains to be seen. We have

not had recordings for long enough, or been able to free ourselves from our own

period styles thoroughly enough, yet, to know how many of our beliefs about musical

form and musical meaning are more or less permanently true. Certainly performers

often mark evident structural boundaries with changes of tempo, but if you go back

far enough—as Cook has recently shown with d’Albert (and indeed Schenker), and

Slåttebrekk and Harrison have shown just as surprisingly with Grieg (that most

foursquare of composers)—in the more distant past performers, and in Grieg’s case

the composer, covered over phrase boundaries to make them as inconspicuous as

possible.11 In this respect their attitude to structural fundamentals was quite opposite

to ours. The very oldest players on record, therefore, really should cause us to doubt

that we can rely on much about the relationship between form and performance being

self-evident.

Cortot’s ‘Berceuse’

So when we come to a performance that does something very unusual it may be worth

stopping to see what can be learned from it about the potential of the composition,

which may be greater than we realised. This is the case, I think, with Alfred Cortot’s

1920 recording of Chopin’s ‘Berceuse’, which is the focus of this article.12 The

opening, transferred from an original 78 by Ward Marston, is available in Media File

1 [www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSoBCTN-HtM].13 This opening has some rather

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interesting properties. At the bar level the timing is quite regular, unusually for Cortot

who was famously flexible. This is easy to see in a video of a Sonic Visualiser

analysis (Media File 2) [www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q5B7A4Answ]. Sonic

Visualiser is software that annotates sound files,14 in this case with a curve

representing Cortot’s rubato at the bar level, where a rising curve maps Cortot

slowing down, and falling maps speeding up. Cortot was meticulous in collecting and

considering evidence for Chopin’s practice and so in playing these opening bars with

(by his standards) relatively little metrical rubato he may have had in mind

Kleczynski’s suggestion of ‘Berceuse’ as a good example of Chopin’s reported notion

of a strict left hand supporting free right.15 In fact, as soon as the variantes (Chopin’s

preferred term for the variations, and his original title for the piece)16 become

complicated Cortot’s rubato gear engages, after which the variantes with most notes

are played a lot faster, amplifying the composed activity.

But already at the start there is plenty of rubato, just at smaller levels than the bar, and

to that extent very much in line with Kleczynski’s suggestion. Media File 3

[www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGVSbJQoSvE] provides a video of the half-bar,

dotted crotchet rubato, indicated by the purple curve, against the red barlines and blue

variation divisions (bb. 3-9). The music expands during the second half of the bar, as

Cortot slows, and contracts during the following half bar as he speeds up again,

inhaling and exhaling; and because the rubato is so strong it seems to be breathing

deeply, at the level of the bar, in a strikingly human way.17 We shall return to the

humanity of Cortot’s performance later. The pattern can also go the other way when

melodic activity increases in the second half of the bar, as for example in bb. 22-4.

There is little sign that Cortot shares Schenker’s intuition that the last three beats of

each variante bring with them a sense of speeding up. Schenker’s unpublished

analysis has been considered in depth by Antonio Cascelli.18 Here, at the start,

Schenker’s middle-ground neighbour-note motion 3̂−4̂−3̂ is shown as speeding up

towards the G-flat 4̂ on the sixth beat of the opening variantes, holding back on it,

and then speeding again back towards the next 3̂ on F.19 Sometimes Cortot accelerates

here, sometimes he slows. Nonetheless, from variantes 4-14 Cortot uses his strongest

ritardandi to mark the variation divisions, mostly (except at 7, 11 and 12, all preceded

by rapid triplet figuration in need of resolution) by lengthening the previous quaver

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beat (Media File 4 [www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKLmk6XLkY0]). And from vars.

4-10 ‘breathing’, achieved by speeding/loudening then slowing/quietening, is

deployed very clearly at the variante level (Media File 5, where the green curve maps

changing loudness [www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGAH1BqXqHs]). However

unusual his rubato may seem locally, then, he is clearly deploying it at a formal level

as well, and with greater consistency than his local rubato might lead one to expect.

So we can both hear and see that Cortot is highly responsive to changing

compositional surface and also to some extent structure: whose structure is a question

we can return to later.

But that is not the most surprising feature to observe here. Media File 6

[www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob-2R09_hEI] shows an orange curve that maps

quaver-beat rubato and a white curve that follows the melody line. And one can see

immediately that Cortot is responding to the rising and falling of the melody by

slowing and speeding up the quavers. Cortot slows whenever the melodic line rises

and speeds up when it falls. Not only does this mutually empower the rubato and

contour by reinforcing one with the other; more tellingly it leads us to experience the

contour of the melody through our embodied knowledge of what it is like to move up

and downhill in a landscape, a classic example of Mark Johnson’s MUSICAL

LANDSCAPE and MUSIC AS MOVING FORCE schemata.20 Cortot induces in us

the sense that it takes more effort for the line to move upwards, and less to come

down. The cycling of tension and release engages our bodies as listeners through our

experience of moving in the world. Cortot achieves this rubato, moreover, by slowing

for the upward leaps, waiting on the note before a leap up, generating a sense of

gathering energy before reaching up. The whole effect is extraordinarily lifelike.21

Does this pattern continue over the whole performance? Not so consistently but to a

surprising extent, given the more complex demands of the composition as it develops.

We can see this by following the same graphic analysis over the next twenty bars or

so (Media File 7 [www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltYEsmdYB7k]). As we saw in Media

File 5 at the variante level,22 Cortot consistently gets louder while accelerating and

quieter while slowing, one his favourite habits as a musician. The whole performance,

of course, is relatively quiet, so the effect is less marked than usual for Cortot, but one

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has to take it together with the other respects in which the performance seems to

breathe, to expand and contract from bar to bar and section to section.

*

Of all these observations the most surprising, surely, is that the rubato and Sonic

Visualiser melody graphs (the white curves in Media Files 6 and 7) match. So let us

ask 1) whether this is unique to this recording, 2) unique to Cortot, or 3) characteristic

of performances of this score. To test this I have used Sonic Visualiser to map the

melody and rubato in 16 recordings, dating from 1918 to 1998, including three by

Cortot: 1920, 1923 and 1926. To keep the example manageable I consider only the

opening statement of the theme.

[Fig. 1 near here]

As is easily seen from the graphs in Figure 1, Cortot’s recordings are indeed quite

similar to one another, but even so neither the 1923 nor the 1926 recording is as

consistent in matching rising melody to lengthening beat as he was in 1920:

comparing them we can see the match drifting apart. We can confirm this by

correlating the melody and quaver beat lengths across all sixteen recordings (Figure

2). Cortot’s match does not reach the level of statistical significance, yet is quite

obvious to a listener once observed: those that do (Vasary and especially Pires) are

both for the opposite correlation: they get faster as the melody rises and slow down as

it descends. We shall return to the variety of approaches to this score in a moment.

Cortot in 1920 has the closest match: the nearest behind him are pianists of a similar

generation (Cortot, b. 1877; Ignacy Paderewski, b. 1860; Ignaz Friedman, b.1882,

both Poles; Moriz Rosenthal, b. 1862), save for Howard Shelley (b. 1950) whose

performance of the opening of the piece is very like Cortot’s of 1923 (Figure 3).

[Figs. 2-3 near here]

At the other end of the scale the pianists are mostly at least fifty years younger than

Cortot, but they include Cortot from 1926, emphasising how much and how quickly

his approach changed. And indeed his late, 1940 recording uses rubato rather

differently, as one might expect given the fourteen-year gap. Another study has

revealed a similar pattern of change in his recordings of the Chopin Preludes.23 And

this is perhaps what one would expect to find in any imaginative performer: readings

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of scores changing as the years pass, very probably without the performer being aware

of it.24 But this is also entirely consistent with the gradual change in general

performance style which recordings document over the past 100 years.

We can begin to answer our three questions, then, by suggesting that the matching of

melody and rubato in this score may have been somewhat characteristic of pianists

born around 1860–80—we have no earlier evidence—and possibly therefore an aspect

of a performance tradition for this score. We can say with more confidence that for

Cortot in his earliest (1920) recording this matching is stronger than for others and

that it becomes less a feature of his performances as time goes on. How he played

‘Berceuse’ before 1920, of course, we cannot know: the melody/rubato match may

have been stronger still. Certainly it was not characteristic of Cortot, despite the

mystique surrounding the improvisatory feel of his playing, to improvise his

performances. Studying his multiple recordings of the Chopin Préludes shows that

Cortot learned every tiny detail of his apparently spontaneous expressivity and

reproduced it exactly, with gradual change only becoming measurable after a year or

more.25

Our performance data also allow us to ask how consistent are performances of

Chopin’s ‘Berceuse’ in general. This may seem a curious question, because one thing

that’s very obvious about the recorded performance tradition is that the pastoral,

consoling character of the piece seems unchanging. Given the nature of the score one

might think it impossible to change, though that remains to be seen (we shall return to

this at the end). But a close examination of pianists’ rubato across this same initial

thematic material presents a surprising picture (Figure 4). The graph’s chaotic

appearance illustrates well just how different these performances are in their idea of

how to relate the melodic and harmonic content to the metre: the variety of

approaches seems far to exceed that normally found in multiple recordings of a

classical score. We can test this by taking a similar stretch of initial thematic material

from another piece by Chopin and comparing the variety of approaches taken by a

similar selection of pianists. The Mazurka Op. 17 no. 4 seems a suitable candidate,

both for the very practical reason that detailed timing data for multiple recordings of

the Mazurkas exist,26 and because Mazurkas are also subject to considerable variation

in the handling of accent, so it seems a fairer comparison from among Chopin’s triple-

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time scores than, for example, a Nocturne, despite the somewhat greater difference in

character between ‘Berceuse’ and Mazurka. Figure 5a shows the distribution of

correlations between 16 performances of the thematic material of the Mazurka—by

pianists offering a similar range of birth and recording dates, and again including

three recordings by the same pianist (Rubinstein)—which can be compared with

Figure 5b showing the distribution for these sixteen ‘Berceuse’ recordings. The

difference is striking. The Mazurka shows a normal distribution clustered around the

centre, while the Berceuse is far from normal. This indicates that the range of

approaches to this score is exceptionally wide.

[Figs 5a & 5b near here]

So for the initial thematic material, at least, Chopin’s ‘Berceuse’ seems to suggest no

particular pattern of rubato, or (to put it another way) it is amenable to a great many

different patterns. This is a rather interesting characteristic for a score to have. We

have not had recordings for very long as yet, so (as observed earlier) we do not know

if this is going to be true indefinitely, but on the whole (and excepting the very oldest

players on record, who as we have seen did things differently) performers of classical

scores largely agree, over fairly long periods of time, which are the longer and which

the shorter beats, even though the extent of lengthening or shortening beats changes

very greatly in general performance style over many decades (typically, increasing

from the very earliest recordings up to ca 1930, decreasing very rapidly ca 1950, then

gradually increasing once again from ca 1990). But that is certainly not the case with

this score: there are very few patterns here.

It almost seems necessary to ask at this point what is Chopin’s ‘Berceuse’? What is

the unchanging core, and where does the rest come from? To be strict about it one

might need to say that only the pitches, their intervallic relationships, and their

metrical positions remain stable; and if performers change notes, which they not

infrequently did before modern times, then even those may come partly into the

domain of performance style.27 I think we have to question whether that is enough of a

core for us to think sensibly about the music made with one of his scores as

substantially Chopin’s. He has provided a starting point, but most of the musical work

is done later. This may be true of most music composed for performers:28 it is just that

this piece shows it particularly clearly. There is much less work being done by the

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score and much more by the performer than is implied by the way we habitually talk

about scores. Of course this is consonant with much recent rethinking of music’s

ontology,29 and in that sense I am pushing at an open door, but perhaps that door has

not opened far enough yet.

Having said that, it remains true that ‘Berceuse’ does have a couple of unusual

properties, and they may be contributing to the exceptional lack of agreement among

performers as to what kind of musical creature it should become. First, unlike most

triple-time pieces, it tolerates lengthening on most beats, regardless of metrical

position. Readers may wish to play or sing through the first section, lengthening

different beats at each pass: while the third is hardest to lengthen consistently in a

persuasive performance, even that is not impossible. Lengthening the first or second

throughout is relatively easy to make convincingly musical. Add to that the

possibilities, typically exploited, for applying longer beats irregularly from bar to bar,

according to one’s personal sense of the melodic and harmonic weight, and the

possibilities for rubato are just as wide as we see in these performances.

Secondly, Jeffrey Kallberg has likened this piece to a music box.30 Kallberg argues

that Chopin was considerably interested in musical machines (discussed in his letters

soon after the appearance of ‘Berceuse’) and that the score has characteristics of a

music box. He points also to the mechanical layout of Chopin’s sketch, which

uncharacteristically exposes the working parts and which numbers (and renumbers as

he reorders) the constituent variantes. The end of the sketch also has sets of numbers

which Chopin has heavily covered up but which Kallberg goes some way to decipher.

They seem to have to do with numbers of bars. ‘Might Chopin have been calculating,

in the manner of an engineer [asks Kallberg], aspects of the configuration of the

piece?’ And Kallberg goes on to describe Diederich Nicolaus Winkel’s Componium.

‘The design of this machine allowed it to improvise on a theme in an

apparently (if not mathematically) random way. Not only did its complex

mechanism engender vast quantities of melodic variations, the Componium

also varied the theme timbrally as well. The constantly shifting perspective of

the variants against the mechanically recurring bass seems to foreshadow

Chopin’s achievement in the Berceuse.’31

[Fig. 6 near here]

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Certainly, the score has some interestingly mechanical characteristics, leaving it a

neutrality that offers many possible interpretations. As well as Kallberg’s points we

may note that its theme is roughly symmetrical, filling out the pitch space around the

initial F. This is especially clear in MIDI notation (Figure 6). And MIDI also gives us

a vivid sense of the music-box-like character of some of this score (Media File 8

[www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqeGvMmxSpw]). Figure 7—the whole melody line in

MIDI notation—shows that in fact there are many quasi-symmetries on various levels,

more symmetry in this final form of the score, incidentally, than in Chopin’s original

ordering of the variations in the sketch. Kallberg’s intuition that the piece is a

mechanism seems the more justified the closer one looks.

[Fig. 7 near here]

At the centre is a W-shaped melodic line spread over three ‘variantes’ (8-10). On

either side are three variantes (5-7 and 11-13) with rapid ascents and descents

variously decorated. Before these are the four opening, circling variantes (1-4); and

after, the closing sixteen bars, balancing the opening four variantes in length, in

which the line winds down. Here the ostinato pattern is broken and extended, while

the melody, via the crucial 7th scale degree on C-flat at the start of var. 14, leads the

piece back towards its close (var. 14-end).

This was not quite the original form of the piece. The surviving sketch, which

incidentally Cortot owned and issued in facsimile with commentary in 1932,32 shows

that the order of variantes in the first state of the composition was 1–7, 11, 8, 9, 12–

end.33 Variante 10 was added, and the rest renumbered, in the sketch. The autograph

still began at (final) b. 3, with the introductory bb. 1-2 (introducing the ostinato)

added only at the last moment in the Breitkopf engraver’s copy.34 From the defaced

calculations at the bottom of the sketch Kallberg ‘can see “18” (or “8”), “4”, “6”, and

“3” amid the thatches of ink—but some of the numbers remain fully visible, if not

fully decipherable: an “18” (or “84”, “18c”, “/8c”, “/8g”?) near the right edge of the

leaf, and—separate from the others—a “72” after the concluding bar of the piece. The

final number, unconcealed, is 84, which in the completed (revised) sketch is the

number of beats preceding the golden section point.35 In this state of the composition

this falls on the first note of b. 45, immediately following the long trills over which

the melody line unusually lingers. The later addition of bb. 1-2 and the shortening of

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the final chord show, however, that if Chopin calculated the form of the piece he was

willing to abandon his scheme for musical improvements.

Cortot’s rubato patterns at the variante level, though emphatically not their extents,

are roughly symmetrical around the centre (Figure 10).36

[Fig. 10 near here]

It is the extent of rubato, however, that the listener perceives, and the management of

that extent seems to be at least somewhat under Cortot’s control. His rubato climax,

which comes at the trills of bb. 43-4, just after the melodic climax of the score, is

prepared from the beginning of variante 10 (b. 39) and and then winds down right

through to variante 13 (b. 51, or perhaps—for he is still accelerating on average—

until b. 53 or so). This can easily be seen in Media File 9 [www.youtube.com/watch?

v=oz1ol_iobVo] where the quaver- (orange), beat- (purple) and bar- (red) level rubato

curves are all shown. In fact, looking at Cortot’s rubato at the bar and variante level

suggests that he had considerably less trouble identifying a middle-ground structure

for this score than did Schenker, who, as Cascelli shows, struggled through variantes

7-13 to find plausible prolongations of his motivically crucial 3̂−4̂−3̂ figure.37 If we

look at the whole performance (Media File 10 [www.youtube.com/watch?

v=4WJwrHiPp-M]) we can see a slight acceleration towards the centre and a slight

deceleration away from it, but this hardly counts as a shaped background structure: it

is much more likely to be an artefact of a growing sense, past the half-way point, that

the end is increasingly nigh. While for Schenker the key to the piece is tracing a

3̂−4̂−3̂ prolongation of 3̂ from b. 3 until the very last gesture in bb. 69-70, for

Cortot what matters is to pace the variantes, and on other levels the crotchet and

quaver beats within them, so that his performance makes sense in relation to the

foreground material both locally and over only somewhat longer stretches of the

score, at the level of the few bars that a listener can easily sense as a unit of shaped

time. Both analysts, one might say, are concerned with the relationship between the

local and the global, but Cortot shows no signs, until the piece starts to wind down

towards its close, of any focus on underlying melodic structure. For him the

ecological significance for the listener of the local earns it his most careful attention.

Schenker studies the present moment in order to understand the whole which, once

clarified, leaves the present moment as of no more than passing significance, a vehicle

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in which to reach a destination. But for Cortot it is the relative weight of each note to

its immediate neighbours that really matters. The global need be no more than a vague

sense that all is well once we reach the end, the sense of closure and catharsis that

classical music always seeks to provide. No wonder, then, that Cortot hardly ever

agrees with the arrow markings for accel. and rit. in Schenker’s own copies.38

Cortot becomes noticeably more Schenkerian, however, in his reading of the closing

page, from variante 14 onwards. Media File 11 [www.youtube.com/watch?

v=S8sac8D87PU] adds to the previous (green) loudness curve—which was smoothed

to give a general trend at the bar level—a second loudness curve (also green) to show

detail from attack to attack. Both indicate, of course, the loudness of the recording,

not necessarily Cortot’s performance in the studio. The 1920 disc was recorded using

the acoustic process with one or more horns directly driving the cutting stylus, and in

a single take with no editing. No means existed for the levels to be adjusted during the

recordings, but on the other hand, recording horns tended to favour (unpredictably)

some frequencies over others. So we have to be careful not to depend too much on the

loudness any one pitch. Furthermore, it is important in using Media File 11 to

distinguish critically between those notes that look loudest and those that sound

loudest. Judging by looks, in other words in absolute acoustic terms, Cortot is making

a point about 5̂ A-flat, which almost every time from b. 56 to the end is consistently

louder than its surroundings, and so might be an artefact of the recording horn.39 On

the other hand, Cortot’s Polish contemporary, Josef Hofmann, notoriously turned the

fifteen left-hand A-flats, bb. 61-68i, into a loud tolling bell in his 1937 recording (to

the audible displeasure of his live audience),40 and it is remotely possible that some

kind of tradition lay behind both pianists’ interest in A-flats here. But when one

simply listens it is rather the melodic descent towards 1̂ that seems stronger. No doubt

this is an impression one brings as an analytically-minded listener, but I suggest that

Cortot is using this aural illusion rather carefully.

Cortot makes less than some pianists of the large descent from C-flat in b. 55 to B-flat

in b. 59, despite Chopin’s having drawn attention to it already in the sketch through

fingering.41 His interest, rather, seems to be in the descents from B-flat beginning in b.

61. There the B-flat and A-flat are acoustically louder, drawing attention to the start of

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a middle-ground descent at four-semiquaver intervals—B-flat, A-flat, G-flat, F, E-flat

D-flat—taking us to the end of b. 62. After the first two notes the rest are not

emphasised but do not need to be in order to seem prominent. After this initial descent

6-5-4-3-2-1, over the new dominant-implying ostinato (in play since the prominent B-

flat in b. 59), Cortot treats bb. 63-64’s F-E-flat-D-flat as a 3-2-1 descent that fades

out. He draws more attention to the new 6-5-4-3-2-1 from b. 64, now the lower

register and with the tonic ostinato restored. For this he uses loudness and ritardando

at the last quaver of b. 64 to catch the listener’s attention, and ritardando through the

6-5, and 3-2 pairs to hold it. As a result the final structural 1̂ seems, to this listener (as

to Paderewski),42 as much that in b. 67 as that over the final chord of the piece, which

belongs almost to an afterthought. In his study score Cortot notes, ‘These two last

chords exhaled, sighed, more than played.’ And he separates them off with a comma,

which he asks the student to observe only sparingly (‘Ménager la légère interruption

suggérée par la virgule’).43 By contrast, Schenker’s reading takes the Fs in b. 68—

where, as Cascelli argues, for Schenker the accompaniment and melody merge—as

providing the Urlinie’s 3̂,44 linked locally to its repeated scalar descents through from

its habitual register at the starts of variantes 14 and [15] (bb. 55 and 59) and

ultimately right the way back at b. 3. Cortot’s concern is much more local, to realise

convincingly the more meandering winding-down composed into the closing sections’

descents; and, to achieve that, the repeated 6-5-4-3-2-1 figures are far more pertinent.

The Fs in b. 68 are no more than an echo of a note once important but already fading

in the memory.

Cortot is giving us here a view of the winding down of Chopin’s mechanism which

may not be ‘properly’ Schenkerian but which has just as much logic and, from an

listener’s point of view, considerably more structural and aesthetic pertinence, not to

mention its symbolic strength in relation to a view of Chopin’s composition as a

mechanism that winds down. In performing his reading in sound, shaping time, Cortot

specifies a more concrete melodic structure for the piece than the notes unperformed

imply. One could counter-claim that Schenkerian analysis, or indeed another

approach, argues for a somewhat different structure as correct. But that is to say

nothing more than that an analyst, hearing through Schenkerian principles, performs

an analysis guided by those principles: the score is heard through that analysis-

14

performance. Only the claim that Schenker is right offers a tactic for choosing one

over the other. That claim, in turn, calls on repeated intuitions about the rightness of

Schenker’s reading of the relationships between notes, formed through the analyst’s

experience of hearing those relationships in imagined (or actual) sound. It is always

open to another performer to offer different relationships and make them more

persuasive. And that is what Cortot does.

Like all such attempts at structural analysis, however, the preceding view of Cortot’s

closing page fails to achieve significant ecological value. In relation to our experience

of listening to the piece it is over-specified. We do not, except when analysing, hear

music like this. Wöllner, Ginsborg & Williamon find that even music researchers do

not.45 And since such analysis claims, at least by implication, to reveal something

about how we hear music (‘structural hearing’ in Salzer’s hopeful phrase), analysis

using real performances, keeping the sound and experience of music in the forefront

of our minds, has the dangerous potential to reveal the incompatibility of theory with

practice.46 Cortot is arguably doing more than most to specify a melodic structure. But

here it is hard to claim honestly that the experience of his performance, or anyone

else’s, is the experience of an analysis in sound. Analysis is better understood, as

Cook long ago proposed, as a parallel activity, a way of imagining music,47 at best a

performance of the score in another domain. Faced with real music, in time, analysis

is not what most of us, players or listeners, do.

Looking at the relationship between structure and experience from this more realistic

angle, it becomes clear—if we accept the findings of analysis concerning the multi-

level symmetries and interrelationships within scores—that compositions in the

classical Western tradition are massively over-engineered. The frameworks, spans and

ties composers construct go far beyond anything the listener needs in order to feel a

sense of consistency and plausible continuity. What kind of work do they do, if they

are there? The more studies appear that find that listeners do not perceive them,48 the

more this question needs a fresh look. Cortot’s belief was that what students needed

from music history was not structural analysis (‘chemical analysis’, he is reported to

have called it) but biography, in particular stories about the origins and associations of

pieces that would offer clues to historically informed interpretation, prompting them

to conceive the character for their performances that the composer intended.49 We

15

may not subscribe to that either. But that approach is at least much more concerned

than the structural analyst’s with style and moment-to moment continuity, and it is

that to which the listener responds.

*

If we want some understanding of what Cortot is making out of this score it may be

more productive to look at the kinds of associations and interactions his sounds make

with our bodies.50 I suggested in a previous study that by matching rising and falling

melody with slowing and speeding up (as he does here) Cortot habitually draws on

our embodied sense of motion—that is to say, a sense we have acquired through a

lifetime’s experience of moving in our environment—giving melodic lines ‘a sense of

physical motion in a lifelike gravitational field, where going uphill is more effortful

than going down; the climbing line generates tension, descending brings release’. And

I showed Cortot reported as using in his teaching similar metaphors for the effect of

rubato (‘moving through resistance’ and ‘running down hill’).51 Moreover, ‘The sense

that the leap takes longer because there is further to travel adds another dimension to

the lifelike quality of this performance. The sense that the music involves space as

well as time, gravitational forces, a set of bodily processes, contributes vitally (quite

literally vitally) to the power of this performance.’52

The nature of these experiences and the ease with which music models them are well

explained by Daniel Stern’s theory of ‘vitality forms’,53 the contours given to the

ostensible content of our moment–to-moment experiences by our feeling response to

them. The vitality form, the shape of the feelings we experience, is immediately

modelled by, indeed sounded by music as its frequency, timing and loudness are

modulated by the performance of a score. Through shared vitality forms music

sonifies feeling (in much the sense that data is now routinely sonified).54 And so a

performer like Cortot, who is able to modulate timing and loudness constantly, deeply

and yet idiomatically within their performance style, is exceptionally well able to

model human experience.

Taking this 1920 performance as a whole, therefore, what we seem to be experiencing

is the expansion and contraction pattern from the opening ostinato—speeding through

the tonic first beat, slowing through the dominant second—worked out on various

16

levels: from note to note, as the melody rises and falls; from half-bar to half-bar as the

ostinato breathes; through to variante to variante; all by means of loudness and

timing. This is important not so much because of the multi-level patterning, which

may have quite low cognitive value – it remains to be shown that motivic or structural

patterning has a role in music cognition. Rather, I am suggesting, the value of Cortot’s

approach to rubato lies in the way in which the expansion and contraction of time and

intensity engages our bodily responses by behaving like breathing, and particularly

like intensifying and fading feeling states, so that the music models the dynamics of

human feeling in just the manner suggested by Stern’s vitality forms. And by ‘the

music’—such a common expression and yet so under-defined—I mean the experience

of responding to the performance of these notes, the music Cortot causes us to

perceive.

Listening impressionistically, there is a striking mismatch between the quasi-

mechanical musical structure put together by Chopin and the kind of flexible, living

performance that Cortot ostensibly gives it. But what is so interesting about Cortot’s

1920 performance is that it manages to be at the same time meandering (‘les adorables

méandres d’une musique impondérable’, as Cortot put it),55 reflecting the decorative

turning around itself that Chopin’s melody seems to enjoy, while at a deeper level

making considerable structural sense, marking out the variantes with great clarity, and

winding down the melody with meticulous attention to the underlying line. Moreover,

while highly expressive it certainly is—more so than anyone56—it is also uniquely

mechanical in a further respect, namely the matching of rubato to melodic direction.

What Cortot has done with this technique is to find a way to play much of the piece—

including the most evidently thematic variations—as a mechanism and yet, as Chopin

is assumed to have done,57 to play it with all his characteristic expressivity signalled

through rubato. It is meandering and yet strict; it is Cortot, unpredictable as ever, and

yet it is a music box.

In that contrast it is entirely characteristic of the contradictions in Cortot’s personality

and behaviour. In his teaching, technique had no role other than to enable

interpretation,58 yet he wrote a terrifyingly systematic book on piano technique

requiring machine-like dedication to repetition. In the service of interpretation alone,

he insisted that a music-historical and -theoretical education was essential for a

17

performer and co-founded a rival school to the Paris Conservatoire, the École normale

de Musique, in order to ensure it.59 Cortot presented himself as a dreamer in sound;

indeed he says to a student in a masterclass on film, of a piece of Schumann, ‘one

shouldn’t play this piece, one should dream it’.60 And yet, far from being a dreamer

Cortot was a formidably competent administrator, conductor, organiser, planner,

director, a willing senior functionary in the Vichy government, to be found in the

Paris Salons where Nazis were entertained, a willing performer in Germany in 1942,61

a huge admirer, one suspects, of systematic and thorough organisation. His

performances always sounded spontaneous and improvised on the spot. And yet, as

I’ve shown elsewhere, these famously inspired, improvised performances were

worked-out in advance and reproduced so exactly in performance, down to the

minutest hesitations, that you can take two recorded within a couple of years, play

them simultaneously, and hear almost one, with the phrase divisions appearing at

exactly the same moment in clock time despite the rubato varying in between.62

Cortot’s ability to sound like one kind of person while being another is dizzying, and

also disturbing. And that perhaps helps to explain what is going on here. The lifelike

quality of his performance, its breathing, its tensing and relaxing, its humanity, is real

for the listener, and intended by Cortot, yet is achieved to some extent systematically

by arguably mechanical or you might say inhumane methods.

Some conclusions

Let us come back now to the distinction between Chopin’s ‘Berceuse’ and Cortot’s.

Neither, of course, is mechanical except in a metaphorical and partial sense. But nor is

either irregular or unplanned. Both offer an appearance of fantasy masking a quasi-

automatic procedure. On the face of it they seem rather alike, so that one might almost

be tempted to trust Cortot as a representative of Chopin’s imagination. Cortot

identified deeply with the Chopin he created as a projection of himself, and collected

remains and memorabilia—portraits, autographs, letters, a cast of the composer’s

hand, a lock of his hair, drawings made at his deathbed—to bring himself morbidly

close.63 But his Chopin is still imaginary and self-serving, not to be trusted despite his

being so much closer in time. Neither he nor we know Chopin’s ‘Berceuse’ nor ever

will. The notation Chopin left is all that remains of music he imagined, and all it can

do is serve as a starting-point for new performances and through them for newly made

18

Berceuses. Nonetheless, Cortot makes the score into an experience that is persuasive,

one worth understanding more about, and through it gives us a Chopin who feels

plausible, contributing memorable ingredients to our own versions of ‘Chopin’ (and

indeed to those of a great many pianists who followed).64 If one is going to analyse

anything of this, it might better be—rather than an imagined amalgam of ideas from

recent Chopin playing—a beautiful, thought-provoking, even alarming performance

like this one. At least we then know what is the object of study and we can examine it

as minutely as we wish in a form that we can share fully with one another.

This is not all that early recordings do for us, however: their implications go further.

We may never know how Chopin sounded, but performances of late nineteenth-

century music, recorded in the few decades following, show that in modern

performances we very significantly misrepresent the character of compositions by

playing them so differently. A Recordings Informed Performance practice, carefully

implemented, would make these scores sound to us quite radical.65 And that would

have implications for analysis. For it is not just alternative structural readings of

moments in a score that different performances afford. When the very nature of a

piece changes (for example, a reverential treatment giving way to something more

like salon music, as happens in some Brahms recordings by his circle) then what it is

that analysis seeks, in adding value to our estimation and experience of a score,

requires rethinking. Analysis has developed in tandem with a particular approach to

performance, one in which everything of classical music worth playing or studying is

reverentially handled, and in which precision and objectivity are owed to the

composer and his creation. What is analysis to think of performances that don’t share

those values, in which notes are skated over, cut out, added, quartered or quadrupled

in length? What does it seek to show when pieces are no longer subservient to their

texts?

What also follows from the largest differences between early recorded and modern

performances is that other, radically new approaches to making music from scores

must also be possible. If they can sound as different as we hear on record, how else

might they be shaped and yet still make sense to us? Once we let go of the apron

strings of objectivity and precision, and of the delusion of faithfulness to the

composer (so intimately bound up with the way we play now), what becomes

19

conceivable? Performance style will gradually change, whether we like it or not, but

knowing how much it has already changed in just one century opens up the possibility

of changing it by design, an alarming notion maybe (despite its having happened

already with HIP), but one very much in keeping with developments of all sorts today.

Recordings show that there are many ways of being musically persuasive. What a

persuasive performance brings, startlingly in this Cortot case and potentially still more

so in others yet to be made, is the interaction of ‘the music’ as sound with our bodies,

allowing us to talk relevantly, and with all the sounding evidence to hand, about

music’s dynamics in the full motional and emotional senses of that word. The

changing quantities and intensities of the music take their meaning from their action

on our bodies including involuntary responses and our rich stock of memory and

association, some shared, some individual, in a process that brings together inherited,

embodied, cultural and personal responses competing in our brains to give rise to a

complex, multi-sourced and mixed-up sense of meaning that we can discuss and

attempt to explain and to share. Cortot was exceptionally effective at triggering this

kind of embodied response and associative meaning. But performers unlike Cortot

and unlike any we know will achieve this too. Our understanding of compositions will

change at the same time, and we shall need to rethink our analytical premisses as we

go.

20

Figure 1: Chopin ‘Berceuse’ bb. 3-12, quaver-beat lengths in three recordings by Alfred Cortot, 1920-26

21

Figure 2: Correlations of melody and rubato in recordings of Chopin, ‘Berceuse’, bb. 3-12 (Spearman’s test)

Cortot 1920 Paderewski 1922 Friedman 1928 Rosenthal 1930.212 .162 .161 .016Shelley 1991 Cortot 1923 Backhaus 1927 Ashkenazy 1975-.028 -.038 -.042 -.088Demidenko 1992 Joyce 1940 Kissin 1998 Cortot 1926-.093 -.101 -.144 -.149Perlemuter 1960 Hofmann 1918 Vasary 1965 Pires 1998-.158 -.181 -.262* -.445**

22

Figure 3: Chopin ‘Berceuse’ bb. 3-12: quaver-beat lengths in recordings of Cortot (1920, 23) and Shelley (1991)

23

Figure 4: Chopin ‘Berceuse’ bb. 3-12: quaver-beat lengths in 16 recordings, 1918-1998

24

Figure 5a: Chopin, Mazurka Op. 17 no. 4, bb. 5-36ii, distribution of correlations among 16 recorded performances

25

Figure 5b: Chopin, Berceuse, bb. 3-12, distribution of correlations among 16 recorded performances

26

Figure 6: Chopin ‘Berceuse’ bb. 1-13, melody line in MIDI notation

27

Figure 7: Chopin ‘Berceuse’ bb.3-67, melody line in MIDI notation

28

Figure 8: Duration of ‘variantes’ in Cortot’s 1920 recording

variante duration shorter/longer1 15.32 15.83 15.84 15.35 11.9 S6 14.1 L7 14.7 L8 12.4 S9 14.9 L central10 11.5 S11 20.0 L12 17.4 L13 13.2 S14 16.815 13.816 17.117 19.4

29

I owe special thanks to Antonio Cascelli, David Fanning, Mats Küssner, John Rink

and an anonymous reader.

1* I gratefully acknowledge support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, via the AHRC Research Centres for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) and Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP), which provided the context for the work written-up here.

Previous analytical uses of specific performances range increasingly widely across the music analysis and music psychology literature. Examples include: Daniel G. Barolsky, ‘The Performer as Analyst’, Music Theory Online 13/1 (2007); Bryony Buck, Jennifer MacRitchie and Nicholas J. Bailey, ‘The interpretive shaping of embodied musical structure in piano performance’, Empirical Musicology Review 8/2 (2013), pp. 92-119; Eric Clarke, ‘Expression in performance: generativity, perception and semiosis’, in ed. John Rink, The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 21-54; Nicholas Cook, ‘Off the record: performance, history, and musical logic’, in Music and the Mind: Essays in Honour of John Sloboda, ed. I. Deliège and J. W. Davidson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 291–309; Alan Dodson, ‘Performance, grouping, and Schenkerian alternative readings in some passages from Beethoven’s ‘Lebewohl’ sonata’, Music Analysis 27/1 (2008), pp. 107–134; and John Rink, Neta Spiro and Nicolas Gold, ‘Analysis of Performance’, in ed. Anthony Gritten and Elaine King, New Perspectives on Music and Gesture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 267–92; to name only a fraction.2 Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Compositions, scores, performances, meanings’, Music Theory Online 18/1 (2012).3 This has become increasingly clear since Nicholas Cook, ‘Words about music, or analysis versus performance’, in ed. Nicholas Cook, Peter Johnson and Hans Zender, Theory into Practice: Composition, Performance and the Listening Experience (Leuven University Press, 1999), pp. 9-52.4 The wording here acknowledges (without wholly accepting) Imberty’s interesting proposal that musical communication ‘is not communication, but it is a representation of our capacity to communicate … communication without an object … proto-narration.’ Michel Imberty, ‘Can one seriously speak of narrativity in music?’, in Proceedings of the Third Triennal ESCOM conference, Uppsala, 7-12 June 1997, ed. A. Gabrielsson (Uppsala, Sweden: Department of Psychology, 1997), pp. 13-22; French original, pp. 23-32.5 For a definition and fuller discussion of performance style see Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Recordings and histories of performance style’, in Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 246-62. As an illustration of the extent of these performance stylistic differences and of their implications for interpretation of scores see Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Sound and meaning in recordings of Schubert’s "Die junge Nonne"’, Musicae Scientiae 11 (2007), pp. 209-36.6 The thinking behind this formulation is sketched in Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Compositions,…’, para. 4.1 and section 5.7 Ibid., para. 2.3.8 Some research on this is reported in ibid., para. 2.2.9 Caution may be in order. Nieminen et al., in a survey of existing work, include among the questions still to be addressed empirically, ‘does musical expertise have an effect on aesthetic experiences of music?’ (S. Nieminen, E. Istók, E. Brattico, M. Tervaniemi and M. Huotilainen, ‘The development of aesthetic responses to music and their underlying neural and psychological mechanisms’, Cortex 47 (2011), pp. 1138-46, at 1144.) Most of the literature on expert listeners’ ability to recognise music-theoretical structures has tested undergraduate music students, mostly with negative results. A selection of studies is cited in Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Compositions…’, para. 4.8, to which a useful addition is Elizabeth West Marvin and Alexander Brinkman, ‘The effect of modulation and formal manipulation on perception of tonic closure by expert listeners’, Music Perception 16/4 (1999).10 Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Compositions…’, para. 2.2.11 Cook, ‘Off the record’; Sigurd Slåttebrekk and Tony Harrison, ‘Edvard Grieg, Chasing the Butterfly: recreating Grieg’s 1903 recordings and beyond’ Audio CD, SIMAX PSC 1299 (recorded 2007 and 2009, issued 2010), and www.chasingthebutterfly.no. In Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 72, Cook quotes Schenker recommending just this approach to phrase-ends in Heinrich Schenker, The Art of Performance, ed. Heribert Esser and transl. Irene Schreier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 55.12 I offered a brief preliminary discussion of this recording in Leech-Wilkinson, ‘The emotional power of musical performance’, in ed. Tom Cochrane, Bernardino Fantini and Klaus R. Scherer, The Emotional Power of Music: Multidisciplinary perspectives on musical arousal, expression and social control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 41-54, from which I quote several points here. Previous studies of other recordings of the Berceuse are Wojciech Nowik, ‘The expression of form and forms of expression: Fryderyk Chopin's Berceuse in D major, Op. 57, in the interpretations of Josef Hofmann’, in ed. Artur Szklener, John Comber, Kinga Tarka and Wojciech Bońkowski, Chopin in Performance: History, Theory, Practice (Warsaw: Narodowy Institut Fryderyka Chopina, 2004), pp. 273-85; and Krystyna Juszyńska and Piotr Rogowski, ‘Acoustic analysis of recordings by Josef Hofmann of Fryderyk Chopin’s Berceuse, Op. 57’, in ibid., pp. 287-310.13 Victor 74623, matrix C 22502 take 5; digital transfer by Ward Marston. I am most grateful to Mr Marston for allowing me to use his transfer to accompany this article.14 The software is freely available, together with online and video tutorials, from www.sonicvisualiser.org. The videos in these media files are made by recording the screen activity of a Sonic Visualiser session. Red vertical lines mark the bars in Chopin’s score, blue lines mark the divisions between the variantes: each set is numbered, the numbering of red lines matching the numbering of bars in the score. Other numbers can safely be ignored.15 Quoted in Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Chopin: pianist and teacher (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 51. Cortot would have known the 1880 French translation: Jan Kleczyński, Frédéric Chopin: de l'interprétation de ses œuvres.

16 The philological implications of ‘variants’ for Chopin’s thinking about the composition are discussed in Jeffrey Kallberg, ‘Chopin’s music box’, unpublished paper delivered to the Society for Music Theory/American Musicological Society joint meeting, Nashville 6-9 Nov 2008. I am most grateful to Prof Kallberg for sharing it with me.17 Leech-Wilkinson, ‘The emotional power’. Marion Guck offers an interesting discussion of the breathing metaphor applied to the performance of Chopin in ‘Musical Images as Musical Thoughts: The Contribution of Metaphor to Analysis’, In Theory Only 5/5 (1981), pp. 29-42.18 Antonio Cascelli, ‘Schenker, Chopin’s Berceuse Op. 57 and the rhetoric of variations’, Ad Parnassum 2 (2003), pp. 51-79 at 62.19 For the rubato indications see Cascelli, ‘Schenker…’, Table 3, p. 78.20 Mark Johnson and Steve Larson, ‘“Something in the Way She Moves"– Metaphors of Musical Motion’, Metaphor and Symbol 18/2, pp. 63–84; given a wider context in Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007).21 Leech-Wilkinson, ‘The emotional power’.22 This is an acoustic recording so the recording machinery was insensitive to the quietest notes, but due to the nature of pre-tape recording it was not edited in any way. On recordings as sources for musicology Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performances (London: CHARM, 2009), chapter 3: www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/studies/chapters/chap3.html23 Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Making music with Alfred Cortot: ontology, data, analysis’, in ed. Heinz Loesch & Stefan Weinzierl, Gemessene Interpretation - Computergestützte Aufführungsanalyse im Kreuzverhör der Disziplinen, (Mainz: Schott 2011) (Klang und Begriff 4), pp. 129-44.24 Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Recordings and histories’.25 Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Making music’, pp. 136-7.26 Data produced by Craig Sapp for The Mazurka Project within CHARM, the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music. Data available from <http://www.mazurka.org.uk/info/excel/beat/>.27 Most early recordings of the score play many of the left-hand bottom D-flats an octave lower or higher than notated. Grunstein provides a good selection of other kinds of alterations in her comments on another selection of recordings. (Sarah Grunstein, ‘Improvisatory, Compositional and Performance Issues in Chopin’s Berceuse, Op. 57’, DMA dissertation, City University New York, 2005.) 28 Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Compositions’.29 See especially Cook, ‘Words about music’; also his ‘Music as performance’, in ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert & Richard Middleton, The Cultural Study of Music: a critical introduction (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 204-14; and more recently Cook’s Beyond the Score, passim but esp. p. 175. Also Lawrence Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), esp. p. 76.30 Kallberg, ‘Chopin’s music box’. There is a brief discussion in his ‘Mechanical Chopin’, Common Knowledge 17:2 (2011), pp. 269-282 at 270.31 ‘Chopin’s music box’, p. 4.32 Alfred Cortot and Édouard Ganche, Trois manuscrits de Chopin (Paris: Dorbon Aîné, 1932).33 In the sketch everything from b. 55 onwards is labelled ‘14’. For machine convenience the Sonic Visualiser displays number the remaining four-bar units as 14-17, and mark them with blue barlines.34 Wojciech Nowik, ‘Fryderyk Chopin's op. 57: from Variantes to Berceuse’, in ed. Jim Samson, Chopin Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 25-40. Much valuable detail is also considered in Grunstein, ‘Improvisatory’.35 Zofia Chechlińska makes a case for golden section planning by Chopin in the Études, albeit with exceptions allowed for missed targets, in ‘Chopin in proportion’, in ed. Artur Szklener, Analytical Perspectives on the Music of Chopin (Warsaw: Narodowy Institut Fryderyka Chopina, 2004), pp. 157-65.36 The central peak of the central melodic W shape in Cortot’s performance sounds at 2’ 11” of the 4’ 22” duration from the start of the first to the start of the last note. I have suggested (in ‘Making music’, p. 131) that Cortot may have had a surprisingly accurate sense of absolute duration at the phrase level; but, even given his very neat timing for the central point peak, one could not seriously suggest controlled planning to this level of precision.37 Cascelli, ‘Schenker’, pp. 65-8.38 Valuably tabulated in ibid., pp. 78-9.39 See especially bar 56/quaver 3, 57/4, 57/5ii, 58/3ii, 58/6ii, 59/5ii, 60/2ii, 61/4, 62/5, 63/5, 66/6, 67/3, 68/5, 69/2.40 Nowik, ‘The expression’, pp. 282-3; Juszyńska and Rogowski, ‘Acoustic analysis’, pp. 303-5. Hofmann’s tolling bell was copied by Demidenko in his 1998 recording.41 Grunstein, ‘Improvisatory’, pp. 100-103.42 As illustrated by Cascelli, pp. 68-8. This is not, of course, to say that the piece is persuasively complete in b. 67, only that in this performance its final has been definitively reached.43 Ed. Alfred Cortot, Cortot Chopin Pièces diverses, 1re série (Paris: Salabert, 1936, reissue 1997), p. 46.44 Cascelli, p. 69.45 Clemens Wöllner, Jane Ginsborg and Aaron Williamon, ‘Music researchers’ musical engagement’, Psychology of Music 39/3 (2011), pp. 364-82.46 Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Compositions’, paras 4.4-4.5, suggests that it was the impossibility for Schenker, and separately for Adorno, of reconciling their taste in performance style with their theories of music that prevented them from bringing to completion their books on performance. Cook makes the same point with much more context in Beyond the

Score, pp. 88-90.47 Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 2-4, 242-3.48 See note 9 above.49 Jeanne Thieffry, Alfred Cortot’s Studies in Musical Interpretation (London: Harrap, 1937), pp. 19-20.50 A key text here is Johnson, The Meaning of the Body.51 Thomas Manshardt, Aspects of Cortot (Hexham: Appian, 1994), p. 120.52 Leech-Wilkinson, ‘The emotional power’.53 Daniel Stern, Forms of Vitality: exploring dynamic experience in psychology, the arts, psychotherapy, and development. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Stern’s work provided a central reference point for work on music and shape developed within the AHRC Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, 2009-14, the results forthcoming in Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Shape and Feeling’, in ed. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Helen Prior, Music and Shape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Stern’s and Johnson’s earlier work were related to music in Hallgjerd Aksnes, ‘Music and its resonating body’, Danish Yearbook of Musicology 29 (2001), pp. 81-100, which includes a discussion of Guck, ‘Musical Images’. On Stern and his precursors, Hausegger and Truslit, see Jin Hyun Kim, ‘Shaping and so-shaping forms of vitality in music: beyond cognitivist and emotivist approaches to musical expressiveness’, Empirical Musicology Review 8/3 (2013), pp. 162-73.54 Thomas Hermann, Andy Hunt and John G. Neuhoff, The Sonification Handbook (Berlin: Logos, 2011).55 Cortot, Cortot Chopin, p. 37.56 In terms of the extent of its rubato this is measurable—the standard deviation of his beat lengths at 0.23 is off the top end of the range of the sixteen performances used here as representatives of the ‘Berceuse’ tradition—though there is of course more to expressivity than that and I am speaking here impressionistically. Pires is the only modern pianist here who comes close at 0.21 but in a much slower performance (quaver = 77) which affords much more variation. More typical of modern performance are Demidenko (0.15) and Kissin (0.14). Closest to Cortot’s average tempo (95) is Shelley (96, 0.16). Most of the early recorded pianists play the score much faster than Cortot, with less space for rubato (Hofmann, quaver = 136, SD 0.09; Friedman, 126, 0.12; Paderewski, 110, 0.14; Backhaus, 109, 0.13).57 George Hogarth’s comments on Chopin’s performance of the piece in London in July 1848 are pertinent: ‘It is highly finished, new in its harmonies, full of contrapuntal skill and ingenious contrivance; and yet we have never heard music which has so much the air of unpremeditated effusion. The performer seems to abandon himself to the impulses of his fancy and feeling, to indulge in a reverie and to pour out unconsciously, as it were, the thoughts and emotions that pass through his mind…’ (Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Chopin Pianist and Teacher as Seen by His Pupils, tr. Naomi Shoet with Krysia Osostowicz and Roy Howat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 294.)58 Karen M. Taylor, Alfred Cortot: His Interpretive Art and Teachings, Phil. Diss. Indiana University 1988, esp. p. 391 ff and chapter 8, pp. 458-557. Thieffry, Alfred Cortot’s Studies; Manshardt, Aspects.59 Taylor, Alfred Cortot, pp. 456-81.60 Christian Labrande and Donald Sturrock, The Art of Piano: Great pianists of the 20 th century (NVC Arts, videotape 3984-29199-3, DVD 3984 29199 2, 1999), chapter 19, 0hr 56’11”–58’47”.61 Myriam Chimènes, ‘Alfred Cortot at la politique musicale du gouvernement de Vichy’, in ed. Myriam Chimènes, La Vie musicale sous Vichy (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 2001), pp. 35-52.62 Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Making music’.63 Alfred Cortot, In Search of Chopin (London: Nevill, 1951), chapters 1-2, pp. 9-23. 64 Cortot’s annotated editions are still widely used in piano teaching, and in conversation many pianists still speak admiringly of his playing while not wishing to copy it. See Labrande and Sturrock, The Art of Piano.65 For such a practice see Anna Scott, ‘Romanticizing Brahms: Early Recordings and the Reconstruction of Brahmsian Identity,’ PhD thesis, Leiden University (2014). Also Slåttebrekk and Harrison, Chasing the Butterfly. (Incidentally, Scott and I use ‘Recordings Informed Performance’ in different senses.)