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PASCAL AMOYEL
You’d like to embody these works almost physically, but you have at your side a
teacher who utters warnings, erects barriers, and tells you everything you must
not do even before you start to play. That destroys the pleasure and the freshness
of an immediate reading, and constant practice pollutes that very feeling of
novelty and discovery, breaks all momentum. Now, that freshness is the secret of
Chopin’s inspiration; it must be preserved at all costs, because it’s the best guide to
projecting his music. If ‘respect’ for the text is a means to an end, it can’t be an end
in itself, especially when the score becomes a book of formulas set in stone, a ‘dead
letter’ as it were. That was the case with the music of Chopin at the Conservatoire:
a sacred work that had entered the museum; people worshipped it and finally they
didn’t hear it any more.
After that I experienced a second disillusionment with the music of Chopin for
which I alonewas responsible: even if you’re helped by a primary intuition, you can’t
interpret Chopin as easily as all that; as soon as you exceed certain frontiers, certain
limits, you very quickly descend into gratuitous effect or a certain coldness. It’s a
much less open universe than that of Liszt, which takes you into so many different
worlds, stimulates such a feeling of liberty. In Chopin, everything is in a sensemore
fluid, as in Mozart or Schubert; it’s a more enclosed world – I don’t mean that in a
pejorative sense – where you have to aim for a certain simplicity. When I recorded
myself playing Chopin I was never satisfied listening to the playback; I didn’t
recognise there what I had had the impression I was doing. It’s music that eludes
intentions.