The Chopin must go on
Maryland pianist on a quest to play every note written by composer
The composer Frédéric Chopin’s body is buried in Paris, his heart is buried in Warsaw — and it’s probably fair to say that a tiny bit of his soul is embedded inside the Silver Spring-based pianist Brian Ganz, who remains very much alive.
Ganz, 63, will take the stage at the Music Center at Strathmore Saturday to perform the most recent installment of his “extreme Chopin quest” to play all 250 works created by the 19th-century Polish composer and virtuoso pianist — a gargantuan feat that began in 2011, and which he expects to wrap up in 2026.
Saturday’s concert, “Chopin the Virtuoso,” includes some of the composer’s most difficult works (his 12 Études) and some of the most hummable (his Rondo in E-flat major.) An étude is a short piece of music composed for one instrument, frequently as a student exercise, while a rondo is a piece of music with a recurring refrain.
Though Ganz performs the work of other composers, Chopin has been his favorite for his entire life, with the exception of a teenage fling with the works of the Russian giant Sergei Prokofiev.
“It’s always been my dream to play all of Chopin’s music,” said Ganz, an artist in residence at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and a retired faculty member of the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Conservatory.
“His mazurkas are fascinating and strange; the waltzes show off Chopin’s gift for melody; and the ballads are poems that tell stories,” Ganz said.
“The ballads are the pieces in which all his gifts come together.”
Ganz recently took a break from rehearsing to tell The Sun about his training at Peabody under the late and great pianist Leon Fleisher, his travels to two European cities to visit Chopin’s grave and how Chopin “wounded” him at age 12.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: You studied with Leon Fleisher when you were a graduate student at Peabody. What was that like? A:
Leon wasn’t just a great artist but an extraordinary educator. He was very devoted, incredibly well-spoken, funny and motivating. He was passionate about involving his students in growth activities. When we were studying Bach’s baroque dance suites, Leon would have his students take dance lessons. This was before YouTube, and it really helped to know how these gavottes and musettes were danced. He would make his students read Shakespeare aloud. That changes the way you play songs, because you know with it means to transform sound into poetry.
Q: How did you fall in love with Chopin’s music? A:
My grandfather was a pianist, and I remember sitting at his feet and watching him play and being utterly captivated by the beauty of what he was doing. I started taking piano lessons when I was 9 years old, and my parent had to beg me to stop practicing. A few years later, when I was 12 or 13, I heard
my first Chopin ballad, and it struck me powerfully. It was so beautiful that it was painful, and I had difficulty understanding how that was possible. It filled me with a profound curiosity to spend the rest of my life inside that question. That’s why I say that I was “wounded” by Chopin.
Q: Will you be the first pianist to play all of Chopin’s works? A:
I’m not sure if anyone has ever done it to the degree that I’m doing it, in which they play every single note that he ever wrote. I played a canon for two voices that Chopin left unfinished. He dashed out a song that wasn’t accompanied
by any musical instrument, so we hired a singer to perform it unaccompanied. But my focus has never been being the first or only pianist to play all of his work. My focus is on the glory of sharing this wonderful music.
Q: What makes the Études so difficult to perform? A:
Chopin’s Études are his Mount Olympus. He wrote them to help his students learn the techniques he was exemplifying in his works for piano and orchestra. Your hand has to leap around the keyboard confidently and hopefully accurately. But you also have to play these chords softly and with consummate delicacy
so the melodic line can sing above them. Chopin was the first composer to write études for the concert stage, and he remains the greatest. They have never been equaled.
Q: Why are Chopin’s heart and body buried in separate cities? A:
Chopin had a deathly fear of being buried alive. So when he was dying in 1849 at the age of 39, he requested that his heart be removed from his body. His heart is encased in a wall in Warsaw’s Holy Cross Church in Warsaw, where it is preserved in perpetuity. His body is in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where a lot of the famous
composers are buried. I visited on a cold and rainy and dreary winter day and I thought, ‘Oh, this is nice. The cemetery is empty and I’ll have time alone at his grave.’ But when I got to his tomb, there were about a dozen people, and they had lit candles and left flowers. It was truly an oasis of light and color and it made me realize how beloved Chopin still is.
IF YOU GO
Pianist Brian Ganz performs at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Music Center at Strathmore, 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. Tickets cost $19-$99. For details, visit nationalphilharmonic.org or call 301-581-5100.