🎹 CHOPIN'S LETTERS. Special display cycle 📅 30.09 – 31.12.2025 Special showing to accompany the 19th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition Fryderyk Chopin was a complete artist – a composer and performer of his own works. Knowing how Chopin transcended musical schemata in both composition and pianism, it is worth focussing on his hand. It was a key instrument in his symbiosis with the piano, often emphasised by observers. Chopin left theoretical groundwork for his own piano-playing method, in the form of sketched notes. He transmitted the tenets of that method through his teaching work. The foundation for making full use of the hand’s construction was its correct positioning with regard to the white and black keys. The essence of good performance consisted in leading the melody after the fashion of the declamation present in the art of singing. Chopin’s individual solutions to fingering also helped the pianist join the notes smoothly together (legato playing). Chopin’s individuality as an artist was perceived by his peers primarily in the metaphysical domain. He was described as a genius, an angel or a poet of the piano. Eugène Delacroix portrayed Chopin as Dante – the spiritual guide for Romantic artists. Meanwhile, bodily awareness – especially the use of the hand – was a crucial element in Chopin’s pianistic art. This is reflected in accounts in which his hand functions as a symbol of the artist, and his fingers are perceived as the most crucial bodily mechanism enabling musical genius to manifest itself. Chopin’s aversion to the activity of writing was well known to his peers. Chopin entrusted the copying out of his musical manuscripts – a time-consuming and mechanical task – to copyists who had gained his confidence. He employed various forms of written communication – from notecards to lengthy letters. Yet he found writing heavy-going, as he readily admitted. During the last years of his life, it also became increasingly dependent on his worsening health. This is expressed partly in his letters, in which illegibly deleted passages visually convey what he termed his ‘torture at writing’. The exhibition ‘The artist’s hand – the expression of genius’, while placing Fryderyk Chopin’s hand at the centre of its reflection, also concentrates on showing priceless handwritten artefacts, such as a musical sketch in his pocket diary, notes for a piano-playing method and letters in which Chopin refers to the act of writing and to the (undeveloped) fourth finger of his hand. We present an image of Chopin’s hand that was produced post mortem. Thus the hand is shown in multiple dimensions, uniting the corporeal and metaphysical domains. It refers directly to the artist’s physiognomy, while at the same time personifying creative genius. - Magdalena Kulig Curator of the Fryderyk Chopin Museum: Dr Seweryn Kuter - Curator of the exhibition: Magdalena Kulig - Design: Studio Karolina Fandrejewska - Photos: Waldemar Kielichowski - Conservation: Diana Długosz-Jasińska, Dr Marta Zaborowska - Translation: John Comber 🎟️ Special display included in the entry ticket to the Museum
