The Semiotic Forces in Chopin’s Music
Eero Tarasti
(Helsinki)

Chopin’s music continues to fascinate us not only as a particular musical message from the nineteenth century but also due to the whole signification of his music, his position in the history of European erudite music, and the special embodiment of creative processes hidden in his work. By this I do not want to say that his aesthetic impact in our time is not direct and immediate; rather, my purpose is to try to find out how we might make explicit the inner or ‘interoceptive’ aspects of his output, and furthermore to ponder what kind of theoretical meta-language is capable of portraying those aspects. I want to situate him, on one hand, in the context of the most recent theoretical reflection in the field of semiotics and musical semiotics, but not only deductively—if that were so, the analyses would only illustrate how the ‘method’ functions and would say little about the unique ‘existential’ character of its object. No, when applying new theoretical ideas we have to maintain a sensibility for the phenomenal qualities of the musical utterance. Yet, on the other hand, our listening experience never starts from what might be termed an objective zero-point, and in this sense I do not believe in so-called ‘grounded theory’, which claims that theory grows from the facts themselves. We always approach music with a certain hermeneutic pre-understanding. This means that I assume no one studies Chopin, for instance, without being to some extent a pianist himself. In my own case, my source of inspiration is naturally the Chopin I have myself studied and played with many specialists and teachers, from the Parisians Jules Gentil and Jacques Février to the Pole Jan Hoffman, and also all the Chopin literature that surrounds such a listening or performing experience. 
In this paper, I want to deal with some core issues of Chopin as a composer, as a subject, with his social context, and particularly with those issues made manifest by the aspects of genre in his output—a topic that has been recently discussed by Mieczysław Tomaszewski, Irena Poniatowska, Jim Samson, Jeffrey Kallberg and others. I want to apply to the case of Chopin my own recent model of existential semiotics, particularly regarding its two broad categories of Moi and Soi—a model that is already rather different from those Paris school ‘semiotic squares’ that I applied in my first Chopin studies on his narratology (dealing with the G minor Ballade and the Polonaise-Fantasy). This does not mean abandoning the narrative approach. I can see quite well how one of my own recent theories in that field, based on distinctions between three types of narrativity, namely conventional, organic and existential, could be applied to Chopin. Thus far, I have illustrated those models by means of two essays, one on Mozart, in order to elucidate the mystery of his art and creativity, and the other comparing Marcel Proust and Richard Wagner; in the latter case, the problem was linked with one of ekphrasis between music and literature. I would not try to do the same for Chopin and his possible literary inspirations in the ballades; that has been done already by many, à la Beethoven und die Dichtung by Arnold Schering. Yet the functioning of these three types of narrativity is quite evident in some late work of Chopin, say the Fantasy in F minor. I mean that, for the purpose of what I call conventional narrativity, we can segment the piece into clear-cut sections and phrases, as the initiator of narratology, Vladimir Propp, once did for Russian folk tales. In this model, narrativity takes place via ‘blocks’ or ‘functions’, as Propp called them. Later, as we know, this model was enriched by the French structuralists, such as A. J. Greimas, who also constituted the mythical actant model with six members. What the ‘actant’ is in music is quite clear: it is a ‘theme’ in musical discourse, as defined by its motivic structure, clear harmonic basis and normally periodic 4+4 syntax—the basis of the ‘corporeal’ style of Viennese classicism, as Ernst Kurth defined it. That is the sense in which I used this model in my study on the Polonaise-Fantasy, for instance. Moreover, in conventional narrativity the ‘blocks’ can be arranged according to a certain stereotypical order or scheme, following the musical or textual functions. Greimas spoke of three functions: inchoativity, durativity and terminativity. Claude Bremond, in his Logique du Récit, wrote of virtuality, passing into action or not passing into action, and achieving or not achieving. In this chain, if the category of ‘not’ was chosen, then one had to leap backwards and start again. Boris Asafiev spoke about initium, motus and terminus. This approach already made the type of narrativity tend towards the next one, namely the organic. In organic narrativity, it is not discrete units of story-telling that are the main issue, but rather continuity, growth and fluctuating energy, a teleological process towards some goal. That is very close to what Schenker’s analysis was aspiring to: music as a process. Two of the principal categories of this narrativity were ‘focusing’ and ‘unfolding’. Music can focus on one chord, which then can be expanded or unfolded. A classic example: Chopin’s C sharp minor Scherzo, the transition to the coda on the dominant ninth-seventh chord used both in the accompaniment and in the melody. In Proust, we find excellent illustration of what is organic narrativity in literature, namely the famous long phrases of his prose, one phrase being well over two pages long and resembling, as he said metaphorically, Chopin’s ‘long-necked themes’. In Wagner, we find the counterpart of the ‘unendliche Melodie’. But then organic narrativity can become at any time also existential, via the cognitive operation of affirmation or negation, that is, moments at which we stop and halt the musical process, sensing that the unique moment in the temporal flow has a more profound meaning, as a moment of freedom amidst the ‘necessary’ organic process of the work. They are the moments of choice, in which the composer can stand back from a particular moment and see in reflection ‘what else might happen’, to paraphrase Leonard B. Meyer’s view of musical style. In Proust, a beautiful example of existential narrativity is the scene with three trees in the narrator’s journey to Balbec, where he is leaving the town and sees from the car three trees that reach their twists towards him as if trying to say: ‘stop now, if you do not listen to what we want to say to you, you will never learn something very important about yourself’. This is an obvious analogy to the scene with the three Norns in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung who warn the protagonists. In my analysis of Mozart’s D minor Fantasy, I asked quite straightforwardly: what is an existential tone or note? Are there such notes or moments in the text? (I found one: the E flat note in D minor at an extremely dramatic and rhetorical moment that I felt to be imbued with such an existential meaning. My finding was supported by Eduard Laufer’s Schenkerian study of the piece.)

The existential semiotic model 
Next, I have to briefly introduce my theoretical model and its fundamental ideas. My intention there has been also philosophical, in the sense that I have tried to specify the category of being by providing this basic modality with new species from Kant and Hegel, and following the phases of this concept further from Kierkegaard to Sartre and Fontanille. When one aims for more subtle tools in semiotics, one can still find basic innovations among the Classics of philosophy. In existential semiotics, Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself were turned into Being-in-myself and Being-for-myself. When these notions are combined in the Greimassian semiotic square, one gets the following cases:

                                 MOI
being-in-myself                                    being-for-myself
être-en-moi                                             être-pour-moi
an-mir-sein                                           für-mich-sein
(will)                                                       (can)
       X
für-sich-sein                                            an-sich-sein
être-pour-soi                                            être-en-soi
being-for-itself                                         being-in-itself
(know)                                                      (must)
                                   SOI  

They can be interpreted in the following ways:
1) Being-in-myself represents our bodily ego, which appears as kinetic energy, ‘khora’, desire, gestures, intonations, Peirce’s ‘first’. Our ego is not yet in any way conscious of itself but lies in the naive Firstness of its being; modality: endotactic, ‘will’
2) Being-for-myself corresponds to Kierkegaard’s attitude of an ‘observer’, Sartre’s negation, in which the mere being shifts to transcendence, notices the lack of its existence and hence becomes aware of itself and transcendence. The mere being of the subject becomes existing. This corresponds to the transcendental acts of my previous model: negation and affirmation. Ego discovers its identity, reaches a certain kind of stability, permanent corporeality, via habit; modality: endotactic, ‘can’.
3) Being-in-itself is a transcendental category. It refers to norms, ideas and values that are purely conceptual and virtual, they are potentialities of a subject, which he can either actualise or not actualise. What is involved are abstract units and categories; modality: exotactic, ‘must’.
4) Being-for-itself means the aforementioned norms, ideas and values as realised by the conduct of our subject in his Dasein. Those abstract entities appear here as ‘distinctions’, applied values, choices, realisations that often will be far removed from original transcendental entities; modality: exotactic, ‘know’.
The essential aspect of the model is that it combines the spheres of the Moi and the Soi, the individual and collective subjectivities. It portrays semiosis not only as a movement of the collective Hegelian spirit, but by adding to the Being-in-and-for-itself the presence of a subject via Being-in-and-for-myself. It is not only the distinction of these four logical cases that is crucial, but also the movement among them, the transformation of a chaotic corporeal ego into its identity, ego’s becoming a sign to itself, as well as the impact of such a stable and completely responsible ego on the actualisation of transcendental values, in which the ego becomes a sign to other subjects. In this phase, the being-in-and-for-myself meets the you or Being-in-and-for-yourself, Others. Behind the social field created in this way, there still looms the realm of transcendental, virtual values and norms, signs which have not yet become signs to anyone. So we are also dealing with a psychological model portraying the varieties of our individual and social being within the mind of a subject. This shows how the social intrudes on our innermost being. In the classical sense, the semiotic sphere consists only of the fields of Being-for-myself and Being-for-itself. The extremities of the semiotic square are the field of pre-signs, which enclose semiosis proper on two sides. However, one cannot understand this semiosis, the process of act-signs, without going outside it, to the transcendence. Hence the existential analysis becomes a Kantian transcendental analytics in these two phases.
Next we can start to elaborate this achronic structure, this kind of ‘semiotic square’, in the Greimassian sense. In fact, strictly speaking, it is no longer a Greimassian square, with its rigorous logical relations of contrariety, contradiction and implication. In what follows, I go even further away from the idea of such a square into a more dynamic and flexible model, in which everything is in motion—as one of the fundamental theses of existential semiotics has tried to argue since its beginning.
We can now improve the model, and make it simpler still, by designating those four cases of being by means of signs: M1, M2, M3, M4 and S1, S2, S3, S4. When put in a semiotic square, they partly overlap:
                                                                          MOI  
                                                             M1                                M2
                                                             (S4)                                (S3)
                                                                                Z    
                                                               S2                                   S1       
                                                             (M3)                                (M4)
                                                                               SOI
These cases would contain the following issues, which are almost the same as above but are now seen rather from the standpoint of our semiotic subject in general and not as his acts embodied in texts or signs:
                      
                                                                                  MOI
                                           primary kinetic energy                            identity, personality                                                                                                                                                                       
                                           desire, gesturality, khora, body               habit, stability (music: melody)                                                                           
                                           (musical sound, texture)                          theme, actor
                                                                                   Z
                                       social roles, institutions, practices             norms, values, general codes
                                    (genres, topics, rhetorics, forms)                 (aesthetic ideas)      
                                                                                        SOI
There are two directions in the model: one from pure corporeality and sensibility, M1 (Lévi-Strauss’s le sensible), to permanent, stable body, M2, and further to the social representation of the body in social roles and professions, M3, and to abstract values and norms of a society, M4 (l’intelligible, l’abstrait); the other from abstract norms to their ‘exemplifications’ or representations in certain social institutions, and further their enactment via suitable personalities which those institutions recruit for their purposes, and ultimately certain corporeal entities. Therefore, there is in every form of square, on the upper side of the Moi, as we call that part of the ‘me’ in the model, a tiny trace of the social; correspondingly, in even the most abstract social norms there is a tiny trace of pure corporeality. The model itself is made manifest within the mind of a subject explaining how the social is internalised within it, and so why we behave socially, obeying laws and norms; it explains how society keeps us in its hold. As Adorno might have put it, what is involved is the juxtaposition of Ich und Gesellschaft (Moi versus Soi). As to the idea that it would serve as a Greimassian ‘semiotic square’, I have already made efforts in previous studies to ‘temporalise’ it, viewing movements among its members. So I would now rather call it a ‘Z’ model when thinking of its inner motions.

Application to Chopin
The next question is whether we can apply such a model to Chopin. In respect to the Fantasy in F minor, I think it is possible. As already said, that work has a clear-cut narrative structure consisting of ‘blocks’: march, introduction, transition, main theme (learned style, contrapuntal), secondary theme (‘George Sand’), third theme (‘Chopin and his passion’, chromatic), huge transition, return of the march, now glorified, etc. 
So there prevails a distinct segmentational structure. Yet when we look inside at those blocks and at how they are syntactically connected, we see already the organic principle transforming the text into a more continuous process. The weighty funeral march (‘Polonais prisonniers en Sibérie’, as Jules Gentil said, following the Parisian oral hermeneutic tradition from which I also took several of the previous characterisations) is soon transformed into a more reflective mood in bar 21; accordingly, moments of action and withdrawal alternate. The passage from bar 21 onwards is like a shift to a narrative within a narrativity, like a story told within the drama, an epic moment amidst tragedy, a technique much used by Wagner—to his disadvantage, as Dahlhaus noted. The triplet figuration from bar 43 to bar 67 portrays the function of ‘inchoativity’, beginning the organic growth or unfolding, leading to the syncopated dialogical main theme. If all the themes up to this point have been more or less based on the interval of a fourth and its ‘gap’, it is filled now in the glittering side theme, bars 77–84, with scale-wise movement upwards then downwards. This theme is not a dialogue but a duet, with its two-part figuration, idiomatically suited to the physical capacities of hand and keyboard. So it represents what Heinrich Besseler once called a Spielfigur. What follows takes place according to the German principle ‘Lieber etwas gutes und dafür ein Bisschen mehr’: the incitive conative function of musical texture is evident, as are the surprise effects; this is all certainly existential, in the sense of the affirmation of the physical and mental power of the musical subject, leading to the glorified declaration, the march no longer funeral, but victorious, which again leads to a surprising deceptive cadence onto the dominant of E major, which never arrives but leads further enharmonically to the C minor return of the main theme. This is exactly the same discursive formation as in the Wagnerian art of Übergang, transition. After the repetition of the exposition—I almost unwittingly use the genre term from sonata form (I shall return to this problem later)—we again pass into transition from bar 180. Now the same musical substance of a triplet figuration serves another narrative ‘function’, namely durativity; here it allows something ‘to unfold’ from its initial germ or cell, but now contrarily focusing into a B major tonic chord (enharmonically, of course, C flat major) at the beginning of the ‘nocturno’ section, and within it a kind of ‘chorale’ section. This is a typical case of ‘genre within a genre’ in the Chopinian discourse. So this section certainly has ‘existential’ content, in the sense of inner reflection, halting the ‘organic’ process for a while as if transcending the musical world. However, this existential moment is brutally interrupted by the dramatic diminished seventh chord in bar 223. This is followed by the recapitulation. In the coda, the music, in its rubato mode, becomes very talkative, like a recitative à la Beethoven or Schumann in ‘Dichter spricht’, in the adagio sostenuto of bars 320 and 321. Nevertheless, the syntactically connecting triplet figuration closes the piece, fulfilling now the function of terminativity. So here we see how musical substance and function differ from each other. The musical signifier can carry all those three functions of musical storytelling: beginning, developing and closing. The closing chord really means focusing in the narrative sense: descending fourth in the bass line, and ascending octave in the upper line as the ultimate post-sign of the growth tendencies and trans-ascendental aspirations of the whole piece. The cadence, of course, is plagal with an altered IV degree—we have already had too much of tonic/dominant resolutions, and we need to get here into a different key from the beginning, not F minor but A flat major—a genuinely Romantic third relationship.
Yet when speaking of a musical text, we have to note that it exists also in performance. So in this mode of musical ‘being’—or utterance, in the act of enunciation, as it is called in semiotic theory—one can effectuate something that in text seems to be only conventional but in performance becomes organic and even existential. This type of existentialisation and transcendentalisation takes place in a truly exquisite rendition of Chopin. What is seen as a conventional ‘genre’—mazurka, waltz, nocturne etc.—is transcended in the act of performance. This device shifts us to an entirely new dimension or level. Therefore, many piano teachers do not give, say, mazurkas to be played by beginners. The texture itself can be technically—on the level of the modality of ‘can’—so simple that even a mediocre pianist could do it… but he would do so without understanding all those subtleties that can emerge only in the hands of an extremely well-trained and sensitive pianist who knows how to produce an organic interpretation and reach the existential stage of the music, and how to transmit this experience to the audience. 
What I mean can be illustrated by a concrete example. Two young Finnish pianists played Chopin preludes and the G minor Ballade at the Sibelius Academy, in the masterclass of Dmitri Bashkirov. I made some notes on what he said. Prelude No 1: it provides the context for the whole set. There must be right at the beginning an agitato like being out of breath, the upper part of the texture must sound and be foregrounded, the hand is ‘breathing’ incorrectly due to the syncopated accentuation, which alternates weight and lightness (at this moment, I thought that Bashkirov as an interpreter was portraying completely what Roland Barthes called a genotype, namely a bodily focused musician). The G major Prelude: this is a cheerful episode after the sick E minor. You have to narrativise all the preludes in the set in this manner so that they form a psychologically convincing continuum (here I would add that if the preludes as a whole represent the idea of a fragment following the aesthetic of Friedrich Schlegel, which so justly applies to Schumann’s ‘Charakterstücke’, the performer has to go further and realise what we called organic, i.e. continuous, narrativity). The D major: dualism in the intonation between two figures: the intonation in the middle part must be foregrounded. The A major Prelude No. 7: note that every phrase ends in a minim, which has to be long enough. The E major No. 9: open forte, not grinding your teeth. The G sharp minor No. 12: with extreme characterisation, but not with extreme force. Play not staccato, but with the whole hand; bass chords as on a double bass. The E flat minor: is the theme an arpeggiated melodic chord? Above, shift from E minor to A major, very important, shift from sadness to a cheerful mode; Una corda is not an ambulance. We have first the body, then the soul—but last are the fingers.
About the G minor Ballade: the figurations first a tempo then, later, faster. The figures must be as if drawn by a soft hand. The fourths in the transition to the secondary theme: like horns. Count in 2 not in three 3 (against the ‘waltz’ genre perhaps looming behind). The organ points in the transition to the coda; those two crotchets, like a sign of death, that is what the organ points signify at the end (sounds like a very Russian interpretation). 
When pondering how the musical discourse is made organic and even existential in interpretation, one may pay attention not only to verbal indications in the situation of musical communication that is a masterclass. In fact, there are three ‘Moi’s’ at work here: 1) Chopin’s Moi as written, as embedded in the musician’s enunciate, 2) the teacher’s ‘Moi’, penetrating, disturbing, trying to impact all the time 3) the Moi of the student. So when we say that Chopin’s music needs the correct ‘modalisation’, that is, given the appropriate modalities, then of whose modalities are we speaking? Whose Moi do we have in mind?
In fact in this piece we have already met some essential aspects of my future theoretical elaborations. Naively speaking, we can see there the struggle between the composer’s Moi and Soi, which we can interpret in many ways. We can see it like Adorno, in his Beethoven studies, as the eternal conflict between Myself and Society. Society is represented in music via the semantic content of its narrative blocks, and via the presence of ‘the social’ in the choice of genre within the piece—genre, of course, being something of a social element in musical discourse, as all genre scholars agree. But we can also see it as a more internal process, enacting also the composer’s ‘body’ and personal style, whatever we mean by those notions.
In fact, this conceptual problem is present implicitly in many ‘classical’ Chopin studies, such as those of Tomaszewski and Poniatowska. Here I shall take just a few examples. 
Chopin’s Moi as a completely carnal physical ego and as a personality has been already dealt with in many commentaries, from Jeffrey Kallberg’s gendered study to the authentic biographic portrayal by George Sand in her memoirs, as well as the account of another eye-witness—Ferenc Liszt. Poniatowska writes about the Chopin Moi: ‘A rich sphere of feelings with a tendency towards melancholy, experiences dramatizing the state of his soul and external situations, were hidden under a mask of self-irony and a distance from reality, expressed with a great sense of humour and wit’. This statement fits well with what is said later about how Chopin’s Moi influenced his music and particularly his view on genres: he wrote to his family on 22 December 1830: ‘“Nor can I send the Mazurkas, as I have not copied them out yet, they are not meant for dancing” […] Chopin also used the so called tempo rubato from equal rhythmic values, which created the effect of a certain freedom, rhythmic disturbances, also characteristic of folk renditions’. Here we have one key to the Chopin Moi: the rhythmic subtleties of performance with regard to tempo. But as we have already noted, this could be seen also as stemming from the Soi of Polish folklore and culture. We learn more about tempo rubato from Tomaszewski, according to whom it was not so much a sign of the composer’s individual Moi as a reference to the original folk genre and folk musicians in the region of Kujawy. In Chopin, rubato appears most often in the mazurkas, where it denotes an execution senza rigore. So to play rubato meant an authentically Polish interpretation, and rubato was a sign of Soi and not Moi. However, there is much more rubato in Chopin than just correct accentuation in the mazurkas: it appears as a sign of the physical, agitated body of the composer-subject; it occurs as his manner of playing and manifests his personal characteristics; yet it also appears as a social practice; and ultimately it is an aesthetic category of freedom. Accordingly, rubato is an entity traversed by all four modes of being between Moi and Soi: M1 or the body, that is, the composer’s particular sensibility as direct gestural expression; M2 or the person, and so Chopin’s identity and habits as performer/composer; S2 or genres, specifically rubato as a trait of the folklore genre; S1 or ideas and values, where it represents the aesthetics of freedom derived from the codes of social practices.
Tomaszewski’s studies provide us with much material in this respect: ‘Sphäre der Gefühle: Chopin reagierte mit grosser Intensität, tief, sogar, heftig, aber nur in Grenzsituation…Für die Aussenwelt war das innere seiner Seele wirklich undurchdringlich geschützt – durch alle Formen der Distanz, durch seine Abneigung gegen die Offenbarung von Gefühlen, melodramatische Szenen und Exhibitionismus’. Yet he also notes: ‘Ein besonders charakteristischer Zug Chopins, der alle Aspekte seiner Persönlichkeit durchzieht, war eben Zwiespältigkeit, ja bisweilen eine innerliche Zerrissenheit. Mit Kategorien der modernen Psychologie wäre sie eine “positive Desintegration” zu nennen. Es gibt Stunden in den Chopin ausschliesslich in seinen “espaces imaginaires”, ausserhalb des realen Lebens und des Alltags verweilt: ein andermal steht er mit beiden Beinen im Leben und beobachtet sachlich “wie sich diese Welt dreht”’. 
Of course, Tomaszewski’s characterisation is based on authentic documents, among the most convincing of which is certainly what George Sand wrote in her Histoire de ma vie. Sand’s analysis of Chopin’s Moi and Soi is a profound and acute portrayal of the artist. She writes: ‘Le génie de Chopin est le plus profond et le plus plein de sentiments et d’émotions qui ait existé. Il a fait parler à un seul instrument la langue de l’infini, il a pu souvent résumer, en dix lignes qu’un enfant pourrait jouer, des poèmes d’une élévation immense, des drames d’une énergie dans égale’. Here Sand makes reference to transcendence (the language of the infinite) and to the focusing of organic narrativity. ‘Chopin était un résumé de ces inconséquences magnifiques que Dieu seul peut se permettre de créer et qui ont leur logique particulière’. Moreover, Sand analysed Chopin: ‘Chopin sentait sa puissance et sa faiblesse. Sa faiblesse était dans l’exces même de cette puissance qu’il ne pouvait regler. Il ne pouvait pas faire, comme Mozart… un chef-d’oeuvre avec une teinte plate. Sa musique était pleine de nuances et d’imprévu. Quelquefois, rarement, elle était bizarre, mystérieuse et tourmentée… ses emotions excessives l’emportaient à son insu dans des régions connues de lui seul.’ As romantic as he was, in Valldemosa he was not able to enjoy the aesthetic of ruins, fashionable at that time: ‘Le cloitre était pour lui plein de terreurs et de fantômes, même quand il se portait bien’.
However, these characterisations interest us most closely when we are able to show or infer that they were somehow reflected in his musical works. Otherwise, all such personal commentaries only limit or even block our interpretations, as is true of much of the so-called gender studies in music or studies of a political nature, as in the case of Shostakovich. Charles Rosen warned of this in his Romantic Generation, when speaking of ruins and fragments in Schumann’s Fantasy: ‘Too firm an identification of an element in a work with an aspect of the artist’s life does not further understanding but block it’. Therefore we have to see the body, the Moi, functioning in music itself. In the choice of tonalities, we often find the effect of chiaroscuro, as in bars 17 and 21 of the F minor Fantasy, on the basis of the colour function of harmonies. Are these moments of Moi amidst the Soi of the codified functional harmony? Chopin’s teacher Elsner said that harmony was the ‘grammar of music’—so it represented the Soi, whereas the melody was its expression (Moi). Herder argued: ‘Music is the language of the passions and so Chopin could say that he tried to convey in the tones the blind, couraging, chainless emotion.’ So when it is said that Chopin’s melodies ‘sind von Konventionen befreit’, does this mean that they are freed from the impact of the Soi? We can say that themes are signs of Moi, that is, M2 as actants. As musical actors, they belong to the sphere of Soi3 = M2, but from there they aspire back towards the Moi or M1 in the two categories of singing and playful qualities. Of course, Chopin’s ornamentation can be seen as a special type of musical Schein in the positive sense that Friedrich Schiller gave to this concept (and not negatively, as in the Kant-Adorno line ‘blosser Schein’). It represents the Spieltrieb. Yet two kinds of bodily Moi can be seen as the origin of music: song and play. Play develops into virtuosity from the state of M1, i.e. mere physical excellence, to M2, whereas bel canto is the original M1 from which Chopin develops his own ‘singing’ style as M2. One device through which all this takes place is ornamentation. ‘The thematic pure melody can along the work get ornamented or it can appear immediately as an ornamented Gestalt’. For instance, in the Prelude No. 18 in F minor the ornamentation has a narrative function: it indicates the growth and unfolding of the passionate figure of the very beginning, seemingly without any ‘must’ of genre topics or form, as the free growth of ‘can’ into that excessivity which Georges Sand ascribed to him. So here the M1 does not develop even into a permanent M2. Neither does it have any S2 form behind it. The aesthetic of S1 appears here as the idea of imprévu and chaos. Yet elsewhere, as in the Ballade in F minor, the balladic, narrative, conventional story becomes gradually, phase by phase, more ornamented, shedding the schematic narrative mould and leading ultimately towards tragic catastrophe and chaos, but also an extreme brilliance of execution, and so the modality of ‘can’. Thus here the ornamentation appears from the beginning as a manifestation of M2, thematic growth, reaching S2, that is, the genre of legend or ballade, and ultimately the aesthetics of narrative catharsis. Moreover, in the Andante spianato, each iteration of the opening melody is more richly embellished à la bel canto. Here the ornamentation is something added to the theme itself, increasing its euphoric, sensual quality. So here M1 (ornaments) is subordinated to M2, and the genre of bel canto, that is, S2 is looming behind. There is no narrative tension, but the introduction as a whole is like a static picture.
With such particular new genres as scherzo, ballade and fantasy, we encounter shifts from M2 to S2. Very often, they constitute a ‘genre before genre’ or anticipate a future genre: first, a very personal M2-level innovation constitutes its own S2 as a new ‘genre’, but at the same time it resists any efforts to reduce it to any pre-existing social genre. In this sense, it ‘transcends’ the level of S2 in favour of some new aesthetic idea and artistic value of S1. This is very much what Busoni later called the ‘Pan-Kunst’ of his category of ‘absolute music’: ‘Absolute music is a play with forms without poetic program, whereby form gives up its central role […] In general composers came closest to the true nature of music in opening and middle movements (preludes and transitions), since there they believed that they were permitted to neglect symmetrical relationships and seemed to breathe unconsciously.’ 

The problem of universality
This leads us to the final question of the universality versus nationality of Chopin. The problem is focused on, for example, in the anthology Gattungen der Musick und Ihre Klassiker, edited by Herman Danuser, where the concept of ‘classical’ does not refer to the Classical style as understood by Guido Adler and others, meaning a certain stylistic period in European erudite music, but rather to something exquisite and distinguished: ‘das Klassische meint das Vorzügliche und Musterhafte. Als Klassiker kann jeder Autor und Künstler bezeichnet werden, dessen Werk zu den Gipfelleistungen seiner Art gehört.’ In this sense, the problem arises as to whether, for instance, ‘national’ art works with a local reference can become ‘universal’ and attain the category of the ‘classical’. In the anthology, certain genres are chosen to represent the idea of the most distinguished and greatest achievements in music history, and each genre is characterised by a certain composer. The list goes as follows: Catholic church music – Palestrina; Evangelic church music – Schütz and J. S. Bach; oratorio – Handel; musical tragedy – Gluck; musical comedy – Mozart; solo concerto – Mozart; string quartet – Haydn; piano sonata – Beethoven; symphony – Beethoven; Lied – Schubert; lyrical character piece – Schumann; musical drama – Wagner. Here, one feature is striking: the list of ‘universal’ composers contains only German/Austrian composers. Danuser is aware of this situation, in which only one nation’s viewpoint is elevated to universalism. He asks about the genre of the lyrical piano piece. Why Schumann and not Chopin? There is a long list, however, of composers who possess national meaning but do not signify much beyond their nation: ‘So spräche nichts dagegen unter einer verwandten Fragestellung nicht Schumann sondern Chopin als Klassiker des lyrischen Klavierstückes zur Sprache bringen’. For instance, Nietzsche considered Schumann purely and solely a German phenomenon, in contrast to Liszt and Chopin, who in piano music had already achieved European standing. But for Danuser it is entirely a problem of whether the national can be considered ‘classical’, whether it is a drawback or an advantage. Moreover, for a lyrical piano piece one can ask whether such a minor or lesser genre in general could have its classical representative. This argument says that a miniature form is not monumental enough. So quantity not quality is decisive, in disregard of the old Roman maxim Non multa sed multum.
All this still depends on which values and norms we follow; that is, to which S1 entities the scholar has committed himself to. We are close to thinking that the determining factor here is what has been recently called the canon of Western art music, which proves to be of very German origin, and so limited to the S1 of that community. European music, however, has also other communities’ S1’s. So the quarrel becomes the eternal epistemic fight within European culture as to who or which culture is superior, Germaner oder Lateiner, as Adolphe Appia once said, or ‘culture’ versus ‘civilisation’, as Norbert Elias put it (further developed in music history by Richard Taruskin). Some composers, on the other hand, are convinced that no one can become universal without first being local, as Ralph Vaughan Williams asserted. Such a debate around this theme of who is central and who is peripheral in European music culture has recurred many times, and it is not necessary to repeat it here (see, for instance, writings by Vladimir Karbusicky versus H. G Eggebrecht). Sometimes, such criticisms are weakened by the fact that one is talking about one’s own case, say, defending a forgotten or ignored nation in the gallery of European music. However, if we interpret any musical subject and any musical utterance containing those two aspects of Moi/Soi and those four cases of them, namely body, identity, social practice and norms, we do not need to remain on one level, say, S1, of a certain musical community, always local itself. This means that some music can be universal only thanks to its physical, gestural qualities (M1); another piece is universal due to its innovations concerning musical actors, melodies and themes (M2); some work is universal since it is an excellent exemplification of some genre, form or style (S2); and a composition can also be universal thanks to the aesthetics, semantics, ideas or ideologies it conveys to us (S1). There is no doubt there are moments of all these types of universality—and existentiality—in Chopin’s output. Accordingly, the view of musical reality becomes richer, and in such a scheme also Chopin and his contribution to mankind can be evaluated and esteemed in its rightful position and essence.

References:
Theodor Adorno  2004   Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik.    Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Suhrkamp
Alfred Cortot  1949  Aspects de Chopin. Paris: Editions Albin Michel
Hermann Danuser (ed.)   1988  Gattungen der Musik und ihre Klassiker.  Publikationen der Hochschule für Musik und  Theater Hannover.  Laaber: Laaber Verlag
Márta Grabocz   2009  Musique, narrativité, signification.   Paris : L’Harmattan
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Jeffrey Kallberg  1996  Chopin at the  Boundaries. Sex. History, and Musical Genre.   Cambrdige Massachusetts, London:  Harvard University Press
Vladimir Karbusicky   1994   Musik, Abendland und seine Grenzen.  Manuscript. Hamburg.
Tom Pankhurst   2008  Schenker Guide. A Brief Handbook  and Website for Schenkerian Analysis.   New York and London: Routledge.
Irena Poniatowska   ed.  2003   Chopin and his work in the context of culture. Vols 1-2.  Polska Akademia Chopinowska. Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina. Krakow: Musica Iagellonica
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Charles Rosen  1995  The Romantic Generation.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
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George  Sand  (1971)   Oeuvres autobiographiques II. (Histoire de ma vie).  Paris : Editions Gallimard
Eero Tarasti        1994  A Theory of Musical Semiotics.  Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press
                             2000    Existential Semiotics.  Bloomington, Indianapolis : Indiana University Press
                              2003    Signs of Music.  Berlin:  Degruyter Mouton
                              2009  Fondéments de la sémiotique existentielle.  Paris : L’Harmattan
                              2012  Semiotics of Classical Music. How Mozart, Brahms and Wagner Talk To Us.              Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
Mieczuslaw  Tomaszewski   1999   Frédéric Chopin und seine Zeit.   Regensburg: Laaber Verlag