Ashkenazy plays Chopin

Felicia Appenteng

Today would have been Frédéric Chopin's 198th birthday. 

"His music was spontaneous, miraculous.  He found it without seeking, without previous intimation of it.  It came upon his piano sudden, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he was impatient to hear it himself with the help of the instrument.  But then began the most desperate labor that I have ever witnessed.  It was a succession of efforts, hesitations and moments of impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he could hear; what he had conceived as one piece, he analyzed too much in trying to write it down, and his dismay at his inability to rediscover it in what he thought was its original purity threw him into a kind of despair...Chopin has written two wonderful mazurkas which are more worthy than forty novels and are more eloquent than the entire century's literature."

--George Sand