one of the classical music world’s best-loved musicians, admired both for his lyrical piano compositions and romantic life story.と冒頭に書かれています．
詩的なピアノ作品，ピアノの詩人，に併せて romantic life story は，ショパンが得たジョルジュ・サンドという理想的な伴侶のお蔭を指しているのでしょう．
ショパンのbicentennial of his birth は，特に生まれた(1810年）国 Poland と主として生活したフランス（1849年死去）で盛んですが，中国でも“Chopin fever.”で全国的にたいへん盛り上がっています．なにしろ大国ですから規模が壮大です．
the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing is presenting 15 all-Chopin concerts by 14 pianists; upcoming performances include Garrick Ohlsson on July 11 and Cyprien Katsaris on Aug. 21, with the series continuing into December.
the Poly Forbidden City Theater management group of Beijing is mounting a Chopin Cycle that includes five different all-Chopin concerts to be performed in 15 concert halls around China. The series began in March and continues through November.(The third cycle, featuring the pianist Victor Stanislavsky, and the fourth, with Gil Shohat）．
An eponymous play directed by Wang Xiaoying and based on Chopin’s life was staged in Beijing and will travel to Shanghai and Guangzhou before returning to Beijing in November.
となかなか多彩です．さらに，
Chinese children will join one Polish child in presenting “Chopin Lives,” an outdoor concert performed simultaneously on 100 pianos．
classical, jazz and rock musicians present “4cities4Chopin” in Warsaw, Paris, London and Shanghai. This event will inaugurate “Chopin Week” in Shanghai, with the composer’s music featured in concert halls and nightclubs across the city. The Poland Pavilion at the World Expo has cosponsored many Chopin activities in Shanghai．
上海には世界で最も大きなショパン像が建てられるそうです．
“Chopin’s country was invaded by foreign powers,” Professor Yu said. “Chinese people related to this because they also had a similar experience.” とあるのはわれわれには耳の痛い話です．つまり，Nationalist として広く中国人に受け容れられているというのです．
When a young Chinese pianist named Fu Cong (also spelled Fou Ts’ong) took third place in the 1955 International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, the composer’s reputation was further solidified.
“He received the least criticism during the Cultural Revolution because of his nationalism,”
It was thus easy to revive Chopin’s music when the Cultural Revolution ended. The fact that his compositions are virtually all for piano accelerated his popularity, since the piano became a symbol of middle-class prosperity in the 1980s.
For the Israeli pianist Arie Vardi, who has taught such renowned Chinese pianists as Yundi Li and Sa Chen, the Chinese affinity for Chopin is related to the “very personal and very national” nature of his music.
Chinese artists are by nature very free and individual, and they can identify with him.”
The rising young pianist Yuja Wang, who played Chopin at the National Center for Performing Arts on July 2, echoed these sentiments in an interview from Taipei, calling Chopin’s music “very nationalistic but very universal.”
原文を抜き書きしたようになりましたが，あとはどうぞご自由にご渉猟下さい．
A Polish 'Nationalist' Whose Music Also Resonates Across China
Ma Shaofei/National Theater of China
Jiang Jiaqi, left, and Yu Yang in the National Theater of China’s production of “Chopin,” directed by Wang Xiaoying.
By SHEILA MELVIN Published: July 5, 2010
BEIJING — The great Polish composer Frederic is one of the classical music world’s best-loved musicians, admired both for his lyrical piano compositions and romantic life story.
The bicentennial of his birth has thus been marked by a seemingly endless series of concerts and commemorations. While many of these are in Poland (where Chopin was born in 1810) and France (where he died in 1849), China’s major cities are also in the grip of “Chopin fever.”
To mark the anniversary, the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing is presenting 15 all-Chopin concerts by 14 pianists; upcoming performances include Garrick Ohlsson on July 11 and Cyprien Katsaris on Aug. 21, with the series continuing into December. Not to be outdone, the Poly Forbidden City Theater management group of Beijing is mounting a Chopin Cycle that includes five different all-Chopin concerts to be performed in 15 concert halls around China. The series began in March and continues through November. (The third cycle, featuring the pianist Victor Stanislavsky, will be performed in Beijing on July 25 and the fourth, with Gil Shohat, on Sept. 12.) An eponymous play directed by Wang Xiaoying and based on Chopin’s life was staged in Beijing in June, and will travel to Shanghai and Guangzhou in September and October before returning to Beijing in November.
But the celebrations aren’t limited to concert halls and theaters. On Aug. 29 in Warsaw, 99 Chinese children will join one Polish child in presenting “Chopin Lives,” an outdoor concert performed simultaneously on 100 pianos. Another simultaneous performance of Chopin’s music, this one geographic, will take place on Sept. 4 when classical, jazz and rock musicians present “4cities4Chopin” in Warsaw, Paris, London and Shanghai. This event will inaugurate “Chopin Week” in Shanghai, with the composer’s music featured in concert halls and nightclubs across the city. The Poland Pavilion at the World Expo has cosponsored many Chopin activities in Shanghai, including “Chopin in the Garden,” which features benches that play Chopin when sat upon. (They are in Zhongshan Park, next to a seven-meter, about 23-foot, Chopin statue said to be the world’s tallest.)
“Chopin’s music has been in China for a long time,” said Yu Runyang, a Chopin scholar and former president of the Central Conservatory of Music. “It started in Shanghai in the 1930s.”
Much of China was then under Japanese occupation, with areas of cities like Shanghai controlled by Western powers. Chopin’s music was appreciated for its national characteristics, with his polonaises and mazurkas particularly popular, and the composer quickly became linked to domestic politics.
“Chopin’s country was invaded by foreign powers,” Professor Yu said. “Chinese people related to this because they also had a similar experience.”
The 1945 Hollywood film “A Song to Remember” — a romanticized Chopin biography that glamorizes the exiled composer’s patriotic yearning for his native Poland (then under Russian rule) — was shown in Shanghai to great acclaim. The movie spread the image of Chopin as a die-hard patriot who so loved his country that he took a vial of Polish soil with him when he left for Paris and, on his deathbed, asked that his heart be returned to Poland.
“Chopin’s music then really started to spread after 1949,” Professor Yu continued, referring to the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
The new Communist government was eager to prove that it could compete with the West on its own terms and to reach out diplomatically to other Communist nations. It thus entered its young musicians in international competitions, especially those based in Soviet-bloc countries — and since China’s conservatory system was established with Soviet and East European help, the “nationalist” composers taught in those countries were emphasized in China, including Chopin.
When a young Chinese pianist named Fu Cong (also spelled Fou Ts’ong) took third place in the 1955 International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, the composer’s reputation was further solidified. In 1960, Chopin’s sesquicentennial was commemorated with a series of concerts, meetings and publications, and the journal “People’s Music” declared that his music was “sweeping” the country. According to the Hong Kong musicologist Hon-Lun Yang, Chinese music critics of the era also claimed that Chopin had anticipated the socialist revolution in Poland and that his “anti-feudalist” music could be truly appreciated only by citizens of nations like Poland and China, whose citizens had suffered under Western oppression and then been “liberated” by Communism.
Western classical music was effectively forbidden in China beginning in 1963 and throughout most of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). But while impressionist composers like Debussy came in for heavy censure, Chopin got off easy.
“He received the least criticism during the Cultural Revolution because of his nationalism,” Professor Yu said. It was thus easy to revive Chopin’s music when the Cultural Revolution ended. The fact that his compositions are virtually all for piano accelerated his popularity, since the piano became a symbol of middle-class prosperity in the 1980s. In the 1990s, according to Professor Yu and other musicologists, the Chinese government bought the copyright to “A Song to Remember,” and requested conservatories and universities around the country to screen it for their students.
Given this history, it is perhaps no surprise that many Chinese pianists have an affinity for Chopin. Yundi Li — who won the 2000 Chopin Competition — and Lang Lang have both released all-Chopin CDs to mark the bicentennial, as has the 13-year-old prodigy Niu Niu. Lang Lang was the pianist chosen to open the Chopin celebrations in Warsaw; he also opted to perform Chopin (Etude in E, Op. 10, No. 3) when invited to play for President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. Of course, less-celebrated performers play Chopin, too. More than 300,000 pianos were purchased in China in 2008 and it is estimated that up to 30 million people are studying the instrument. Serious students must pass through a multilevel national testing system, which requires some mastery of Chopin at level eight.
But if politics and piano classes have propelled China’s fascination with Chopin, the most fundamental reason for his continuing popularity here is the deep connection many feel with his music.
“Chopin is very melodic,” said Jaroslaw Kapuscinski, a Polish-born composer and pianist from Stanford University who visited Beijing as part of his “Where is Chopin?” project. “The importance of melody brings it closer to a traditional understanding of music in China.”
For the Israeli pianist Arie Vardi, who has taught such renowned Chinese pianists as Yundi Li and Sa Chen, the Chinese affinity for Chopin is related to the “very personal and very national” nature of his music.
“This is a kind of paradox,” he explained by phone from Germany. “The more personal and national, the more international. Chinese artists are by nature very free and individual, and they can identify with him.”
The rising young pianist Yuja Wang, who played Chopin at the National Center for Performing Arts on July 2, echoed these sentiments in an interview from Taipei, calling Chopin’s music “very nationalistic but very universal.”
“His music ... speaks directly to the soul and touches all people, just like Chinese poetry,” she said. “Something primitive in his music language reaches the human psyche and moves all humanity. I am agnostic, but I think he is god-sent.”
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