I just listened to a Chopin concerto.
Chopin makes me cry. They say that George Gershwin cried when he played Chopin.

There is something about his music that is almost ethereal. Take his nocturnes, for example. He had the most uncanny ability to combine the greatest heights of happiness and sorrow in one composition. He could put his soul, all of his fears and hopes, into a piece of music. He wrote It is dreadful when something weighs on your mind, not to have a soul to unburden yourself to. You know what I mean. I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.


Oscar Wilde wrote After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.

Chopin was born in 1810 and lived only 39 years. He was a great improviser and often composed while he was playing the piano. How one man could so devote himself to a single instrument and breathe life into it like he did is just absolutely amazing to me. I do not understand how something as fragile as the human mind can create like that. I suppose that's one thing that proves that we are made in the image of God - He gave us the ability to be original, to be individual, and above all, to create.
When Chopin was in Majorca, awaiting the arrival of a piano, he wrote I dream music but I cannot make any-because here there are not any pianos.

George Sand was Chopin's companion for nearly a decade. She was perhaps the person who knew him best. She painted a vivid picture of Chopin the man and Chopin the composer with these words:
His creation was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without searching for it, without foreseeing it. It came to his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he would hasten to hear it again by, tossing it off on his instrument. But then would begin the most heartbreaking labor I have ever witnessed. It was a series of efforts, indecision, and impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he had heard: what had come to him all of a piece, he now over-analyzed in his desire to write it down, and his regret at not finding it again "neat," as he said, would throw him into a kind of despair. He would shut himself up in his room for days at a time, weeping, pacing, breaking his pens, repeating and changing a single measure a hundred times, writing it and effacing it with equal frequency, and beginning again the next day with a meticulous and desperate perseverance. He would spend six weeks on one page, only to end up writing it just as he had traced it in his first outpouring.

Good night.
I'm going to go listen to Chopin.