Real Clear Arts readers know that I am a fan of The Wall Street Journal’s Saturday Masterpiece column, subtitled “Anatomy of a Classic.”
Today’s piece — about music — is no exception. It celebrates the 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birth with a column about his 24 Preludes, “tiny microcosms [through which] Chopin established the hegemony of the Romantic miniature.”
The piece, by David Dubal, a professor of piano performance at the Juilliard School, also contains this statement, which astonishes and pleases me (a Chopin fan) immensely:
Probably more people have come to great music through Chopin than from any other composer.
What an achievement that is.