Yesterday, a friend asked me to identify the song at the beginning of a particular movie clip, to help his team out in a trivia contest. Indeed… behind the sickening melodrama of a farewell scene on the beach, I could recognize a tune that was annoyingly familiar. Granted, to me there are a lot of tunes that are annoyingly familiar, as over the years I have amassed and/or absorbed more music than most people; however, this one was particularly tricky.
After a few seconds, I hastily jumped to the (wrong) conclusion: “piano concerto”. After all, there was a piano, an orchestra, and a theme that seemed to fit the “Adagio” middle movement in the standard form. There are many works of this genre that have produced popular film tunes, and spawned hoards of cheesy, overplayed rip-offs: Rach 2 & 3, Tchaik 1, Schumann, even Beethoven 5. “Easy”, I thought, “it’s the slow movement from one of the popular piano concertos”. But then I listened to the clip again.
The orchestra was echoing the pianist—actually duplicating the notes—and this continued for most of the clip: definitely a sign of weak orchestration. The rubato was over-done, and there was no rhythmic presence. It lacked depth. This could not be an original composition. I listened again: which instrument fit? Which timbre fit? The piano… and the piano alone! It must be an orchestration for film (tawdry and awful, nonetheless). The piano sounded unmistakeably like Chopin.
Besides, the tune was familiar… too familiar really, to be a piano concerto. It was so familiar that it must have been on one of the Classical compilation tapes that my mother used to play at breakfast when I was a kid. But the key to this mystery was actually in the first few notes; in fact, the first interval, because I could actually feel that interval… I realized that I could feel that interval on the piano… and then I knew I must have played it before.
That certainly narrowed it down, because I am not that familiar with the piano repertoire outside of the symphonic context. I could place it as something I’d played through but never studied, and I could place it at UofT; however, Chopin wrote a lot of work for piano solo. Then I looked through my CD collection and saw “12 Études”, remembering the night I peeked through the glass in Walter Hall and watched Bill Aide fly through the entire cycle. It was magical. I remember being amazed at how a series of… well, études... could really come alive. And I remember digging the work out of the library and playing through it the next day, just for fun.
The song in question? A (bad - what else?!) orchestration of the opening melody of Chopin’s Étude no. 3 from the 12 Études, op.10.
