It is Katyń massacre remembrance day

I think a lot of things in the field of Chopin study are over romanticized, but what’s not romanticized enough is the fact that when he was a kid his parents ran a boarding house in the center of Warsaw, and your parents could just send you there to live (if they had enough money) and you would just be like studying for exams while teenage Chopin learned to play piano in the living room, vibes unmatched

grade school field trip to Warsaw, 1950s, to see the city after its rebuilding

whenever I see artists and writers say the things they make aren’t good enough to publish or to show to the public, I always think about Chopin’s nocturne in c sharp minor no 20 because it has such an iconic place in history now. Not only is it beloved because it’s so beautiful, it got legendary status when Władysław Szpilman played it on the last broadcast of the Polish radio as Warsaw was being bombed by nazis. It’s such a powerful symbol to us now, but to Chopin it was nbd. He wrote it prob in a hotel room in vienna and sent it to his sister in warsaw so she’d have something to practice while he was away. He never intended to publish it. He never even gave it a title. We only call it a nocturne because it sounds like one, but he never gave it a genre either. Some people just call it by the only words he did write on top of the page, which were the instructions for how to play it: lento con gran espressione

slowly, with great expression

and of course you can say, well Chopin was incredible at writing music, so it’s not really surprising that he’d half ass something that turns out to be beloved centuries later, but I’M not a genius of the thing i do. ok, that’s fine. but my point is you’re not necessarily the best judge of what your work means to others, and art is art

anyway, here’s the so called nocturne played by Władysław Szpilman in Warsaw in 1997