Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0008-3674-4390

Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

DMA

College

College of Creative Arts

Department

School of Music

Committee Chair

Peter Amstutz

Committee Co-Chair

Amy Simpson

Committee Member

Lucy Mauro

Committee Member

Hope Koehler

Committee Member

General McArthur Hambrick

Abstract

Chopin’s Innovation and Influence on the French Piano School: From his Predecessors to his Principal Students and Successors

Wenjun Xia

This research explores Frédéric Chopin's (1810–1849) innovations in piano technique, pedagogy, composition, and interpretation, as well as Chopin’s subsequent influence on the French piano school. Before Chopin’s arrival in Paris, the French piano school was primarily influenced by Louis Adam (1758–1848) and Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785–1849), whose approaches dominated piano pedagogy at the Paris Conservatoire. Early French piano pedagogy centered on finger precision, virtuosity, and clarity, but expressivity was somewhat limited. Chopin initiated Romantic trends that emphasized emotion and natural physical motion. This study focuses on how Chopin’s unique performance style and pedagogy reshaped French pianistic traditions. The shift in French piano pedagogy and performance from its early 19th-century tradition to late 19th-century Romanticism resulted in a more expressive, free, and nuanced approach introduced and embodied by Chopin and his followers.

Chopin’s students and contemporaries, Georges Mathias (1826–1910), Karol Mikuli (1821–1897), and Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813–1888), along with later French pianists including Isidor Philipp (1863–1958) and Alfred Cortot (1877–1962), carried Chopin’s pedagogical ideals to succeeding generations.

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