Conference Agenda

In writing the history of her son Maurice Sand’s commedia dell’arte puppet theater at Nohant, George Sand remarked that it “all began with pantomime – an invention of Chopin,” thirty years earlier. She noted how his improvisations “inflamed the imaginations and loosened the limbs of [the] performers,” guiding them through a spectrum of affects “at his whim.” Endowed with an exceptional talent for mimicry, Chopin often combined commedia improvisations with his own extemporaneous performances at Nohant, interrupting melancholy pianistic spells with sudden appearances as Pierrot or as playful caricatures of his friends.

Around 1837, Sand also penned passionate letters to the actress Marie Dorval that verged on the courtier-esque, and in Questions d’art, Sand captured her through the words of “Innamorato” commedia character Mario. In the latter, Sand/Mario extolled Dorval’s stage appearance — her “drooping figure, languid step, sorrowful and penetrating gaze”— and confessed that she saw her own “sad, pathetic, beautiful form” in Dorval. This Romantic “form” invited queer identification and synthesis, fueling rumors of “Sapphic” activities encouraged by figures like Balzac and de Vigny.

This neglected corpus of history and correspondence mirrors Chopin’s blatantly censored queer language in his addresses to Tytus Woyciechowski — whose original pronouns were only recently interrogated by David Frick. In my paper, I historicize Chopin’s queerness and its connection to nineteenth-century literature, acting and performance theory, and puppetry. I begin by analyzing the rhetoric of Chopin’s letters to Tytus in relation to Sand’s letters to Dorval and Wilde’s redacted excerpts from The Picture of Dorian Gray. I identify in them gender-crossing, masked performances of surrender that resonate with the theories put forth by Diderot and Kleist, which further developed in literature on puppet performance and history (e.g., The Snowman; Masques et Bouffons). Throughout, I contextualize this literary discussion with material examples from the puppets, clothing, sound props, and cyclorama of the Nohant theater. Finally, I draw analogies between skeletal remnants of Chopin’s music — the prelude sketch discovered in 2002, the 2024 Waltz excerpt, and passages from his Mazurkas — and Maurice’s puppet commedia play sketches, arguing that they can be seen as “queer” nineteenth-century improvisations.

In her Impressions et Souvenirs, George Sand captures Chopin’s own reflection on his improvisations on the piano: “I’m looking for the colour, but I can’t even find the outline.” This evocative image suggests that Chopin sought to “paint” with sound, offering fresh insights into the relationship between sound and sight in his timbral world. During his time in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s, Parisian writers and critics advocated for a revision of Horace’s classical dictum ut pictura poesis (as painting, so poetry), replacing it with ut pictura musica (as painting, so music). This notion proposed that music, rather than poetry, serves as the ideal model for painting, thus supporting the idea of a synesthetic fusion of the arts. Yet, despite frequent references to the auditory-visual aspects of Chopin’s music in nineteenth-century Parisian descriptions, these intersections between sound and sight remain at the margin in current Chopin scholarship.

Drawing on ideas from Chopin’s music and his world, this presentation first proposes a new understanding of timbre as the multi-sensory experience of music. Second, it pursues Chopin’s idea of timbre through the investigation of Eugène Delacroix’s Journal. Delacroix’s reflections on his experiences of Chopin’s performances illuminate how Chopin’s sound could cross sensory boundaries, offering an essential model for Delacroix’s artistic principle. I will trace a historical survey of the comparison of these sister arts, music and painting, to explicate how these two arts converged in their shared perception of Chopin’s timbre. For both Chopin and Delacroix, the physical act of creation—through the hands on the piano keys and the brush on the canvas—was central to the development of their artistic logic. This dynamic process of embodied creation, rather than the final product, defines their artistic essence. In this way, I propose that Chopin’s timbre becomes not only a vehicle for rich, multi-modal listening experiences but also a means of bridging the physicality of sound with the visual dynamism that Delacroix captured in his paintings. Both artists, through their respective artistic processes, transformed their mediums into expressions that bridge auditory and visual sensory realms.

In his book Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre, Jeffrey Kallberg examines Chopin’s nocturnes within the context of their gendered generic origins. Building on the work presented in Kallberg’s book, this paper explores the role of gender in Chopin’s mazurkas. While the gendered associations of nocturnes are well established, mazurkas—grounded in a dance tradition with distinct gender roles—also present an opportunity for examining musical portrayals of masculinity and femininity. By analyzing several mazurkas, I demonstrate the ways in which both intra-opus musical elements—such as phrasing, ornamentation, and cadences—and inter-opus relationships between mazurkas often emphasize choreographic elements associated with the woman’s role. In this way, Chopin’s mazurkas shift the focus away from the masculinity often associated with the original dance genre.

My analyses draw both on personal experiences learning Polish folk-dance choreography, as well as discussions by Tomasz Nowak and Aleksandra Kleinrok on 19^th-century dance textbooks, and Ada Dziewanowska’s Polish Folk Dances & Songs. I then contextualize these analyses within the feminist musicological frameworks of Susan McClary and Suzanne Cusick and compare them with works by Maria Szymanowska and Clara Schumann. Finally, I apply the feminist literary theory of Elizabeth Harvey's Ventriloquized Voices to argue that the prioritization of feminine elements in Chopin’s mazurkas represents a musical transvestism of voice—where a male composer “speaks” with a female voice. However, by situating my analyses within the context of Warsaw’s salons, Chopin’s letters, and other biographical sources, I propose that, unlike Harvey’s literary examples, Chopin's mazurkas do not ventriloquize an external feminine voice but rather express an internal one.