What is the purest form of Chopin’s genius? There are a few levels.
Level 1: Chopin improvising live
Well, max-Chopin was surely to watch him improvise live, which he did with extraordinary style in among other places Parisian salons. It’s said that after a great session he’d hurry home to write down and preserve the outpourings of genius. Surely the purest experience of listening to Chopin would have been at one such salon:
Level 2: Chopin performing something he’s written down
The next level of Chopin would have been to listen to him play a piece, such as the Fantasie Impromptu, as a performance at some later point. Here the original moment of genius would have been mediated by the act of writing it down, and re-performing it. But you’d still be in the company of Chopin playing Chopin.
Level 3: someone else playing what Chopin wrote down
And the next level of pure exposure to Chopin would be to hear another person play one of his pieces, mediated by both the externalisation of writing (presumably a very lossy process, losing so much of the originary genius) and yet very good- I once saw Michail Pletnev play Chopin in Milan and it still seemed very Chopin like.
Digression on the weirdness of writing:
It is difficult to connect today to how unnatural and strange the possibility of capturing musical or any other genius in the form of written marks on a page is. We know that Socrates deplored writing, as recorded in Plato’s (ahem, written) remarks in the Phaedrus dialogue:
“”For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.”
Level 4: a recording of someone else playing what Chopin wrote down
The next level after this is of direct access to Chopin is to listen to a recording of someone playing Chopin. Here the original genius of Chopin improvising has had to go via a) Chopin writing it down to b) Another musician interpreting those marks to c) a recording device reproducing those sounds.
Level 5: the digital invention of a recording of someone else playing what Chopin might have written down
Generative AI provides a fourth way in which Chopin’s genius can be passed through to us. Have a giant neural network memorise all the music ever. Have it pay particular attention to all of Chopin’s work. Prompt it to “Remember” Or “Improvise” Or “create” on the basis of this distilled remembrance of all of Chopin.
In some sense you can see that this is on a continuum with writing. An alien technology that can capture the essence of a human’s ingenious mind and feeling and transport it through time.
Final thought
These five levels aren’t really in sequence. There’s an argument to be made that the ultimate version of gen-AI (which would also immerse itself in Chopin’s letters etc) would actually be the closest to the experience of Chopin improvising as in Level 1.
It seems to me that this has implications for copyright, among other things. I”ll be happy for the superseding of reading / writing on which I”m largely in agreement with Socrates. Nobody I know imprints more than a fraction of a percentage of the books they read on their souls.