Francesco Giammarco
Il pedale di Chopin. L'estetica del pedale di risonanza nella musica pianistica di Fryderyk Chopin

The subject of this review is a book dedicated to Chopin. It is a somewhat technical book, but it reads without any problem. It is The Pedal of Chopin. The Aesthetics of the Sustain Pedal in the Piano Music of Fryderyk Chopin by Francesco Giammarco, published by Zecchini Editore. This text is hard to find because it deals with purely musicological issues; but having said that, once you start reading it, you encounter a very smooth writing style. This essay, first published in 2010 and reprinted in 2014, as I mentioned, is addressed to classical pianists like myself and discusses the pedalizations indicated by Chopin, namely the use of the sustain pedal, which Chopin specifies with absolute precision in his music. Furthermore, this text is crucial because it clarifies that alongside good music teaching, there must always, and I mean always, be good teaching of music history.

The question from which the essay starts is: can the pedals indicated by Chopin also be realized on modern pianos? This issue is quite controversial, but Giammarco, like many other open-minded pianists, answers affirmatively. However, it seems it's not even easy to give a definitive answer to this question, given that not all pianists agree on the actual possibility of replicating Chopin's pedals on modern pianos. As if that weren't enough, it should be noted that the best essays on this subject have been written by American researchers and musicologists.

Francesco Giammarco examines a whole series of examples from which it clearly emerges that the Polish Maestro carefully planned his pedalizations. Even in a piece with a very simple structure (i.e., A B A), such as all the Mazurkas (from op. 6 to the two collections published posthumously, namely op. 67 and op. 68 [not to mention the nine Mazurkas without an opus number on the title page, and the Mazurka op. 7 no. 2a, which apparently is the very first version of the Mazurka op. 7 no. 2]), the indications of where to place the sustain pedal during performance are carefully studied and thought out by Chopin and meticulously put on paper.