Paper transcribed from the National Chopin Conference Warsaw: 'Through the Prism of Chopin: Women, Music, and Social Change in the Long Nineteenth Century' Paper delivered by Dylan Henderson PhD ‘A fragrance of the freshest flowers’: Chopin, Pleyel and the soprani sfogati
National Chopin Conference Warsaw December 2025
'Through the Prism of Chopin: Women, Music, and Social Change in the Long Nineteenth Century'
Paper delivered by Dylan Henderson PhD
‘A fragrance of the freshest flowers’: Chopin, Pleyel and the soprani sfogati
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| Bouquet Of Violets (1872) Edouard Manet |
‘A FRAGRANCE OF THE FRESHEST FLOWERS’
CHOPIN, PLEYEL AND THE SOPRANI SFOGATI
DYLAN HENDERSON
In the literature published during or shortly after Chopin’s lifetime, passages from three different authors on the distinctive tone colour of Pleyel’s pianos during the 1830s and ‘40s stand out. Of particular interest is this passage, quoted on screen above, from Franz Liszt’s 1852 biography Life of Chopin, which recalls an intimate soirée held in the composer’s apartment:
His apartment, invaded by surprise, was only lighted by some wax candles, grouped round one of Pleyel’s pianos, which he particularly liked for their slightly veiled, yet silvery sonorousness, and easy touch, permitting him to elicit tones which one might think proceeded from one of those harmonicas of which romantic Germany has preserved the monopoly, and which were so ingeniously constructed by its ancient masters, by the union of crystal and water.
The poetic virtuosity of Liszt’s text is indeed undeniable, and although that may discount its validity as a biographical source, the same does not necessarily hold true for its insights about Pleyel pianos, which are verified in several other notable accounts.
In Antoine François Marmontel’s Histoire du Piano from 1885, the French pianist and influential Paris Conservatoire teacher recalled how Chopin’s ‘works harmonized in a more complete, truer way with the discreet, slightly veiled sound that Pleyel’s keyboards and their pedals gave under his fingers, with timbres so soft, so vaporous.’
Marmontel’s observations are predated by piano technician Claude Montal’s The Art of Tuning from 1836, which chronicles the history of the piano up until 1834. His discussion of Pleyel’s pianos is particularly illuminating and invaluable, perhaps all the more so because it makes no mention of Chopin:
In 1830, Pleyel introduced veneered sound boards to his pianos […] veneering the pine boards with mahogany across the grain of the pine. The result was the same, that is to say, the sound did not augment in volume, but acquired instead a particularly satisfying quality, the upper register becoming bright and silvery, the middle one accentuated and penetrating, and the lower clear and vigorous […]
In the three accounts just quoted, it is significant that there are several word-for-word commonalities. Liszt and Marmontel both note the Pleyel sound as being ‘slightly veiled’; yet more intriguing still is the observation from both Liszt and Montal of the Pleyel sound being ‘silvery’.
This ‘silvery’ quality has become one of the defining attributes of the Pleyel sound in our contemporary imagination, yet the significance of this intriguing adjective has gone largely unexplored in the Chopin literature. In this presentation, I will attempt to analyse and unpack its meaning, exploring first its inextricable connection with the human voice (and particularly the female voice), and secondly its value as a register characteristic. In the second half, I explore its significance as a harbinger of death, revisiting the familiar Romantic tropes of the glass harmonica, the lark and the nightingale to posit new conclusions on the centrality of Pleyel pianos to Chopin’s compositional aesthetic.
The influence of the bel canto tradition of Italian opera on Chopin’s music has deservedly been allocated a great deal of attention from Chopin scholars. Less explored, though, is the capacity for Chopin’s piano to represent the voice itself: an extension of the human body, a transmission through technological surrogacy. Throughout Chopin’s correspondence, several anecdotes support this notion. Writing to his close friend Tytus Woyciechowski, Chopin gave a detailed account of five performances given by Henriette Sontag in Warsaw in June 1830.
What
Chopin valued most deeply in Sontag’s performances were qualities that later
became synonymous with Pleyel pianos: the enchanting tone, the fine gradations
of dynamic nuance (especially in diminuendi), and the ‘sumptuous’ quality of
chromatic scales within the soprano register. Chopin also noted her exquisite
use of ornamentation: ‘She seems to breathe into the stalls some sort of
fragrance of the freshest flowers,’ he observed.
Chopin describes these virtues as ‘non plus ultra’ – a phrase he also employed
to describe Pleyel’s pianos in a later letter to Woyciechowski, sent from Paris
in December 1831, which, not surprisingly, is saturated by the topic of great
singers, featuring accounts of the performances of Luigi Lablache, Giuditta
Pasta, Maria Malibran, Giovanni Battista Rubini, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient,
Laure Cinti-Damoreau, and Adolphe Nourrit.
It is evident in both this letter and the earlier one from 1830 that Chopin especially prized singers for three particular qualities:
A modest, tasteful use of ornamentation (‘of a smaller sort’, i.e. Sontag).
Exquisite control of dynamic nuance, or ‘shades’ within ascending and descending scales, especially chromatic ones (Sontag; Cinti-Damoreau).
An airy, unforced delicacy of tone (mezza voce) akin to ‘breathing’ upon the audience (Sontag; Rubini; Cinti-Damoreau).
It is not difficult to see the qualities of these singers woven into the fabric of Chopin’s compositions, as many scholars have already established. What is less explored are the role pianos themselves (particularly those by Pleyel) played in making such qualities even possible.
Emily Dolan has persuasively argued that, for many instrument builders of the nineteenth century, the sonority of ‘voice’ represented an alternative to the burgeoning trend of the ever-expanding orchestra – one which prioritized the ethereal, the vocal and the individual over the grand, the collective and the bombastic.
Whilst Dolan was writing mainly about ‘ethereal’ instruments such as the Aeolian harp and the glass harmonica, these ideas seem equally valid for piano manufacturers.
There is an intriguing parallel here with the trajectory of Chopin’s own compositional aesthetic: as Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger writes, Chopin was the ‘only musical genius of the nineteenth century whose pianism does not emulate the orchestra of his era, he lies at the heart of a tradition of vocal inspiration, with its prime emphasis on refinement of touch’. These words seem to speak equally to Pleyel pianos.
One of the greatest differences between nineteenth-century pianos of Chopin’s time and our own are the distinct tonal characteristics of each register, made possible by their parallel-strung construction. The idea of register characteristics was, of course, a vocal phenomenon.
In his Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing, Manuel García (whose pupils included Jenny Lind, Pauline Viardot, and numerous other luminaries), defined a ‘register’ as ‘a series of consecutive homogenous sounds produced by one mechanism, differing essentially from another series of sounds equally homogenous produced by another mechanism, whatever modifications of timbre and of strength they may offer.’ The registers were thus named chest (the lowest), medium (the middle), and head (the highest), and were distributed onto a musical stave as follows:
These register characteristics are reflected in the critical reception of the great nineteenth-century voices: in Stendhal’s Life of Rossini (1824), a connoisseur of music describes the effect of the voice of Giuditta Pasta:
[…] her voice, changing from register to register, inspires in me the same sensation as this memory of moonlight, veiled an instant, darker, softer, more entrancing … then shining forth anew, a silver shower a thousandfold increased.
Given Liszt’s standing as one of the foremost musical critics of the Romantic age, and the prevalence of adjectives such as ‘veiled’ and ‘silvery’ in descriptions of soprano vocal registers, it is almost certain that Liszt was ascribing Chopin’s Pleyel with decidedly vocal characteristics.
In their purest, most unadulterated form, Chopin’s melodies typically orbit the same soprano range the composer attributed to Henriette Sontag, a range that (according to my observations performing on a c.1846 Pleyel at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in Australia) is velvety and veiled towards the bottom, and metallic and tinkly in the middle.
Towards the upper end of this spectrum, it begins to sound ‘silvery’. It is notable that many of Chopin’s fiorature typically extend beyond this range, capitalizing on the ‘silvery’ register of Pleyel pianos in rising and falling chromatic and diatonic swirls. These ‘bursts of sonic perfume’ – as Paul Kildea memorably put it – rise beyond the range of vocal possibility, lending them an otherworldly, heavenly quality which is further enriched by the soft, opalescent mist of resonance that trails in their wake, especially after descending chromatic scales. Sandra Rosenblum explains how ‘the light dampers on the Pleyels leaves a slight after-sound that does not exist on twentieth-century pianos’.
Although
it was probably conceived on a Buchholtz, the aria of the Larghetto from the
Concerto in F minor is, as many commentators have claimed, a tribute to the
soprano voice: with the exception of just a few notes, the first eight measures
of the aria falls largely within Sontag’s tessitura. Over the course of the
movement, the molto-con-delicatezza cantilena is twice reprised and, in
accordance with operatic tradition, adorned with variants of ever-increasing
sophistication each time.
What begins as a series of softly cascading trills is later perfumed with 29-
and then 40-note fiorature, vented from the keyboard as if sung in a single
breath.
A similar principle is at work in the posthumously-published Lento con gran espressione. In the arias that bookend the central medley of quotations from the F minor Concerto, the vocal register once again lies mostly within Sontag’s range, with the exception of bars 14 and 48, which add an additional octave whilst still paying homage to what Chopin admired most: Sontag’s non-plus-ultra diminuendi.
In the eight-bar coda that concludes the work, a series of fiorature rise and fall above a static harmonic progression that alternates between the tonic minor and half-diminished seventh chords. The second 35-note fioratura is enchantingly silvery on the 1846 Pleyel, as are measures 15 and 48, which transcend the vocal range. In all cases, the slight after-sound of the dampers adds a ‘veiled’ quality to the diminuendi as the scales fall back down to earth.
In the Nocturne in B flat minor, Op. 9 No. 1, the ‘silvery’ register of the Pleyel sounds right from the very first note, quickly descending into the veiled, velvety sonorities of García’s mezzo-soprano ‘head register’. Each chromatic variant blankets the harmonic texture like a perfume: tiny beads of mist are visible in the air for just a moment, before they dissolve into the ether.
When temperatures are cold enough to permit it, the human breath emits a transparent vapour that, like mist or fog, is silvery. In measures 78–83 of the Barcarolle, Chopin furnishes the airy melodic line with the hitherto unused directive dolce sfogato. The past participle of the Italian verb sfogare (‘to give vent to’, ‘to let out’), the term was used to describe specialists of the bel canto repertoire possessing a rare combination of ‘beautiful tone, a wide range, dramatic ability, and flexibility’. There is something essential in Chopin’s use of the sfogato term in the Barcarolle to its execution: it cannot be played, it must be breathed. Chopin exploits both the silvery and the veiled registers of the Pleyel in order to atomize, if only for a moment, some of the exquisite air vented by the soprani sfogati.
Like the topos of dreaming, the moon and its light have been an enduring source of fascination for writers, poets, painters, and composers since time immemorial. The moon also played a defining role in the vocal serenade, wherein the presence of moonlight was a constant auditor of musical solicitations of romance.
It is worth revisiting Schubert’s immortal ‘Ständchen’ from Schwanengesang as the archetypical example here, set to the poetry of Ludwig Rellstab. Present in the text are three tropes relevant to our discussion of Chopin: moonlight, nightingales, and ‘silvery notes’.
When Liszt and Montal described the tone of Pleyel’s pianos as ‘silvery’, they were drawing on a vast literary tradition which continued well into the twentieth century: a tradition that consistently used the adjective to evoke moonlight, reflections, unrequited love, the ephemeral, the ethereal and the unattainable. To ascribe a piano with these qualities was to mark it with a status of considerable poetic distinction.
And although we find nothing in Chopin’s correspondence in relation to Pleyel pianos themselves sounding ‘silvery’, there is one passage – familiar to all Chopinologists – that stands out for its atypical disclosure of extra-musical stimuli, where the composer describes the ‘Romance’ from his E minor Concerto as ‘a sort of pondering during a beautiful springtime, but under moonlight.’
The admission probably owes its existence to an awareness of the serenade genre, and a particularly Romantic sensibility. And whilst Chopin may have been writing about the orchestration rather than the tone of his piano, it is impossible to ignore the similarity of the ‘nasal, silvery tone’ of his violin accompaniment to the ‘slightly veiled, silvery sonorousness’ Liszt later ascribed to Chopin’s Pleyel.
In 1838, Chopin set Stefan Witwicki’s poem Wiosna (WN 52) to music. In the text, a lark (instead of a nightingale) sings its ‘silv’ry music’, spiralling ‘ever upward’ until it is ‘lost to vision mortal’. Fourteen years later, in 1852, Berlioz gave a description of Henriette Sontag that is eerily similar to the last three lines of Witwicki’s Wiosna:
On she carols, higher and higher, like a lark at ‘heaven’s gate’, so soft, so clear, so wonderfully distinct that, like the silver bell from the altar, is heard through the pealing organ.
Both Berlioz and Witwicki surely must have known Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, or at least been familiar with the famous line ‘Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate’. It is not necessary to establish a precise confirmation of textual allusion here to note the curious similarities between Witwicki’s poem and Berlioz’s account of Sontag: both invoke the image of the lark as a symbol of transcendence, and both describe the high register of its ‘carol’ by resorting to the colour silver.
Although Chopin’s playing was, to my knowledge, never likened to the song of a lark, there are at least three instances where his contemporaries invoked an even more densely-layered textural allusion: the nightingale. The most famous representation of Chopin as a nightingale comes from George Sand’s Impressions et Souvenirs (1873): a beautifully evocative account of a night in January 1841 in which Eugène Delacroix, Adam Mickiewicz, Sand and her son Maurice discuss line, colour and reflection while Chopin improvises at the piano.
The yearning for summer and the song of a nightingale is fulfilled over a year later in a letter from Delacroix dated 7 June 1842, where the conditions at Sand’s Nohant estate are described with a poetry bordering on the sublime:
Every now and then there wafts through your window, opening on to the garden, a breath of the music of Chopin, who is at work in his room, and it mingles with the song of the nightingales and the scent of the roses.
Note how ‘the music of Chopin’ is described as ‘a breath’, and the garden is sketched with evocative immediacy via the fragrance of its flowers. Embedded in Delacroix’s description is a miraculous confluence of poetic tropes, containing within them many layers of meaning. As David Kasunic has observed, Sand subscribed to the literary tradition of associating the nightingale with tragedy and lament: the nightingale is the surrogate voice of the voiceless Philomela, who is transfigured into the bird in Sophocles’ Tereus and Ovid’s Metamorphoses after being raped and mutilated by her sister’s husband, Tereus.
Kasunic
has also pointed out Sand’s affinity for the Roman poet Virgil: in the fourth
book of Georgics, Orpheus’s lament is compared to the lament of the
nightingale, who plays a central role in the epic poem.
For Sand and many others, the song of the nightingale was also a harbinger of
death, and the poignancy of John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale – written two
years before the poet expired from tuberculosis – would not have been lost on
her. The notion of a nightingale embodying a sense of imminent departure was
also evidently well understood by Robert Schumann.
‘I would like to sing myself to death like a nightingale,’ he wrote in 1840 to his new wife Clara, during the composition of his Liederkreis, Op. 39. ‘Nachtigallen’ appear in no less than three of the twelve songs in Liederkreis, including Nos. 8, 9 and 12, and in Nos. 2 and 8 of Dichterliebe, Op. 48, which was dedicated to Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient.
Another
significant attribute of the nightingale’s song is the frequent separation of
sound from source. This separation is present in both Sand’s account and in
Delacroix’s, where Chopin’s playing (and the song of the nightingale) wafts
through his open window like a perfume.
The inability to connect a visual source with its corresponding aural output
was a defining part of the ethereal mystery of the bird, and a characteristic
that dovetails rather neatly with descriptions of Chopin’s Pleyel representing
both the Aeolian harp and the glass harmonica. As Percy Bysshe Shelley so
memorably put it in A Defense of Poetry:
‘A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.’
Invented in London by Benjamin Franklin in 1761, the glass harmonica was perhaps the most ethereal of all instruments, and achieved tremendous popularity in the later decades of the eighteenth century, before slowly receding into obscurity around the time Chopin arrived in Paris in the early 1830s. The instrument consists of an array of spinning glass bowls – arranged from the largest on the left to the smallest on the right – nested within each other. As Annette Richards writes, this configuration creates a ‘virtual keyboard’ that is ‘translucent, glittering and rainbow-coloured’. Sound is produced by manipulating the pressure on the glass with wet fingertips, and as such an extraordinary degree of dynamic nuance is possible.
A large part of the glass harmonica’s mystical aura was due to the inability of listeners to determine the beginning of its sound: with the requisite control of a skilled player, the ethereal tones emerged ‘with no beginning, possessing no trace of physical origin.’ They likewise faded into oblivion – a ‘sonic manifestation of a return to nothingness’, an ‘uncanny representation in sound of death itself’, to quote Richards again – qualities that bring to mind the extraordinary sequence of ever-diminishing dynamics in the coda of Chopin’s Mazurka in B flat minor, Op. 24 No. 4.
The inability to locate the origin of the sound, coupled with its extreme tactility, range of dynamic nuance, and otherworldly, celestial tone were qualities that must have sprung to Liszt’s mind when he suggested the Pleyel sound was akin to ‘the marriage of crystal and water’.
That the glass harmonica just happened to be the instrument best suited to capturing the ghostly voice of Philomela was not a coincidence, and Liszt certainly would have been cognizant of the nightingale’s symbolic significance. I suggest that the glass harmonica and the nightingale were, as metonyms for a Pleyel piano, different names for the same thing.
In a YouTube video posted in 2022, Paul McNulty talks about the process of restringing Chopin’s last 1848 Pleyel for the Chopin Institute in December 2021, an instrument McNulty described as being ‘in a miraculous state of preservation’.
A curious detail about this Pleyel is the fact that the grain of the soundboard runs perpendicular (90 degrees) to the strings, validating the Claude Montal passage quoted at the beginning of this paper. This goes a long way toward helping us understand why this instrument – and so many others like it – sound ‘silvery’.
After replacing the anachronistic modern strings with historically appropriate wire (‘like taking army boots off a balerina and putting slippers on’), McNulty noted that the instrument now ‘speaks like crazy. It is the world’s finest piano treble: the top end of Chopin’s last Pleyel is the best treble I’ve ever heard.’
If a
nightingale’s song is silvery, and so too the equivalent register on a Pleyel,
then Chopin’s Pleyel would have had the triple distinction of being at once
piano, poet and nightingale.
And like Shelley’s skylark and Keats’s nightingale, the silver sounds of
Chopin’s Pleyel were heard as the winged messengers of a death foretold: if the
song of the nightingale announced the imminence of death, then the silvery
sound of Chopin’s Pleyel provided an ideal medium through which this imminence
could be transmitted, resulting – as Kasunic has already eloquently pointed out
– in a kind of ‘swan song’.
We should not be surprised, then, to find the ‘silvery notes’ of a nightingale singing by moonlight in Rellstab’s text for ‘Ständchen’ from Schubert’s Swan Song. We should also not be surprised that the swan of an anonymous poem set to music by Orlando Gibbons in 1612 was – how could it not be? – silver:
The silver Swan, who, living, had no Note,
when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
thus sang her first and last, and sang no more:
‘Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes!
More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.’
* * * * * * * * * * *
[Link describing the McNulty restoration of Chopin's final piano in Warsaw]
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