Just a few weeks ago I was asked to give my thoughts on Chopin on Front Row, that lively arts programme on Radio 4 in advance of the Chopin weekend on Radio 3. I ruminated on creative artists, looking down posthumously from whatever vantage point they occupy (even if this is entirely hypothetical), who without any doubt would like to have a big say about their post-mortem reputation, and, oh yes, make a few extra bob on some ‘everlasting’ royalties. A wit once quipped that he did not want to see himself as others saw him, as if he did he would become impossibly vain. But a good many dead composers, observing their shifting reputations and the uses to which their music is put, would undoubtedly be anything from surprised to miffed to outright angry.

Chopin is a case in point. Many stories about him have developed since his death, but so they did during his reclusive life. His music, too, has been used, understood and heard in some remarkable ways. Every piano student, from eight to eighty (as they say), learns works by Chopin, just as their mothers and grandmothers did before them. That music stool has been crammed with editions of the preludes, anthologies of easy pieces, waltzes and mazurkas for well nigh 150 years. So well known have some pieces become that Chopin’s authorship is almost obscured. Ask a grim-faced group of mourners watching a gun-carriage carrying the body of a fallen hero to his final rest who wrote that ‘oh so familiar’ march that the band is playing, and many of them would show their minds as blank as an Anne-baited contestant on the ‘Weakest Link’. ‘Well’, Chopin, might say by way of consoling himself, ‘at least they knew my music even if they couldn’t remember me.’

But the funeral march is just the most famous example of Chopin masquerading as ‘anon’. Barry Manilow’s song ‘Could it be magic’ begins with the imposing chords of Chopin’s C minor prelude, and Judy Garland’s ‘I’m chasing rainbows’ from Ziegfeld’s Follies is lifted straight from the slow section (the big D flat tune) of the Fantasie-Impromptu – the bit not-so-advanced pianists jump too when they are disheartened by not being able to master all those rapid counter-rhythms in the C# minor opening! Here I think Chopin might be annoyed and have already rung his celestial agent to sue as the acknowledgements for the Garland song credits Harry Carroll and Joseph McCarthy as the composers: no mention of poor old Chopin.

Publishers are some of the worst at ‘creating’ reputations, especially for pieces. Faced with a simple prelude in A major, no publisher is happy until he has ‘upped’ its ‘market potentiality’ by ‘branding’ it ‘the Raindrop’, obviously targeting the ‘twin-set and pearls’ market! And others, anxious to increase Poland’s chances for gold in the Olympics, have dubbed a perfectly decent two-minute waltz ‘the minute’. Perhaps if you can play it in a minute the musical drugs police should check whether you’re on nandralone or ‘speed’.

As Chopin’s publicists have been telling us for a long time now, (so it has acquired truth by repetition - a common musico-historical disease), everything he composed was inspired by the highest ideas: old Johnny-head-in-the-clouds was our Frederick - sorry, Frédéric, don’t you know, or Fryderyk, for those in the know. Oh what a disappointment to learn that the ‘minute’ was inspired by a dog chasing its tail, and that the publishers actually meant the waltz to be called the ‘very small’. Somehow it wouldn’t be quite the same thing if Nicholas Parsons, listing the opening credits to ‘Just a minute’, said, ‘that was Chopin’s waltz ‘the Chihuahua chasing its tail.’’

Oscar Wilde once joked that there is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. So Chopin should at least be happy that his memory is secure not only through his music, but in several other ways. An enterprising Polish company now manufactures a delicious potato vodka under the name ‘Chopin Vodka’. Chopin might be best pleased that his posthumous reputation is safe with the youth of tomorrow as a Japanese company have invented a role-playing game called ‘Eternal Sonata’ (is that an indication of how long it takes to play? It makes Monopoly seem perfunctory!). In it Chopin, on his deathbed, dreams of a fictional world of two kingdoms, Forte and Baroque, who are at war with each other. A young girl called Polka has a terminal illness, the side effect of which is the ability to perform magic. She, Chopin, and two orphans they meet - called Allegretto and Beat - eventually join forces with a resistance group trying to overthrow Count Waltz. Other characters appear such as Largo, Falsetto, Jazz, Salsa (a name redolent with Chopin connections, especially after his famous trip to Cuba to see Castro, hence the neophyte Chopinista, Falsetto – oh well the game is meant to be a dream). If you don’t believe me you can find a trailer for the game on You Tube or find out more on Wikipedia. That is if you have a mind for it. But remember Statler’s great reply to Waldorf in The Muppet Show. Statler: ‘This show is awful. I’ve half a mind to leave.’ Waldorf. ‘If you had half a mind, you wouldn’t be here in the first place.’

And now to flit off to Chopin-land on the wings of the Butterfly study.

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