The Reception of Chopin – the Poet of the Piano – and his Music in Taiwan. An initial assessment, based on a questionnaire for choir singers

Abstract

Although the popularity of Chopin and his music in East Asia is a well-known phenomenon, we know quite little about how exactly Asian people understand and listen to Chopin’s music. This article aims to show the general situation of the reception of Chopin and his music in Taiwan by examining three different aspects. Presented in the first part are the results of a questionnaire about Taiwanese choir singers’ impressions of Chopin and his music and their experience of listening to excerpts of four different compositions by the composer, while the second part deals with the cultural image of Chopin in Taiwanese books, textbooks and film. The results suggest that the designation ‘poet of the piano’ plays an integral role in Chopin reception in Taiwan. In order to understand how Taiwanese people’s understanding of beauty in poetry can affect their understanding of Chopin’s music, an aesthetic category called yijing, frequently used in literary and art criticism in Taiwan, is introduced in the last part of the article. It seems that the epithet ‘poet of the piano’ encourages Taiwanese people to understand Chopin’s works according to yijing (by seeing imaginary scenes and feeling the expression, they experience the deeper beauty and meaning of the music) and to associate them with poetry representative of that aesthetic category. Moreover, the Taiwanese tend to perceive Chopin’s music as lyrical and sentimental and to consider such qualities as characteristic of his oeuvre.