Review: Hershey Felder Imagines Chopin’s Last Piano Lesson in Monsieur Chopin

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, into the salon of Fryderyk Chopin, where you will all be students to the great 19th-century Polish composer, giving what will be one of the last lessons he’ll give before his death in 1849. That’s the setup for Monsieur Chopin, the latest solo show from Hershey Felder to get a theatrical run in New York. Felder has created a cottage industry of sorts with this kind of biographical show about composers, with previous subjects including George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Leonard Bernstein. As with those other shows, Monsieur Chopin is as much lecture and concert as it is a play. Also like those shows, it tends to be stronger as a work of education than theater.

Even the setup for Monsieur Chopin is clumsy: What exactly are we in the audience students of, if none of us are actually learning to either play the piano or write compositions? No, it’s merely a pretext for Chopin (played by Felder himself) to recount his short but trailblazing life, with lighting designer Erik S. Barry bathing Felder’s own spare scenic design in reflective chiaroscuro shades to add to the twilight context. From his birth in a small village near Warsaw to his earliest compositions and public concerts at age 7, and from the discovery of his distaste for public concerts in Paris to his tempestuous romance with French writer George Sand, Felder covers the major biographical high (and low) points.

Felder’s not just interested in Chopin’s life, but in how it informed the music he composed. According to him, it was the untimely death of Chopin’s beloved sister Emilia that eventually inspired the famous funeral march in his Second Piano Sonata, while his Grande valse brillante expresses some of the scorn he felt about the upper-class folk for which he performed in salons. Like a lively college professor, Felder-as-Chopin breaks down his interpretation of some of these works while performing them on the piano. At other points, he’s content to let a piece speak for itself by playing it straight through. You only need to know about Chopin’s consistent sense of homesickness toward his native Poland to appreciate the nationalistic fervor in his Military Polonaise, just as the melancholy infusing the dance steps of his final composition, the Mazurka Op. 68, No. 4, needs little elaboration.

All of this will be catnip to classical-music aficionados who’ll find in Monsieur Chopin some fresh ways of appreciating works they thought they knew well. For others less versed in Chopin’s life and art, Felder’s show offers a reasonable introduction. Those who are expecting a well-crafted theatrical experience, though, may find the experience rather wanting. As engaging as he is as a teacher and pianist, Felder is a bland thespian, without the kind of immersive intensity and force of personality that distinguishes the greatest solo performances. Monsieur Chopin isn’t really much of a play, either. When Felder goes so far as to include two Q&A sessions with the audience to push the show up to two hours (no intermission), the show’s didactic intent seems resoundingly clear. Directors Joel Zwick and Trevor Hay do little to ameliorate this impression, with Erik Carstensen’s video designs — blown-up archival photographs, painting reproductions, and all — offering little more than slideshow-like illustrations.

That said, it’s during those Q&A sessions that Felder drops some of his choicest bits of info: Chopin’s alternating disdain for and envy of fellow piano virtuoso Franz Liszt’s flashiness; as well as his irritation at how some works, like his Fantaisie-Impromptu, have become popular even though he forbade them to be published. (The fact that the play’s setup is supposed to be that of his final salon lesson in 1848, thus making such knowledge on Chopin’s part impossible in the moment, defies explanation.) The thoroughness of Felder’s knowledge of his subject is certainly easy to admire. So is his pianistic prowess. In general, Felder proves to be a solid interpreter of Chopin’s music, with rubato — a stylistic trait of slightly varying tempos for expressive effect that Chopin pioneered in the performance of his music — applied with sensitivity and restraint. Felder’s musical interpretations are impressive enough that you may wish you were merely watching a straight-up Chopin recital instead of this intermittently fascinating but overall half-baked music-appreciation class posing as theater.