“Etude Op. 10, No. 1″ By Chopin Is On Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox – A Must See Performance

Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox

Biggest Influence on My Music – The jukebox. I lived beside jukeboxes all through the fifties. … I never knew who was singing. I never followed things that way. I still don’t. I wasn’t a student of music; I was a student of the restaurant I was in — and the waitresses. The music was a part of it. I knew what number the song was.

- Leonard Cohen (Yakety Yak by Scott Cohen, 1994)

Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox: Over the years, Leonard Cohen has mentioned a handful of specific songs he favors. Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox is a Heck Of A Guy feature that began collecting these tunes for the edification and entertainment of viewers on April 4, 2009. All posts in the Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox series can be found at the Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox Page.

Chopin Breaks Into Leonard Cohen’s Top Ten

The fourth entry on Leonard Cohen’s Top Ten Songs of 1988, a listing found in “Leonard Cohen – In Eigenen Worten” (In His Own Words) by Jim Devlin, is Chopin’s “Etude Op.10 No. 1 in C.”

The description of this piece offered by Wikipedia follows:

Étude Op. 10, No.1 in C major, composed by Frédéric Chopin, is a technical study in reach and arpeggios for the piano. It also focuses on stretching the fingers. Sometimes it is known as the “Waterfall” étude. It was composed in 1829, and first published in 1833, in France, Germany, and England. In a prefatory note to the 1916 Schirmer edition the American music critic James Huneker (1857–1921) compared the “hypnotic charm” that these “dizzy acclivities and descents exercise for eye as well as ear” to the frightening staircases in Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s prints of the Carceri d’invenzione.

After viewing a performance of this piece, I offer this description:

Scary

Watch this.

Chopin’s Etude Op10 No.1 Performed By Valentina Lisitsa

Video from ValentinaLisitsa

Credit Due Department: Florian earns a tip of the Heck Of A Guy fedora for submitting the reference from “Leonard Cohen – In Eigenen Worten” (In His Own Words) by Jim Devlin, which includes Leonard Cohen’s Top Ten songs of 1988.¹

1. Of the several members of LeonardCohenForum who responded to my request for help in finding instances of Leonard Cohen favoring a specific song performed by a specific artist, Florian was far and away the most prolific. [↩]