THE CHO MUST GO ON

The Chopin Competition – known as the 'Olympic Games of the piano' - takes place every five years in Warsaw. Here, novelist Richard Mason explains how the composer's music teaches important lessons, and is needed more than ever

- Richard Mason

I remember where I was, what I was eating and what I was reading the first time I heard Chopin’s Nocturne in C Minor, Op 48 No. 1. It was the early 1990s. Simply Red, Kylie and PM Dawn dominated the airwaves - but something about this extraordinary piece of music landed in my prefrontal cortex and ignited a lifelong love affair with the soundtrack of a vanished age.

Except for a handful of my closest friends and a few (but not all) members of my immediate family, Fryderyk Chopin is the human being for whose existence I am most grateful. Learning his music, attempting to decipher the mass of notes on the page, to use my body to unleash the beauty that poured in such torrents from him (he was only 39 when he died) has given me a respite from every sadness and taught me much of what I know about joy.

Every piece, even the simplest, is a work of genius. I do not presume to conquer them, much less to achieve perfection – and there are compositions, like the Ballade in F Minor (Op 52 number 4) that I have been working on for a decade and of which I can still only play five pages.

The destination doesn't matter with Chopin, all that matters is the journey. And that journey has taken me to the very centre of the piano world: the Chopin Competition, which has taken place every five years in the concert hall of the Warsaw Philharmonic for nearly a century. Not for nothing is it called the “Olympic Games of the piano”.

Hunger Games would be more accurate. Even to enter, you must have conquered the complete repertoire – because each finalist must play an entire piano concerto with the Warsaw Philharmonic.