Two Perspectives on the Music of Fryderyk Chopin from the 1920s: Lucien Bourguès and Alexandre Denéréaz (1921) and Leonid L. Sabaneev (1925–1927)

This article explores two different perspectives on Chopin’s music from the 1920s – those of Lucien Bourguès and Alexandre Denéréaz, on one hand, and Leonid Sabaneev, on the other. The former approach displays a psychological character, so it is descriptive and focusses on such aspects as the expression and symbolic content of a work, while the latter studies the work primarily as a system of proportions, thereby constituting a form of mathematical poetics. Ostensibly confrontational, these scholarly standpoints actually represent elements in a bigger, all-embracing system of phenomenological thought which characterised that period in cultural history.