Variations on Two Fingers

Little Gania Borodin had a favor to ask of her famous father: Could she play a duet with him on the piano? Russian Composer Alexander Borodin beamed--it was news to him that his little girl could play at all. But he listened while she picked out "Chopsticks" with a finger of each hand. Fascinated, he began to improvise a ten-finger accompaniment in the bass while she pecked.

Later, Borodin wrote a funeral march and a mazurka around the tune, which he called the Coteletten Polka* and proudly showed the pieces to his musical friends. Rimsky-Korsakov promptly added several variations; other composer friends chipped in too, and before long there were 16 paraphrases. All were written for piano duet, the lower part for a skilled player, the upper for two fingers. In 1879, when the collection was published, Liszt got a copy, and added a paraphrase of his own.

U.S. music lovers can now hear the paraphrases on the immemorial "Chopsticks," or Tati-Tati, as it later was called, performed by full orchestra. Alfred Frankenstein, music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, had a copy of the paraphrases, suggested to Conductor Werner Janssen that he orchestrate it. Columbia Records heard about it, suggested a recording with Janssen conducting the Columbia Symphony. A little research revealed that half of the paraphrases had already been orchestrated, under the title Tati-Tati, by a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov's, Nicolai Tcherepnine. Columbia put Tcherepnine's version on one side of an LP disc, Janssen's on the other.

Tati-Tati is no long-lost masterpiece, but with Gania Borodin's appealing little theme blown, bowed and bonged in a dozen modes and moods, it has plenty of charm. Like Papa Borodin's own Prince Igor, it could make some choreographer a first-rate ballet score.

* Coteletten (now spelled with a K) was German for the French cotelettes, meaning cutlets--or chops.

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