Music: 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.