波兰——肖邦之魂

MARIAN MARZYNSKI: [voice-over] For the first half of my life, I lived in Poland. I spent another half of it in America. After the fall of communism, I have returned here many times, reporting on the emerging Polish democracy. This time, it's not politics that brings me to Warsaw, it is Chopin.

Like every child growing up in Poland, I was raised with this sound. Frederic Chopin is a Polish legend woven into the Polish fabric, not only to its culture, but its history and politics.

Every five years, hundreds of pianists from around the world come to this music hall in Warsaw for the Chopin International Piano Competition. I am in a musical temple. The great Chopin is the highest priest in this temple. Here young pianists aspire to achieve their own priesthood.

When I lived in Poland, many times I have sat in this hall, imagining what it must feel like to be on this stage.

Hisaki Kawamoto, one of 800 who signed up, survived the first round of elimination. She discovered Chopin in Japan. When she plays the "Minute Waltz," she tells me, she sees all the planet's animals dancing.

BEN KIM: And so the tempo of my march comes from two- two different places. First is the beginning- the end of my second movement, which is- [demonstrates]

MARIAN MARZYNSKI: This is Ben Kim, born of Korean parents who moved to New York, where he studies at the Juilliard School of Music. He plays the competition's obligatory sonata, of which one part is known as the Funeral March. It gives me goose bumps.

I ask another pianist to play it for me. Eighteen-year-old Andrei Yaroshinski came from Moscow with his mother.

MOTHER: [subtitles] I have strange feelings about this music. I see the light. At some point, there is no more fear. There is still grief over the departed, but I see that there is light after death.

MARIAN MARZYNSKI: In my youth, whenever a Soviet communist leader passed away - and there were many of them - all of Poland was listening to this march for days and days. Chopin wrote it in Paris. When Polish culture was suppressed by the 19th century Russian occupiers, young Chopin was exiled in France, the country of his father. He never returned to Poland.

Every Chopin competition is marked by the commemoration of his death. Chopin died at the age 38 in Paris and was buried there, but his heart was removed from his body and placed here in this Warsaw church.

Although he was half French, the critics say his music comes from his broken Polish heart. One of them tells me that he was too Polish to even speak good French, and that the unique signature of his music is grief. This nostalgia is in everything he wrote, says the critic.

[on camera] [subtitles] A grief over Poland?

STANISLAW DEMBOWSKI, Music Critic: [subtitles] It is a grief of the soul, not a physical one.

MARIAN MARZYNSKI: [subtitles] So the soul is missing something.

STANISLAW DEMBOWSKI: [subtitles] Yes, something.

MARIAN MARZYNSKI: [subtitles] A lost love?

STANISLAW DEMBOWSKI: [subtitles] No, he left Poland and misses it.

MARIAN MARZYNSKI: [subtitles] So it's all about Poland?

STANISLAW DEMBOWSKI: [subtitles] Yes, he loves Poland.

MARIAN MARZYNSKI: [subtitles] But doesn't he miss a woman he once loved?

STANISLAW DEMBOWSKI: [subtitles] This is possible, but it is too intimate.

ANNOUNCER: I would like to congratulate and send good wishes to those pianists who did not qualify for the second round-

MARIAN MARZYNSKI: [voice-over] After two weeks of competition, the field has been reduced to 32. Whoever wins these Chopin Olympics will launch a worldwide performing career. But how can one decide who plays Chopin better and who plays it worse?

To figure this out, I enlisted an insider, a man whom I saw win this competition 50 years ago. Now he sits among 18 jurors. "The whole idea is to be light, like playing it for the first time," says Adam Harasiewicz, the famous Polish pianist.

ADAM HARASIEWICZ, Juror: [subtitles] It should sound like it is improvised. If Chopin is played academically - like this goes first, this goes second - then Chopin is not alive and his truth will not come out.

MARIAN MARZYNSKI: "What if they hit the wrong key?" I ask him. "If someone plays beautifully," he answers, "who cares about a false note?"

Meeting Austrian Ingolf Wunder, one of the stars of the competition, I conclude that you don't have to be Polish to have Chopin's touch. Tomorrow, he will be eliminated from the competition. Harasiewicz will blame his fellow jurors for this overlooking.

"The jurors were being petty," says Adam Harasiewicz, and admits that while listening to his own winning performance from 1955, he found many technical mistakes. "Wunder was criticized for playing his Chopin's Grand Polonaise, too fast," he says. "Indeed, there were some double tones, first going up and becoming forte, and then coming down and sounding pianissimo"

ADAM HARASIEWICZ: [subtitles] -but when he played those notes, it was heavenly. It was like a knife to my heart. He filled me with ecstasy. It enchanted me.

MARIAN MARZYNSKI: Harasiewicz hopes that before the competition is over, another Wunder will appear.

Will this be Takashi Yamamoto, who left Japan and moved to Poland to study piano? Chopin is admired in Japan, and the parents who can afford it send their gifted children to Poland for Chopin immersion. Yamamoto's teacher is one of the jurors. But according to the competition rules, he won't be allowed to judge his own student.

One Polish pianist even looks like Chopin. Janusz Olejniczak, who won a prize in one of the previous competitions, is now in the jury. What does he think about this Japanese invasion?

JANUSZ OLEJNICZAK, Juror: [subtitles] Having a tradition of industrial espionage, of making better cars, better pianos, now they dig into Chopin's soul. They used to play like machines, but now they can really move us. They read a lot, listen to our music. They're after our secrets, which we didn't even know existed.

MARIAN MARZYNSKI: Twelve pianists made it to the finale of the 15th International Frederic Chopin Piano Competition. Now, before playing one of Chopin's piano concertos, each of them will rehearse with the orchestra. Nine of the twelve come from Asia, one is from Russia and two from Poland.

With such a great cult of Chopin, why in 75 years of the competition have there only been three Polish winners? In my times in Poland, Chopin was political, like everything else in culture, and the rumors were that it was easier for a non-Pole to win. The communist government liked to make the foreign winner its cultural ambassador, to improve Polish standing in the world. But perhaps it is also because Poles are too overwhelmed by the genius of their compatriot and get jitters on the stage.

This year, Rafal Blechacz is Poland's hope. Coming from a small Polish town, he was unknown in Warsaw. I wanted to interview him, but he would disappear after each of the previous rounds, going home for more practice.

[www.pbs.org: Read an interview with the filmmaker]

Next day, the moment of truth will arrive. For the Warsaw's cultural "who's who," the music hall is the place to be. I imagine the emotions of those 12 who were once 800.

Takashi Yamamoto is one of the favorites. His teacher is as nervous as he is.

PIOTR PALECZNY, Juror: [subtitles] I am very satisfied. He is an extraordinary young man- gifted, full of talent and sensitivity.

JOSE FERNANDEZ, Music Critic: Yamamoto's a machine. He's outstanding. The man- if you give him- he's fantastic! He's fantastic! But he still doesn't have the heart, I think. That's my opinion.

MARIAN MARZYNSKI: What kind of sensitivity, I wonder, is behind every pianist's decision to hit the keyboard with a specific force, to apply a specific tempo, to control the quality of this irresistible music that fills me with the emotions of joy and sorrow, love and fear, and makes me contemplate the beauty of the order?

Rafal Blechacz is on the stage. "It is all about inspiration," my man in the jury said, and suddenly it feels like the entire Music Hall is inspired. His concerto in E-minor wins the hearts of the public and the jury, the first Polish winner in 30 years. The new prince of Chopin music will reign for the next five years, until the next competition. And Rafal Blechacz gives his victory concert.

[www.pbs.org: More about the winner]

Among the previous Polish winners, only one stayed in the country. The other two emigrated to the West. But now Poland is part of the democratic Europe, and the world of music is borderless. To this world, Chopin's heart is Poland's special gift.

ANNOUNCER: Finally tonight, a grass roots technology makes pumping water fun.

TREVOR FIELD: If we could put a thousand pumps in each country that's water-stressed, we'd make a monster difference.

South Africa: Play Pump
Reporter: Amy Costello

AMY COSTELLO: [voice-over] In many parts of the world, it is impossible to find clean drinking water, especially here in South Africa, where some five million people have no access to safe water. But one man is trying to do something about it.

TREVOR FIELD, Social Entrepreneur: We're going towards an area called Stinkwater. It's a lovely name. And it's obviously an Afrikaans name. And the reason why it's called Stinkwater is because the water stinks.

AMY COSTELLO: Trevor Field is obsessed with solving South Africa's water problems. He took me to Stinkwater to show me what he's up against. Here people get their water from leaky, contaminated hand pumps. And the work involved is exhausting.

[on camera] How's that feel, Trev?

TREVOR FIELD: Hey, man, you don't need to go to a gym, hey? You can cancel your subscription to Virgin Active. You just do this for a couple of hours a day, and every day.

AMY COSTELLO: [voice-over] Once they've pumped the water, women still have to walk long distances back home, carrying water on their heads or in wheelbarrows. Each container weighs about 40 pounds.

TREVOR FIELD: You try picking one up. Those are full.

AMY COSTELLO: [on camera] Yeah, that's heavy.

TREVOR FIELD: OK. Now put it on your head. Off you go. Now, the amount of time that these women are burning up just collecting water, when they should be in their homes, looking after their kids, teaching the children, just being loving mothers, you know, what women should be doing, not beasts of burden.

Hi, guys.

WOMEN: Hello.

TREVOR FIELD: How are you doing?

AMY COSTELLO: [voice-over] Trevor's an entrepreneur who made his money in the advertising business, and at the age of 42 decided he wanted to give something back. He teamed up with an inventor, and the Roundabout Outdoor Play Pump was born.

[www.pbs.org: More about this social entrepreneur]

TREVOR FIELD: Yeah, so what happens is, as the kids spin here - and it doesn't matter which direction they go, it works in both directions - water is pumped from an underground bull hole, comes across here underground, into this part. And not only can you hear the water going into the pump, you can actually feel that it's getting very cold.

AMY COSTELLO: [on camera] Cold, yeah.

TREVOR FIELD: And then from there, there's an outlet pipe and it goes across to that tap. When you turn it on, you just get cold, clean, fresh drinking water coming out of there.

AMY COSTELLO: [voice-over] The play pump costs only $7,000 to install and can pump up to 400 gallons an hour. Trevor installs most play pumps at schools, where jungle gyms and swing sets are rare. The principal says it's a hit.

PRINCIPAL: First time when they arrive at school in the morning, the first child who comes in goes to the wheel, dumps his book or a book and comes to the wheel until the bell rings. They enjoy playing here. [laughs]

SCHOOLGIRL: I felt so impressed and I appreciated it. Me and my friends were just running. Even though the teacher called us, we didn't listen to him. We just ran to the merry-go-round. There were no toys at school that we could play with, so I thought this merry-go-round, we could play with it and have some fun.

AMY COSTELLO: [on camera] And what?

SCHOOLGIRL: Some fun. [laughs]

AMY COSTELLO: [on camera] It's fun, and the water's better, too.

[on camera] So this used to be your drinking supply?

PATRICIA MAHOLE, Teacher: Yes.

AMY COSTELLO: This is where you drink water from?

PATRICIA MAHOLE: Yes.

AMY COSTELLO: OK. So what do we have here?

[voice-over] Patricia Mahole, a teacher, says for years, they never realized the groundwater here was polluted.

PATRICIA MAHOLE: We thought it was safe. But the kids used to get diarrhea, you see, and vomit, get sick.

AMY COSTELLO: The play pump changed everything by drawing clean water from deep underground.

PATRICIA MAHOLE: We used to stay here for nearly the whole day and night and go to sleep very late, looking at this pump, playing there, looking at the kids when they played there. It was just a nice thing.

AMY COSTELLO: Trevor sells ad space on the water tanks and uses the money for maintenance to keep the play pumps working. And then he had another idea.

[on camera] What is this?

TREVOR FIELD: Oh, this is the Love Life campaign. This is an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign. This is a focal point of the community, so my idea was that if we put messages for HIV/AIDS awareness, it should have the same effect on these kids. And we've got to get the message through to them before they become sexually active. That's the way I see it.

AMY COSTELLO: Trevor invited us along as a new play pump was installed in the eastern Cape, in a remote rural village. When we arrived, the taps had been dry for a week. The play pump can transform a place like this, giving enough drinking water for 2,500 people.

And with only seven men and a day's work, the pump was ready to go. And it didn't take long for the kids to show up.

Trevor wants to expand beyond South Africa and bring the play pump to neighboring countries.

TREVOR FIELD: If we could put a thousand pumps in each country that's water-stressed, we'd make a monster difference to rural water supplies.

AMY COSTELLO: The World Bank recognized the play pump as one of the best new grass roots technologies. And these days, Trevor is busy raising the funds to fulfill his dream.

TREVOR FIELD: It's a big operation to put a thousand pumps in any country, but it would make a major difference to the children on the ground. And that's where our passion lies, is to make a difference to the kids, because the kids are the future.

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