In Search of Chopin

Alfred Cortot

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486316352
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

`Altogether, a sensitive and tasteful document.` — Library Journal
A series of themed essays rather than a traditional biography, this profile of the Polish composer and virtuoso pianist is the work of a legendary conductor and performer. Alfred Cortot taught at the Paris Conservatory of Music, co-founded the École Normale de Musique de Paris, and produced printed versions of the complete works of Chopin, Schumann, and Debussy. In these revealing chronicles, Cortot focuses on Chopin's compositions as well as his performances and personal relationships.
Beginning with an account of the composer's physical characteristics, the book examines Chopin's role as a teacher; his works, as reflected by his correspondence; his identity as a Polish nationalist and his attitude toward France; and his concert performances. It further explores his friendships with Liszt and Delacroix and his romance with George Sand, as well as the composer's chronic illness and the expression of his tormented, sensitive nature in his music.

CHAPTER I

SOME PORTRAITS

Height five feet seven inches, a round chin, an oval face, a medium-sized mouth. These details are contained in a passport issued to Chopin in Paris on 7th July, 1837. In this same document his parentage is stated to be French. He had accompanied Camile Pleyel on a short visit to England during that year. A passport was a necessity; red tape was as abundant then as now, hence the false statement concerning his parents.

If one accepts as accurate the only precise information given in this casual official description, he was slightly below normal height.

For all who came near him his appearance was characterised by an indefinable “resilience.” A deceptive impression, engendered perhaps by the fact that his weight was well below average. In 1840 it was ninety-seven pounds, just under seven stone.

As if to defend herself from the whirlpool of gossip that would attend the first sign of any cooling off in her notorious liaison with the composer, George Sand confirms this impression for us. In her provocative novel, Lucrezia Floriani, she sketches Chopin in the guise of Prince Carol. “Delicate in mind as in spirit, his face has the beauty of a sad woman.” Careful to omit no detail that will fix the identity of her model, she adds, “pure and slender of form as a young god from Olympus and to crown the whole, an expression at once tender and severe, chaste and passionate.”

Liszt gives an equally poetic description of the personality of this man, whose genius was to inspire some pages of remarkable aesthetic insight. “His appearance formed a harmonious whole … his blue eyes were more spiritual than dreamy, his gentle, delicate smile held no trace of bitterness. The fineness and transparency of his complexion bewitched the eye, his fair hair was silky, his carriage distinguished, his manners so instinctively aristocratic that everyone treated him as though he were a prince. His gestures were full of grace and freedom, the tone of his voice was muffled to the point of being stifled.”

It is apparent that Chopin’s contemporaries were incapable of remaining on the level of material reality when speaking of him. Liszt continues, “… His whole appearance reminds one of the unbelievable delicacy of a convolvulus blossom poised on its stem—a cup divinely coloured but so fragile that the slightest touch will tear it.”

Charles Legouvé carried away from their first meeting the impression that he had just encountered “such a son as Weber might have fathered had the mother been a Duchess.”

Finally there is this appreciation by Moscheles:

“What is Chopin like to look at?”

“His music.”

In spite of its abruptness, it is not far from being the most penetrating and suggestive description we have of the poet of the Nocturnes.

Diligent research, and an occasional unexpected piece of luck, have enabled me to acquire several interesting portraits of the composer. The artist’s brush confirms the writer’s attempts to describe an incomparable art.

In the sentences that follow, it is my intention to compare these portraits with the prose sketches I have quoted. The writers’ unanimity of opinion bears the hallmark of truth. It is in no way augmented by the addition of the writings of Delacroix, Heine or Berlioz, which do little to bring him more clearly to life.

I hope that the description of these pictures, so far unknown or ignored, may add to the small body of material available for us to draw upon in the documentation of Chopin’s outward appearance, and help towards a more intimate approach to his personality.

In the portrait that was once in the possession of the historian, Charles de Mazade, before coming to me, Chopin wears the expression George Sand describes when she picks out his essential characteristics.

Emaciated, melancholy rather than sorrowful, the delicate features bear the marks of a relentless disease.

His eyes, more grey than blue,^* eyes which, we are told, could fill with laughter over childish pranks, look rather set and distant as though clouded over with the film of fever.

The mouth and chin remain those of a boy, the lips bloodless, and the shape of the chin indicates an almost feminine fragility.

Only a proud Bourbon nose, the object of so many jokes on his part, a feature which in anyone else might have been considered sensual, defies the menacing symptoms of his illness and gives some indication of his burning vitality.

With a quite unexpected realism it contradicts the immateriality of his character, which is shown so clearly in his pensive likeness. One might almost say it is prophetic of the ghost destined to remain a legend for all time.

Less dramatic than the stormy Delacroix in the Louvre, but with a more intense expression than the elegiac Ary Scheffer, of which only the Dordrecht copy now exists, lacking the impersonal rigidity of the Kolberg in the Warsaw Museum, this picture shews him to be just such a person as his music would lead one to imagine him to be. In feeling it comes very close to the tenderness which his brief and sad existence inspires in us—a feeling halfway between an irresistible need for confidence and an instinctive shrinking from disillusion.

So far, all my efforts to identify the artist with the necessary guarantees of authenticity have been in vain. Personally, I think it is permissible to attribute it to the Italian painter, Luigi Rubio.

In a lithograph of the pianist, Gottschalk, and in a portrait of Franchomme at the age of six, perched on the end of a grand piano with his violin, the Princess Czartoryska, that great and faithful friend of Chopin, at the keyboard, Rubio employs a technique undeniably similar to that used in the painting to which I refer.^*

Other reasons, which follow, also seem to justify my supposition.

A young pianist, whose name, Vera de Kologrivoff, leads one to assume that she was of Russian extraction, was Chopin’s pupil and later an assistant tutor for some of his aristocratic students. From 1842 to 1846 she was constantly in his society. She became, until Mlle de Rozières felt herself called upon to supplant her in this role, the involuntary recipient of his more intimate confidences. She was probably the first to be aware of the uneasiness which began to creep into his relationship with George Sand, an uneasiness which, in the face of daily shocks of disillusionment, was not long in reaching an irreparable break between these two victims of misplaced affection.

In a letter to Chopin, dated 1843, she informs him that she has spoken to M. Rubio about a portrait. To save Chopin the effort of climbing stairs, Rubio has for this once consented to depart from his normal practice and come to him with his palette and brushes. Rubio is determined, she adds, “to finish the little portrait in oils in two sittings.” She ends by begging Chopin to agree to the project because she wishes there to be in existence “a portrait that is a likeness.” Since three years later she became the wife of the young painter, her prejudice in favour of Rubio’s talents was, no doubt, due to considerations other than those of a purely aesthetic nature.

Writing to congratulate her on her marriage, Chopin refers to the imminent departure of the newly-married couple for foreign parts. In point of fact, after living in Geneva, Milan, and Venice, they settled in Florence, where Rubio became Professor at the School of Art, and where his wife died in 1882.

There is, therefore, nothing to contradict my supposition that Charles de Mazade, a great admirer of Chopin, should, through the Princess Czartoryska, who was his friend and whose portrait Rubio had also painted, have acquired the portrait (which was subsequently to become my property through the great kindness of his heirs) before the young couple went abroad.

The signs of illness, which the artist’s penetrating and observant brush has delineated, support my view as to the date when the portrait must have been painted.

It was a period in Chopin’s life overshadowed by moral torment as much as by physical suffering.

The gradual withdrawal from Nohant, the increasing offhandedness of Maurice’s manner towards him, the atmosphere of suspicion, caused by the intrusion of Clesinger into Solange’s affections, coincide with this period. These depressing circumstances were added to by purely material anxieties; anxieties which led him after some months of unhappy solitude to look upon the fatal trip to England, which was to hasten his end, as a kind of salvation of the spirit as much as a release from material necessity.

The ravages of twenty years of suffering, the piteous fixity of his gaze, clearly that of the visionary of sound, who has taught us with what penetrating intensity he could search the secrets of all dreams, the unexpressed stirrings of that longing for home, which will not be silenced, the superhuman confidence apparent in every page of his work, all are faithfully portrayed by this artist.

The idea of a Chopin-Ariel, of a Chopin-spirit, of a Chopin without physical substance, detached from all reality, is in no wise contradicted by this portrait. The inner significance of his work leads irresistibly to such a likeness.

And if a personal predilection has led me to dilate on the merits of a portrait which seems to me to be a singularly exact translation on canvas of the unhappy face of a beloved composer, this is not to vaunt its quality as a work of art, but rather the expression of what it has meant to me by its presence in my home. It gives me the illusion of being in intimate daily contact with that sublime personality from whom came those subtle, nostalgic musical utterances which were to transform the fundamental essentials of piano music. In this, for me, lies its great value.

While I was travelling in Belgium, I discovered another canvas, this time signed and dated. Less penetratingly observed and technically more conventional, it has, however, one special feature. Alone of all known portraits of Chopin, it shows him standing. I came across it in rather peculiar circumstances.

The artist, Louis Gallait, a native of Tournai and a painter with a firmly established local reputation, had, so it is said, been in Paris during the year 1843. There he had arranged with Chopin for some sittings. The picture was later to become part of the Bishop of Ghent’s collection.

It was a strange coincidence that within an interval of several years I was to become the possessor of two portraits of Chopin, both painted in 1843 and both unknown to the master’s biographers.

The artist makes no attempt to reach the hidden personality of Chopin, and, in speaking of this portrait, I cannot do better, since it best describes its pictorial value and the deliberate academic treatment, than quote the catalogue itself.

“The celebrated Polish composer is shown standing, threequarter length, in a romantic landscape embellished with mountains and a mediaeval castle. In his right hand he holds the rolled manuscript of one of his works. At this period at the height of his fame he does not as yet show any sign of the illness which was to prove fatal a few years later.”

One hesitates to add to or alter the exposition I have just quoted. To complete the description, however, I must mention the presence of a stone column and balustrade in the foreground. The latter enables Chopin to lean against it and take up a pose careless and confident, as though he had won a first prize or had just received his diploma.

It goes without saying that such a stilted composition does not, could not, compete with the portrait by Rubio. It contains no hint of understanding the personality or of making spiritual contact with the person portrayed.

No glow comes from this accurate, lifeless face. No freedom is allowed the figure limned against the artificial background. Instead, one’s attention is directed to the meticulous care taken over the details of his clothes—the high threefold cravat, the white waistcoat, the very obvious watchchain, the carefully draped frock-coat; in short, everything that mirrors the fashion of the period. Only the hands come in for a slightly less impersonal treatment. No doubt, for the honest Belgian artist it was of the utmost importance to depict the physical details essential in a famous virtuoso. In his eyes, this aspect probably far outweighed in immediate importance the less tangible attributes of creative genius.

To sum up, it is a factual portrait, from which any hint of psychological interpretation is deliberately excluded, but which, none the less, cannot but find a place with the other portraits of Chopin.

The two medallions of Liszt and Chopin, struck in 1837 by the sculptor Bovy, were the subject of a long and careful search before they were finally added to my collection. That of Liszt I bought for a few lira from an antique dealer in Pisa, where I found it while poking about in a heap of the most unlikely pieces of old iron; that of Chopin I bargained hotly for at an auction sale in Paris. The bidding developed into a struggle, lacking neither verve nor obstinacy, for more than one appetite had been whetted.

All Chopin’s pupils—Mathias in particular—joined in praising the veracity with which Bovy’s expert chisel had caught the facial expression of their master, especially the detail of the hair and nose.

In bronze, the profile is in high relief, and produces an effect of urgency and perfection of line. In this it is distinguished from the highly stylised interpretation with which Clesinger chose to ornament Chopin’s tomb at Pere-Lachaise.

It shows off very clearly the light tuft of side-whisker, which Chopin light-heartedly mentioned to his parents in a letter from Vienna during July, 1831: a detail that is not to be found in any of his likenesses dated after 1839.

In this letter he remarks jokingly that he only proposes to wear one side-whisker, on the right, since the left-hand side of his face is not exposed to the public eye. Incidentally, the passport of 1837 mentions this hirsute ornament, stating vaguely and laconically: “Fair beard.”

From another letter, written to Gryzmala from Marseilles on his return from Majorca, and dated 17th March, 1839, we learn of its final disappearance.

These details are of secondary importance, but none the less serve to fix with a certain degree of accuracy the dates of several portraits and photographs, to which I shall again have to refer in the course of this study of Chopin’s physical appearance.

Bovy, with scrupulously accurate modelling—based perhaps on the style of David d’Angers—has reproduced the expressive features of the young musician of twenty-seven: he, who has just written in Marie Wodzinska’s album the Valse de l’Adieu, so full of the melancholy rhythm and undying echoes of an unhappy love affair; he, whose fingers bring surging forth from the piano the tumultuous rhythms of the tragic Scherzo in B flat minor; he, for whom Destiny is preparing the imminent encounter with George Sand, the consequences of which are to have such a deep effect on his character and genius during the eight years of a liaison which, though not without some bright moments, was devoid of any real happiness.

Here is Chopin on the threshold of the two most important events in his emotional life. One look at that gentle, aristocratic face, with its affectionate and childlike expression, its instinctive delicacy, is all that is necessary to know that in his struggle against any of the great tragic realities, his physical being would be bound to confess defeat, and that “Mademoiselle Chopin,” as he was called, would find himself in permanent disagreement with that virile and robust creature “Monsieur George Sand.”

Contemplating the two original sketches made by Kwiatkowski at Chopin’s deathbed gives me the feeling of humble, tender contact with the ghost of the beloved master. But before turning to them, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to a curious picture, which, though not unique, is nevertheless almost unknown. I refer to a daguerreotype, which was taken in Paris during the last months of Chopin’s life. The original, for a long time in the possession of the music publishers, Breitkoff and Härtel at Leipzig, now the property of the Chopin Institut...