Chasing Chopin

A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries, and a Half-Dozen Revolutions

Annik LaFarge

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501188732
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critiques de la musique

A modern take on a classical icon: this "luminous book" (Susan Orlean, New York Times bestselling author of The Library Book ) tells the story of when, where, and how Chopin composed his most famous work, uncovering many surprises along the way and showing how his innovative music still animates and thrives in our culture centuries later. In this widely-praised book, Annik LaFarge presents a very different Frédéric Chopin from the melancholy, sickly, Romantic figure that has predominated for so long. The artist she discovered is, instead, a purely independent—and endlessly relevant—spirit: an innovator who created a new musical language; an autodidact who became a spiritually generous, trailblazing teacher; a stalwart patriot during a time of revolution, pandemic, and exile.One of America's foremost pianists, Jeremy Denk, wrote in The New York Times: "It is almost impossible for me to imagine a world in which [Chopin's "Funeral March"] is both fresh and tragic, where its death is real. LaFarge's charming and loving new book attempts to recover this world…This book took me into many unexpected corners…For a book about death, it's bursting with life and lively research."In this "entertaining dual music history and memoir" ( Publishers Weekly ), a "seamless blend of the musical and literary verve" ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review) LaFarge "brilliantly traces the footsteps of Chopin's life" (Scott Yoo, host of PBS Now Hear This ) during the three years, 1837–1840, when he composed the now-iconic Funeral March, using its composition story to illuminate the key themes of Chopin's life.As part of her research into Chopin's world, then and now, LaFarge visited piano makers, monuments, churches, and archives; she talked to scholars, jazz musicians, video game makers, music teachers, theater directors, and of course dozens of pianists. She has given us, says pianist, author, and New York Times columnist Michael Kimmelman, "a tour-de-force and journey of the soul."It is an engrossing, "impeccably researched" ( Library Journal ) work of musical discovery and an artful portrayal of a man whose work and life continue to inspire artists and cultural innovators in astonishing ways.An acclaimed companion website, WhyChopin, presents links to each piece of music mentioned in the book, organized by chapter, along with photos, resources, and more.

ONE In a Word, Poland

“All the contemporary assaults upon society date from the partition of Poland. The partition of Poland is a theorem of which all the present political crimes are corollaries.… When you examine the list of modern treasons, that appears first of all.”

VICTOR HUGO, Les Miserables

One morning in 2010, the official “Year of Chopin,” a young Polish entrepreneur woke up with an idea that was crazy but wonderful: Frédéric Chopin could return from the grave and save the world from itself. As a creator of video games he had all the tools to make it happen, and that day Zbigniew Dębicki, known as Zibi to friends, put his team to work. Artists and animators worked with writers and programmers to develop a storyline and graphic landscape. Musicians selected, then remixed, a dozen compositions—polonaises, nocturnes, mazurkas, waltzes, études, songs—into mashups with contemporary formats: reggae, rap, country, rock, and chiptune, a form of synthesized electronic music. The game opens with an animation in black-and-white as Chopin, dressed in tailcoat and cravat, awakens in his grave at Père Lachaise. Moments later the graphics turn to color as the confused composer passes through the cemetery gates into noisy, twenty-first-century Paris, where he is greeted by three Muses. They present him with special artifacts, including his own grand piano (now pocket-size) and a magical horse-drawn carriage that will take him home to Poland. This is the game’s ultimate goal, for while Chopin’s body was buried in Paris, his heart was removed after he died in 1849 and smuggled by his sister across a heavily guarded border into Warsaw, where it was eventually interred in the pillar of a Catholic church.

The title of Zibi’s game is Frederic: The Resurrection of Music, and its premise is that the world has lost its collective soul, thanks to the greed and creative bankruptcy of modern content creators for whom music is just one bullet point in a marketing strategy designed to craft brand image and sell product. We are all surrounded by this soulless stuff, and only one man can save us. The gamer’s task is to escape the mind-numbing stereotypes of contemporary commercial music; Chopin’s is to finally return to his homeland. Along the way the two of you must engage in a series of musical duels against all manner of opponents, from a Jamaican Rasta man to a New York City gangbanger, until finally you come face-to-face with Mastermind X, the evil worldwide producer who owns every musician and cares only about money and power. The funeral march from Opus 35 appears in a country-western-techno remix when Chopin finds himself in a deserted cowboy town, forced to duel with the local sheriff at high noon.

The game’s interface is a piano keyboard, and during each battle musical notes fly fast and furious toward the gamer, whose job is to hit them with the cursor as they land on the keyboard, thereby gaining points. It’s clear that whoever designed this game was a pianist, because basic keyboard technique—skills I learned once I had mastered scales and arpeggios—serve the player well by netting higher points. The more musical you are, it turns out, the better you will perform against the bad guys. For example: if you hit a flying note in just the right spot on the key, which on a real piano would elicit a highly coveted rich, singing tone, you’ll get a 10 instead of a 7. Artfully sliding your finger from one key to another—a technique scholars cite as one of Chopin’s keyboard innovations—gains even more points. The Help section includes a tip that will resonate with any musician, reminding us that “the key to success is not faith in your eyes but your ears.” If I had a dotted quarter note for every time my teacher told me to make better use of my ears at the keyboard, I could write a symphony.…

The gamer’s keyboard in Frederic: The Resurrection of Music.

Frederic is one of a handful of Chopin video games available today on multiple platforms, from Nintendo to iPhone, but it’s the only one that puts music at the center of play. And it’s not just about melodies and techniques; it’s also ideas that animate the experience, beginning with Chopin’s painful self-exile from his homeland, a theme that’s introduced in the opening moments back in Père Lachaise. Thinking there were worse (or certainly more predictable) ways of exploring Chopin’s Polish roots, I emailed Zibi to see if he would speak with me. Most of all I wanted to know why, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a young software developer would choose Frédéric Chopin, of all people, as an international superhero.

Frederic is hard to master if you’re over fifteen, but it’s strangely addictive, and because I wanted to find out what happens in the end, I was highly motivated to complete all the duels. Chopin does make it home to Poland, but there’s an interesting twist that Zibi explained to me via Skype from his home in Gdańsk. “First,” he promised, “you will fail against Mastermind X in the final duel. Every player does, it’s built into the game.” Your loss creates a sense of doom and unhappiness; meanwhile, Mastermind X revels in triumph, brandishing his contracts. But then the Muses return and tell you that this time you must play the music that comes from your own heart. Finally, in one last duel, you and Frederic defeat Mastermind X. He gives back the contracts, frees the musicians, and disappears forever. The art of soulful music has been saved, and Chopin is home at last.

These themes of homelessness, yearning, and redemption through music are among the key threads in the story of Chopin, and since his death have formed the basis of his long, enduring cultural legacy. His music and his life, Zibi told me, “tell a very hard story about my country,” one that continues to resonate today in powerful ways. What’s unusual about Frederic the video game is the way the designers chose to represent Chopin: not as the weak, sickly, tragic figure that has become a common trope but as a clever superman with nimble strength, artistic independence, and vanquishing power. “It’s crazy, I know,” Zibi kept saying during our conversation, the idea that Chopin is a musical zombie and my iPad a magical piano. But what better way to bust up the musical and cultural stereotypes of our times than by reanimating old forms and creating unexpected surprises? After all, that’s what Chopin himself did.

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The “very hard story” of Poland is often told through music, a tradition that predates Chopin by many centuries. You can experience it for yourself any day in Kraków’s main market square, where, if you hang around for at least an hour, you’ll hear a trumpet call sounding from the top of the fourteenth-century St. Mary’s Basilica. Actually, you’ll hear it four times: a plaintive melody that ends as abruptly as it begins, mid-note. Look up at the tower and you’ll see the bell of a trumpet emerging, first from a window facing west, toward Wawel Castle in honor of Poland’s kings and heroes, and then three more times as the trumpeter makes his way around the points of the compass. Down below, tourists flock with cell phones and wave to the tower. Usually the trumpeter—a member of Kraków’s fire brigade in dress uniform—waves back. The call is made every hour on the hour, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

The melody the bugler plays is known as the Hejnał Mariacki; it consists of just thirty-three notes, but it’s never played through to the end; the final cadence is always cut off in a sharp, unmelodious way. The reason for the broken note dates to a legend from the thirteenth century, when the cupola of St. Mary’s was a watchtower manned around the clock by a guardian with a bugle. Every morning he woke the residents of Kraków with his call; throughout the day he alerted them to the opening and closing of the city’s gates, signaling the arrival of an important visitor, and his job was also to warn the community of fire and foreign invasion. In 1241 an army of Mongol warriors known as “the scourge of God” rode from the steppes of Central Asia into modern-day Poland, where they razed village after village, killing all or most of the inhabitants. Before they reached the gates of Kraków, so the legend goes, the bugler atop St. Mary’s sounded the alert, blowing his horn until an enemy arrow pierced him through the throat and stopped his call mid-note. His warning allowed many of the town burghers to escape without harm, and in tribute to the fallen musician the survivors endowed a city fund to pay a trumpeter full-time. The first mention of an hourly bugle call comes from the mid-fifteenth century, and the playing of the Hejnał with the broken note has endured since sometime in the seventeenth. In 1927 Polish Radio began broadcasting the noon call and claims it to be “the longest running serial broadcast on Earth,” one that sounded through the years of Nazi occupation in World War II, the fall of Communism under the Solidarity movement in the 1980s, and the rise of a new right-wing party, Law and Justice, that assumed power in 2015. It is still, as historian Norman Davies observed, a reminder to millions of listeners “both of the ancient pedigree of Polish culture and of Poland’s exposed location… one of the few active mementoes of Genghis Khan, and the irruption of his horsemen into the heart of Europe.”

The story of Poland, poignantly and symbolically preserved in the lacerated tune of the Hejnał Mariacki, is animated by a paradox: the juxtaposition of enlightened ideals against violence, subjugation, and oppression. “This country,” Davies wrote in his two-volume national history, “seems to be inseparable from the catastrophes and crises on which, paradoxically, it thrives. Poland is permanently on the brink of collapse. But somehow, Poland has never failed to revive… and to flourish.” His observation frames a story of some seven centuries of invasion, occupation, and partition that begins in the thirteenth century when the Golden Horde descended from the east. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Poles were repeatedly attacked by Crimean Tatars and Teutonic knights; the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought the subduing armies of Russia, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire. But in the eighteenth century a fresh threat emerged that would prove far more devastating—and enduring—than any barbarian horde: its own neighbors. In 1772 a troika of new power in Europe set its sights on Poland and carved the country into three parts to be shared among them. Over the next two decades this coalition of Russia, Austria, and Prussia (roughly today’s Germany) executed two further partitions, varying the configuration of borders until finally, in 1795, Poland was literally erased from the map and its name banned from official use. This condition of statelessness lasted for the greater part of its modern history, until 1918, when the establishment of a “New Poland” became one of president Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points in peace negotiations to end World War I. Then, with a stroke of a pen, the country finally resumed its place on the map of Europe. Davies observes that while other nations—he cites India, America, and Africa—during this period were attacked, occupied, pillaged, or stripped of territorial possessions by foreign entities, the Polish partitions were different and without precedent in modern history. Poland was “annihilated… in cold blood,” he writes, “the victim of political vivisection—by mutilation, amputation, and in the end total dismemberment.” In 1793 Irish statesman Edmund Burke reflected what many in the capitals of Britain, Europe, and America took to be Poland’s political reality when he said: “With respect to us, Poland might be… considered a country on the moon.”

There is, however, another side to the story of victimhood that came to be known as “captive Poland,” one that tapped into a larger narrative that had taken hold in the early nineteenth century. Even as it was under constant attack by foreign enemies, as far back as the sixteenth century Poland practiced a kind of liberal humanism that even today seems fragile around the world. The idea of a parliament, an assembly of members drawn from the community, took root there in 1454; a century later, religious freedom was engraved into the Confederation of Warsaw. “We swear to each other,” the document reads, “that we who differ in matters of religion will keep the peace among ourselves, and neither shed blood on account of differences of Faith, or kinds of church, nor punish one another by confiscation of goods, deprivation of honor, imprisonment, exile.” The nobility elected its kings in an elaborate ceremony that took place on horseback in a meadow. They retained for themselves the right to control military finances and declarations of war and taxation, and all it took was one member’s vote to overrule any decision made by the king. Baked into the political consciousness of Poland’s “Noble Democracy” was the right of citizens—noble ones, that is—to resist. It was in Poland in May 1791 that the first constitution in Europe was written and adopted; this is astonishing because at the time its people lived in a fractured country carved up by a “Satanic Trinity” of foreign autocrats. Even then, stateless and oppressed, the Poles produced a document that poet Czesław Miłosz called a “landmark [on] the road to a new type of democracy.” It guaranteed freedom of the press, religious tolerance, personal liberty, and, perhaps most important of all, the right of peasants to acquire land. What Miłosz describes as Poland’s “abnormal” history gave rise to an idealistic notion of citizenship and individual freedom—values that put many Poles in sympathy with the French in the years following their revolution. It was precisely those values that posed an unacceptable threat to the Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Romanovs who had claimed Poland’s lands for their collective empires. It was only four years after Poland adopted its unprecedented, progressive, enlightened constitution that the final partition of 1795 wiped the country off the map of Europe. No longer a nation, Davies writes, “Poland was now an Idea.”

For the generation that followed, which included Chopin and his equally famous compatriot, the poet Adam Mickiewicz, the Romantic ideal of the homeland developed from all this violence and loss. It’s so ingrained in the Polish character that the country’s own national anthem, composed two years after the final partition, begins with the lines “Poland has not yet perished, as long as we live.” This strange, oddly disheartening amalgam of verb tenses suggests that patriotism is a perpetual fight to a death that never quite arrives. For Mickiewicz, these words signify that “people who have in them what indeed constitutes nationality are able to extend the existence of their nation regardless of the political circumstances of that existence, and may even pursue its re-creation.” What he meant is that even if their country was controlled by foreign invaders, as so often was the case, the idea of Poland constituted the nation itself in the hearts of its own people, and that idea could live on, no matter what. When a friend of Chopin’s wrote that “through his music he imparted Poland; he composed Poland,” this is what, I believe, he was expressing: that Chopin’s music manifested the juxtaposition of tragedy and hope that both define and animate the history and spirit of the Polish people. What’s extraordinary is how enduring this legacy turned out to be.

The decisive moment in Chopin’s story, and that of Poland during the first half of the nineteenth century, came in 1830, when he was twenty years old and a spark of independence flew in Warsaw. The year before, Nicholas I of Russia had crowned himself King of Poland, disregarding the national constitution and parliament. The czar’s brother and factotum, Grand Duke Constantine, unleashed his secret police, abolished press freedoms, imposed taxes, closed Vilnius University, and deported Mickiewicz, the country’s most famous poet. The final insult was a Russian scheme to use Poland’s army against the people of France to suppress their July Revolution, which deposed the last Bourbon monarch and put Louis Philippe—the “citizen king”—on the throne. On November 29, 1830, a cadet at the Warsaw officers’ school led a group of co-conspirators in an attack on Constantine’s palace. The grand duke managed to escape (according to one historian he scurried off in women’s clothing), but the failed rebellion launched six months of unrest and turmoil.

Chopin had left Warsaw three weeks before the November Uprising for a European sojourn of music and adventure, traveling through Dresden, Vienna, Salzburg, and Munich, going to the opera and immersing himself in the local musical life. It being his first long-term trip abroad, a group of friends sent him off with a silver cup filled with earth they had collected in Żelazowa Wola, the small town where Chopin was born, thus allowing him to carry a bit of the beloved homeland away with him on his travels. When the uprising began, Chopin’s friends rushed home to join the fight, but insisted he remain in exile and use his music to give voice to Poland’s struggle. Traveling the Continent, keeping in touch with friends and family through a regular stream of letters, he went to parties, dinners, plays, and operas. Then, as he wrote to a friend, he would return home around midnight, sit down, “play the piano, have a good cry, read, look at things, have a laugh, get into bed, blow out my candle and always dream about you all.”

The November Uprising lasted less than a year, and in September 1831 the Russians brought the hammer down in Warsaw. From Stuttgart Chopin learned there was hand-to-hand fighting in the streets, including in the cemetery where his younger sister Emilia had been buried after suffering a massive tubercular hemorrhage at age fourteen. Being separated fro...