Chopin

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781848318106
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music. Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.'After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.' In his typically perverse way, Oscar Wilde puts his finger on the fact that no one can capture a mood quite like Chopin. Where Liszt dazzles with technical virtuosity, Chopin's music concentrates on nuance and expressive depth. His ballades, nocturnes, preludes and etudes, and even those pieces based on dance forms, the waltzes, polkas and mazurkas, belong essentially to the salon (it is reckoned Chopin gave no more than 30 public concerts in his life). Yet his predominantly solo piano works, full of harmonic invention and poetic power, are universally acknowledged as a pinnacle of the repertoire.Frederic Chopin, though born in Poland, spent most of his adult life in France. Michael Steen follows his tragically short life from the early years in Warsaw and Vienna, to the Paris of the 1830s, the Paris of Rossini, Berlioz, Liszt and George Sand. Chopin's notorious affair with Sand, the outrageous free-thinking, trouser-wearing, smoking, female author, was a central feature of his life, but it ended bitterly. Strangled with tuberculosis, exhausted with coughing, he undertook a short visit to England and Scotland. Soon after returning to France, he finally yielded to the disease which had been gnawing away at him for so long.

A PENCIL DRAWING BY GEORGE SAND, 1844

CHOPIN

AT AROUND TWO in the morning on 17 October 1849, Chopin died of consumption in an apartment in the Place Vendôme, that most elegant 18th-century square in Paris. It is almost exactly opposite the hotel where, about 150 years later, Diana, Princess of Wales set out to her death; today, Chopin’s plaque can be seen above a very smart jeweller’s shop.

The dying man was visited by many friends. Pauline Viardot, the well-known mezzo-soprano, said that ‘all the grand Parisian ladies considered it de rigueur to faint in his room’.¹ Three ladies were more constant and stayed at his bedside: his sister Louise, the Polish Princess Marcelline Czartoryska and the wayward Solange Clésinger.² They represented the three periods of his life: his young years in Poland, his society life among émigré Poles in Paris, and his long affair with Solange’s extraordinary mother, the notorious novelist George Sand. She was absent.

Frédéric Chopin had been born less than 40 years earlier, in a village near Warsaw.* We shall follow his tragically short life from the early years in Warsaw and Vienna, to the Paris of the 1830s, the Paris of Rossini, Berlioz, Liszt and George Sand. Chopin’s notorious affair with Sand broke up bitterly. Strangled by tuberculosis, exhausted with coughing, he undertook a short visit to England and Scotland. Soon after returning to France, he finally yielded to the disease which had been gnawing away at him for so long.

POLAND

The Poland into which Chopin was born, and for which he became a symbol, had long been an unhappy place. For centuries, its borders with Muscovy and the fiefdoms of the Ottoman Empire seem to have been permanently elastic. In seeking their disparate aims, thugs with Romantic names like Boleslaw and Casimir, and their supporters, hacked each other to bits. Some of the worst were that ferocious combination of grail and sword known euphemistically as the Teutonic Knights. Then, two centuries after the Knights ceased to be an active force, the Swedes and Russians inflicted damage on Poland as serious as that experienced by Germany in the Thirty Years War.* Much of the story of Poland is epitomised by the statue of King Sigismund III Vasa at the entrance to the Old City of Warsaw. Wearing his crown, he brandishes a sword in one hand; in the other, he bears an enormous cross.

An unusual feature of Poland was its paralysing political system whereby the nobility elected their king, whose powers were then constrained by the liberum veto: legislation could technically be frustrated by a single objecting noble’s vote. As a consequence, the country was virtually ungovernable and it could easily be squeezed by powerful neighbours.

The king was usually someone backed by either the Russians or the Swedes. The Electors of Saxony, who were chosen to be kings in Poland during the 18th century, and to whose officials Bach sent his complaints, owed their Polish crown to the Russians. The Swedes tried to push them out by getting their puppet-ruler Stanislas Leszinski elected;** but the Russians twice ejected him and reinstated the Saxons, and Leszinski was compensated with the dukedom of Lorraine, which is found on modern maps around Nancy in the north-east of France bordering with Germany. Chopin’s forebears, it seems, followed King Stanislas there.

The Saxons, however, took little interest in their Polish domains. On the death of Augustus III, the Poles elected Stanislas Poniatowski, a veteran of the bedroom of the Russian Empress Catherine the Great. But his attempted reforms were too much for both his ex-lover to the east and his neighbour to the west. In 1772, the Prussian King Frederick the Great dismembered Poland: he diverted the Russians and Austrians from a war over moribund Turkey, in which victory by either would have destabilised the balance of power. He awarded each of them a slice of Poland; for himself, he took the tastiest portion, which enabled him to join up Berlin with East Prussia. This outrageous action reduced Poland’s population by a fifth.³

Following a few years of considerable instability, there was a second ‘Partition’ in 1793. Poland was shorn of two thirds of its people. Around this time, the composer’s father, Nicholas Chopin, returned to Poland to work as an accounts clerk in a tobacco factory. This went bust, but before he could go back to France, Nicholas got caught up in a revolt led by Thaddeus Kosciusko, who had fought in the War of Independence in the United States. Kosciusko’s Polish peasants, armed with pikes and war scythes, were no match for the Russians. The Poles retreated into Warsaw and, after two months, the city was sacked with great cruelty: up to as many as 20,000 were slaughtered in a single day.⁴ Nicholas must have been very fortunate to survive.

Under the final partitions of 1795–6, Poland, which had once been twice the size of France,* disappeared. The Russian Romanovs, the Austrian Habsburgs and the Prussian Hohenzollerns agreed that they should ‘abolish everything which can recall the memory of the existence of the Kingdom of Poland’.⁵ There was a saying at the time: ‘God made a mistake when he created the Poles.’⁶

However, a few years later, when Napoleon defeated Prussia and Austria, a remnant of Poland was re-constituted as ‘the Grand Duchy of Warsaw’. This entity benefited from the introduction of French administrative procedures and laws. Thus it was, when Frédéric Chopin was born, as February turned to March, in 1810. However, the Grand Duchy did not last long. After Napoleon was defeated, the Kingdom of Poland, which emerged in 1815 from the lengthy discussions at the Congress of Vienna, was a Russian fiefdom and only three quarters the size of Napoleon’s Grand Duchy.⁷ With the pragmatic support of the leaders of the Polish nobility, it was ruled by a viceroy, the tsar’s brother, the ‘ill-tempered and brutal’ Grand Duke Konstantin.⁸

CHOPIN’S YOUTH IN POLAND

Chopin’s father Nicholas had ended up staying in Poland, possibly because illness kept him there. His fluency in French made him a suitable tutor for aristocratic children.* When he was working as resident tutor with the impoverished and downwardly mobile Skarbek family, he met Justyna, one of the Skarbeks’ relatives, who lived in the household as a kind of companion. In 1806, they married and then had four children: Louise, Frédéric, the robust Isabelle, who lived until 1881, and the sickly and consumptive Emilia, who died aged 14.⁹

There are few places whose local guidebook is prepared to concede that the landscape is ‘striking with its monotony’, but ˙Zelazowa Wola, then the seat of the Skarbeks, is one.¹⁰ It is in the flat farmland, the fruit and vegetable garden of Warsaw. But Frédéric’s birthplace has a definite charm, set as it is beside a fast-flowing stream in a luxuriant garden, the trees covered in mistletoe. He was born in a wing of a larger mansion, of which now there are only a few foundation stones to be seen. The Chopins’ apartment was nicely furnished, with warm stoves to resist the bitingly cold wind as it blew from the Urals. Baby Frédéric was baptised in the church in which his parents had been married.**¹¹

Someone with Nicholas’ skills was ideal to be appointed professor of French at the Lyceum, one of the leading schools in Warsaw. So, when Frédéric was only seven months old, the Chopins moved the 30 miles into the capital. The school was housed in one of the fine palaces built to the south of the Old Town.

In contrast with his later sickly life, Frédéric, although delicate, appears to have been an active little boy with a considerable sense of humour. He played the piano with his mother, and showed early skill at improvisation. His first teacher gave him a grounding in Bach and Mozart. He soon performed in public, and by the time he was seven, he was dedicating a polonaise to Countess Skarbek, and even being hailed as Mozart’s successor.

Nicholas took in boarders for the school. Frédéric had an adolescent crush on one who was two years older than him: indeed, the correspondence might point to something more intense.¹² Other boarders were two brothers of Maria Wodzinska, with whom Frédéric was eventually to fall in love. Rents from boarders, Nicholas’ salary and thrift allowed the Chopins to live very comfortably in a fashionable part of the city. And Frédéric, the boy prodigy, enabled his parents, who would normally have moved in bourgeois circles, to gain an entrée to aristocratic salons. So Frédéric, whose grandfather had been a wheelwright in Lorraine, was brought up to behave with the refined manners which his father had seen in the aristocratic Polish houses in which he taught.

In 1823, Frédéric went to his father’s Lyceum. As well as receiving a good general education, he played the organ for services at the nearby Church of the Visitation Nuns, a church remarkable for its elaborate baroque pulpit in the shape of the prow of a ship. He had private music lessons with Josef Elsner, a competent teacher and composer of sorts, who was director of the musical side of the Warsaw Conservatoire. In the summers, he would go to the country estates of his friends, and hear the peasant music to which some attribute the Polish aspects of his music.

The Poles have certainly claimed Chopin as embodying the nationalism of the Polish people, although very few of his works actually contain an identifiable folk tune. Some claim that ‘the Polish blood throbs with particular vigour in his warlike polonaises, whose boldly arching melodies are of bent steel’,¹³ and yet others have found evidence of him making political statements through his music, whatever this may mean.¹⁴ Yet, a composer does not have to be Polish to write a polonaise or mazurka: Schumann wrote polonaises, and the Viennese were writing and playing mazurkas early in the century. Chopin wrote waltzes, yet nobody suggests that he was Austrian. Poland and its woes certainly stimulated his imagination; but it seems fair to say that ‘Polish music owes to him something more and something greater than he does to Polish music’.¹⁵ The Poles, when their national identity had been obliterated, rallied round his music; he became a focus for their nationalism.* Chopin’s music was, however, unique, polished like the most exquisite French furniture.

Less nationalistic, and indicative of the ambivalence necessary in his upbringing and life, was his performance before the Tsar of Russia in 1825 when he was opening the Polish Diet, the parliament. The Tsar presented him with a diamond ring. This was around the time that his first opus, a rondo, was published.

At the age of sixteen, he gave his first solo recital at a Silesian spa to which he was sent to recover from a cold in the chest. He then went to the Warsaw Conservatoire, where he received a thorough training in theory, composition and instrumental teaching. He was not the star pupil, but he enjoyed himself, and made many friends. He devoted his spare time to piano compositions such as the Rondo ‘à la Mazur’, and the Variations on Là Ci Darem, a popular tune from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In 1828, he was invited to accompany one of his father’s friends who was attending a scientific conference in Berlin. He saw Mendelssohn and Spontini, although he felt too shy to introduce himself. But he found time to draw some caricatures of those attending the conference: he was a good mimic and actor, and had a refined sense of humour.¹⁶

Back in Warsaw, he continued his studies and frequented the popular Warsaw cafés. He did the social round and developed the taste for ‘Society’ which never left him. Many of the aristocrats whom Chopin met were fiercely nationalistic: the ancient families such as the Potockis were involved in Kosciusko’s rising; the Czartoryskis were to be involved in the rising in 1830. These connections would be very important in his later life in Paris.

TO VIENNA

Warsaw was a backwater; Chopin became increasingly frustrated with it and he set off to Vienna, then still the Mecca for musicians. He had sent some works to the Viennese music publisher Haslinger, and arrived with a letter of introduction. Haslinger agreed to publish, provided Chopin played the works for free. A concert at the Kärntnertor theatre was a great success, Chopin’s delicate musical textures being a welcome contrast to the hammer and tongs works of Liszt. The Viennese were surprised that a place such as Warsaw could produce such talent. He did another concert, again for nothing, so as to avoid any implication that the first was not a success. But, when Haslinger suggested yet another, Chopin put his foot down and refused.

Back in Warsaw, Chopin fell in love with Constantia Gladowska, the daughter of one of the city’s civic dignitaries and a singing student at the Conservatoire. Chopin’s father packed him off to tutor Prince Radziwill’s two daughters, where he wrote the Polonaise for Cello and Piano for the prince. He became absorbed in composition, so was not involved in the initial disturbances which arose when news arrived of the July 1830 Revolution in Paris: he was busy working on his Piano Concerto in E minor which he performed in October of that year.

AU REVOIR, POLAND

Warsaw was no place to stay, even though Chopin’s father was concerned that it was not a suitable time to be travelling. Frédéric exchanged rings with Constantia. At the beginning of November, he left Poland and her, for what was to be the last time. She married someone else a few years later. In her blind old age, she dismissed the suggestion that her love affair with Frédéric was serious, saying that she found him ‘temperamental, full of fantasies and unreliable’.¹⁷

Thus, late in 1830, two years after the death of Schubert, Chopin took a leisurely journey to Vienna, stopping at Breslau and Dresden, where he played at soirées. After a day in Prague, he reached Vienna. But in contrast to his earlier visit, he was no longer an amateur performing for free: he was a professional competing with others for public favour and money. His piano playing began to attract criticism, however, because its refined and small tone lacked the vigour of the contemporary virtuosos.¹⁸

The Viennese were more interested in the waltz. Chopin wrote: ‘During supper, Strauss or Lanner play waltzes. After each waltz, they receive tremendous applause; and if they play a quodlibet, i.e. a potpourri of opera tunes, songs and dances, the public is so pleased that it goes off its head – it just shows you how rotten the taste of Vienna is.’¹⁹ Chopin subsequently developed the waltz into a piano piece for the refined salons of Paris, rather than Viennese beer-gardens and ballrooms.

Chopin’s visit to Vienna coincided with the Polish rebellion of late 1830, which was inspired by the events we have seen in France and Belgium. Someone placed a p...

Table of contents

• INTRODUCTION
• POLAND
• Notes
• Other Books in the Series