Chopin

(#litres_trial_promo)

Chopin’s next destination was Stuttgart, where he spent a couple of weeks, alone, since Kumelski had stayed in Munich. He was in a state of morbid depression verging on the pathological, as the very long entries in his diary reveal:

Strange! This bed I am about to lie on has probably served more than one dying person, and yet that does not worry me. Perhaps more than one corpse has lain on it – and for many days? But what makes me any better than a corpsę Like a corpse, I have no news of my father, mother, sisters, of Tytus! Nor do corpses have lovers! Corpses are pale like me, cold like my feelings. A corpse has ceased living, and I have lived long enough…Why does one go on living this miserable life?

(#litres_trial_promo)

He looked back on his life, pointing to its worthlessness and to the fact that, cut off as he was from everything dear to him, it made no sense. There is less affectation here than in some of his letters from Vienna, and the feelings expressed have a genuine ring to them. The twenty-one-year-old composer felt lost, and anxious over his future. He was now quite alone, and further from home than he had ever been. Not the least of his worries was the fact that, while philandering in the company of Kumelski, he had caught a venereal disease.

(#litres_trial_promo) If he had invested his twentieth birthday with such significance, he can hardly have regarded what may well have been his first sexual encounter, let alone its consequence, as anything but a watershed in his existence.

But he did not have time to indulge his own miseries, as only a couple of days later he received news which was to alter the course of his life dramatically – the Polish army had been defeated and Warsaw had fallen to the notoriously ruthless Russian commander General Paskievich. In his diary, Chopin wrote:

I wrote the preceding pages without knowing that the enemy had already broken in – the suburbs are destroyed, burnt down – Oh, Jaś[Matuszyński]! Wiluś [Kolberg] probably died on the ramparts! I can see Marceli [Woyciechowski] in chains! Sowiński [the general in whose house Chopin wrote the Fantasia on Polish Airs], that kind old man, in the hands of those monsters! Oh God! You exist! You exist and yet You do not punish! Have You not seen enough Russian crimes? Or perhaps – maybe You are a Russian Yourself! My poor father! My dearest! Perhaps he has nothing left to buy my mother bread with! Perhaps my sisters have succumbed to the fury of the Russian rabble! Paskievich, that dog from Mohilev, has stormed the capital of the first monarchs of Europe! The Russian is master of the world!? Oh, father, so this is your reward in old age! Mother, suffering, gentle mother, you watched your daughter die, and now the Russian marches in over her bones to come and oppress you!…Did they spare her gravę They trampled it and covered it with a thousand fresh corpses! They have burnt the city! Oh, why could I not have killed at least one Russian! Oh, Tytus, Tytus!…What is happening to her, where is shę – unfortunate creature! – Perhaps she is in Russian hands? The Russians are pressing her, stifling, murdering, killing her! Oh my love, I am alone here, come to me, – I shall wipe away the tears and heal the wounds of the present with memories of the past…when there were no Russians…Maybe I have no mother any more, perhaps the Russians have killed her, murdered her…my sisters unconscious, yes, or struggling; my father in despair, helpless – no one left to pick up my dead mother. I am inactive, I sit here empty-handed, just groaning, suffering on the piano in despair…and what next? God, God! Move the earth – may it swallow up the people of this century. May the cruellest tortures fall on the heads of the French, who would not come to our aid!…

(#litres_trial_promo)

Having cursed the French, Chopin set off for Paris a few days later. He was to build a new life there which suited him better than any he could have had in Warsaw, but the sense of loss sustained on that night in Stuttgart never left him. It came to embrace everything – home, country, family, friends, love and youth – and remained the fundamental inspiration for his music. As he had promised Konstancja, he would ‘heal the wounds of the present with memories of the past’.

SIX Romantic Paris (#ulink_f970dd8c-f27d-587b-b242-2124f6a504ef)

The Paris that Chopin saw for the first time in September 1831 was a formidable city. Its size, the grandeur of its buildings and monuments, the scale of its open spaces, its bustle and vitality, not to mention emblems of modernity such as the gas lighting to be seen here and there, all made Vienna look like a market town by comparison. But Paris was far more than that. ‘Paris is the capital not only of France, but of the entire civilised world; it is the rendezvous of its intellectual notables,’ wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine, who had exiled himself there. ‘Here is assembled all that is great in love or in hate, in sentiment as in thought, in knowledge or in power, in happiness as in misery, in the future or in the past. When one considers the collection of distinguished or famous men that one finds here, Paris appears like the Pantheon of the living. They are creating a new art here, a new religion, a new life; it is here that the creators of a new world are happily at work.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

Chopin was no intellectual, and what arrested his attention first in Paris was the allure of the decadent yet vibrant capital, so very different from the strait-laced cities he was used to. It exuded a permissive atmosphere which both shocked and delighted him. Apart from the bright lights, what intrigued him most were the whores who pursued him in the street, the chorus girls who were so keen on ‘duets’, as he coyly put it, and the lady upstairs who suggested they share a fire on cold days. ‘Here you have the greatest luxury, the greatest squalor, the greatest virtue and the greatest vice – everywhere you look there are notices about ven. disease – you simply cannot imagine the shouting, the commotion, the bustle and the dirt; one could positively lose oneself in this anthill, and the nice thing is that nobody cares what anyone else does,’ he wrote to Kumelski after a few days in the city, adding that he was prevented by his ailment from ‘tasting the forbidden fruit’.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The other thing Chopin quickly became aware of was that Paris lay at the epicentre of European dissidence. The revolution which had swept the Bourbon Charles X off the throne in the previous year and replaced him with Louis Philippe had been incomplete, and there was continuing unrest, fuelled by the influx of defeated revolutionaries from Italy, Germany and Poland.

While Chopin was conservative by instinct, the shock of seeing his country crushed had induced a spirit of rebellion in him, and he ranged himself on the side of the enemies of the status quo, voicing subversive views on all authority. Possibly out of a desire to compensate for having failed to take part in the insurrection, he attended meetings along with other young Polish émigrés, and may even have been mixed up in some rioting.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The artistic life of the French capital was as unbridled as its manners and as partisan as its politics. The progress of the Romantic revolution against the literary establishment had been marked by violent battles, as the supporters and opponents of Victor Hugo resorted to physical as well as literary weapons. This had created an atmosphere congenial to anyone with a new idea, and the city attracted artists of every kind. It was, as Heine pointed out, the artistic capital of the Western world.

‘I’m delighted with what I have found here,’ Chopin wrote to Kumelski. ‘I have the best musicians and the best opera in the world.’

(#litres_trial_promo) With Beethoven, Weber and Schubert dead, and the next generation of great composers not having yet made a significant impact (Mendelssohn was twenty-two, Schumann and Chopin twenty-one, Liszt nineteen, Verdi seventeen and Wagner eighteen), the musical establishment of Paris, consisting as it did of a handful of venerables like Cherubini (Director of the Conservatoire), Paër and Lesueur; renowned opera composers like Auber and Hérold; and above all the two lions of the moment, Rossini and Meyerbeer, was indeed the most brilliant in the world.

Paris also boasted the finest collection of performing musicians. In the concert halls, Chopin heard the pianists Herz, Liszt, Osborne and Hiller. The three orchestras – of the Conservatoire, the Academy (Opéra) and the Italian opera (the Théâtre des Italiens) – were probably the best in Europe. The singers at the two opera houses included such legendary names as Giuditta Pasta and Maria Malibran, and when he went to performances of Rossini’s operas under the baton of the composer himself, Chopin felt he was hearing completely different works from those he had heard in Vienna or Warsaw. The scale of the productions overawed his critical faculty, and when he saw Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable, with its cast of hundreds, its pyrotechnics and stage machinery, he termed it a ‘masterpiece of the new school’, and declared that ‘Meyerbeer has immortalised himself’, strong words from someone as reserved in his praise as Chopin.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Chopin had taken rooms on the fourth floor of a house in the boulevard Poissonière, a newly built-up area on the northern fringe of the city. He soon got used to this part of Paris, and as with most things to which he got used, he would not stray far from it over the next seventeen years. ‘You wouldn’t believe what a nice apartment I have,’ he wrote to Kumelski; ‘a small room beautifully furnished in mahogany, a little balcony overlooking the boulevards, with a view stretching from Montmartre to the Pantheon and embracing this whole beautiful world.’

(#litres_trial_promo) And it was not an alien world, like Vienna.

There were strong historical links between Poland and France, the most recent being those forged on battlefields all over Europe by Polish soldiers who had fought for their country under the banners of Napoleon. All but the most conservative saw the two nations as standing for the same values against the tyrannical order embodied by the Russia of Nicholas I, and French society at every level felt sympathy for the Poles and their cause.

Paris itself had long been a cultural magnet for the Poles, and there had been many living there before 1830. Some, like Countess Kisselev, a member of the Potocki family separated from her Russian husband, were well-known figures and kept salons frequented by some of the most interesting people in Paris. Others, like the Komar family or Count Ludwik Plater and his brood, had left Poland before or during the insurrection and settled in Paris. They were soon joined by others fearful of Russian reprisals or merely unwilling to live under Russian rule.

From September 1831 on, a stream of defeated insurgents began to trickle into the French capital, and Chopin was reunited with schoolfriends such as Kazimierz Wodziński, and his Conservatoire colleagues Antoni Orłowski and Julian Fontana. The latter soon left for London, where he hoped to make a living, but was to reappear in Paris a few years later. The presence of these combined with the goodwill and hospitality of the Parisians to make Chopin feel at home, and the sense of not belonging which had spoiled his stay in Vienna did not trouble him here.

When he arrived in Paris, Chopin had only a letter from Elsner to Lesueur and one from Malfatti to Paër, the master of the royal music, but the musical world of the city was so tightly knit that within a couple of weeks he had met all the most prominent musicians, including the eminent pianist Kalkbrenner, whose works he had so often played in Warsaw. Chopin could not get over the impression Kalkbrenner’s playing made on him. ‘You won’t believe how anxious I was to hear Herz, Liszt, Hiller, etc, but they’re all zeros next to Kalkbrenner,’ he wrote to Tytus. ‘If Paganini is perfection itself, so is Kalkbrenner, but in a totally different way. It is difficult to describe his composure, his enchanting touch – unbelievable evenness and mastery are evident in every note of his – He is a giant who tramples underfoot all the Herzes and Czernys, and, by the same token, myself.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

Kalkbrenner listened while Chopin played through his E minor Concerto. He complimented him by saying that he played like Cramer with Field’s touch, but declared that he ‘lacked method’ and would never be able to play or compose properly until he had acquired this. He also put a red pencil through the manuscript of the Adagio, arguing that it was too long and repetitive. In spite of this, and of reservations on the part of others (the forty-five-year-old Kalkbrenner, who was dubbed ‘the mummy’ by Heinrich Heine, was not popular with most of the younger musicians in Paris), Chopin liked him, and persisted in thinking him ‘the first pianist in Europe – the only one whose shoelaces I am not worthy of untying’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Kalkbrenner himself was anxious to turn Chopin into his own idea of a superior pianist and agreed to teach him, suggesting a course of three years. Chopin was minded to accept, although the length of time and the expense worried him, and he informed his parents of the plan.

The Chopins were puzzled by the idea that he still needed to learn to play, and Elsner, who was also informed, was furious. ‘I can say with pride and self-congratulation that I was able to give you a few lessons in harmony and composition,’ he wrote, but the idea that anyone thought they could teach Chopin to play the piano was preposterous. He saw in it a trick of Kalkbrenner’s to eliminate competition. Elsner also took the opportunity to say that Chopin was too obsessed with the idea of being a pianist, which he considered to be only the first step in a musical career. He argued that Beethoven’s and Mozart’s piano concertos had been forgotten, while their symphonies and operas lived on, and that Chopin should seek immortality through the operatic form, which would allow him to take his place between Mozart and Meyerbeer.

(#litres_trial_promo)