Chopin

Paganini’s visit was followed by a series of concerts by the violinist Karol Lipiński, who had at one stage been regarded as one of Paganini’s principal rivals, but in Chopin’s view his concerts only underlined the superiority of the Italian’s genius. The same was true of the concerts given soon afterwards by the Hungarian pianist Stephen Heller; his playing was marked by a superior musical intelligence, but lacked the special qualities Chopin was beginning to look for.

A more portentous event for Chopin was a concert organised by Carlo Soliva, the singing instructor at the Conservatoire, to show off his pupils. One of these, Konstancja Gładkowska, struck the young man not only by her fine voice, but also by her appearance. She was dark-haired and pretty, with a face that exuded melancholy rather than vivaciousness. Of her character, not much is known. Chopin was immediately smitten, but he was too shy to let this show, and made no attempt to attract her attention over the next few months.

He was now faced by an important hurdle, in the shape of his final exams at the Conservatoire; Nicolas Chopin would certainly take note of the results and plan his son’s future accordingly. It is not known what form the exams took, but they were partly based on his work over the past three years. As he considered this, Elsner noted in his diary that Chopin had ‘opened a new era in piano music through his astonishing playing as well as through his compositions’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the official verdict on the exams in the Conservatoire register, he was more categorical: ‘Chopin, Fryderyk; third year student. Outstanding abilities; musical genius.’

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This would have been the logical moment for Chopin to set off on a foreign tour, but there seemed to be no way of financing it. The best he could do for the time being was to join a party of friends from the University who were going on a jaunt to Vienna. They left Warsaw immediately after the exams, on 21 July. On the way they visited the historic city of Kraków, and from there went on a couple of excursions, one down the Wieliczka salt mines, another through the scenic valley of Ojców. The cart they were travelling in got lost and then stuck in a stream, leaving them to wander for hours in the pouring rain before they found shelter and some straw for the night. That Chopin did not catch cold suggests that his health had improved considerably.

The little party reached Vienna on the last day of July 1829, and Chopin took an immediate liking to the city. He saw several operas, by Boieldieu, Meyerbeer and Méhul, went to a number of concerts, and found perfection everywhere. He had mastered the reticence which had held him back in Berlin, and immediately took steps to get acquainted with the musical establishment. He called on Haslinger, the publisher to whom he had sent the scores of the La ci darem la mano Variations and the C minor Sonata; on his old friend and teacher Wilhelm Würfel, who had moved back to Vienna; and on a venerable Polish music-lover, Count Husarzewski. They in turn introduced him to others, including the venerable Ignaz Schuppanzigh, violinist and leader of the quartet which had performed all Beethoven’s chamber music for him; the two foremost piano-makers, Stein and Graf; and, most important, the director of the Kärntnerthor Theatre, Count Gallenberg.

‘I don’t know what it is, but all these Germans are amazed by me, and I am amazed at them being so amazed by me,’ Chopin wrote to his parents a few days after his arrival.

(#litres_trial_promo) Haslinger, who had probably put aside the score of the Variations by an unknown Pole without looking at it, changed his attitude radically when the young man sat down at the piano in his shop and played them through. He promised to publish them if Chopin agreed to play them in public, and the project was taken up with enthusiasm by others. Würfel believed that the Viennese public was ‘hungry for new music’, Husarzewski predicted a resounding success, and Count Gallenberg offered his theatre free if Chopin wished to give a concert. Chopin himself was irresolute, and feared that Elsner and his family might not approve, but let himself be persuaded.

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The Kärntnerthor Theatre was booked for 11 August and, at Chopin’s request, a Graf piano provided. An orchestra was assembled, and a search made for others who might fill out the programme – all concerts at the time took the form of a succession of different artists performing in a variety of musical forms. There were problems at the rehearsal that afternoon, as the two pieces Chopin intended to play with the orchestra (the La ci darem la mano Variations and the Krakowiak Rondo) were written out in his usual careless way, and the disgruntled orchestra began to mutiny. They refused to play the Krakowiak, and it was only thanks to the diplomatic efforts of Tomasz Nidecki, whose travels had brought him to Vienna, that the concert took place at all. Nidecki made a clean copy of the scores of the Variations, which the orchestra eventually agreed to play. ‘At seven o’clock in the evening I made my appearance on the Imperial and Royal stage!’ Chopin wrote to his parents the following day.

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The concert opened with the orchestra playing the overture from Beethoven’s Creatures of Prometheus, after which Chopin appeared on stage to play his Variations. He was not nervous of the Viennese audience, but was a little put out to find a highly rouged gentleman sitting down next to him, boasting that he had turned pages for Hummel and Moscheles. The skirmish with the orchestra that afternoon had ruffled him, and he launched into the piece with ‘exasperation’, half expecting them to set a trap for him. But they played perfectly, while the delighted audience applauded after each variation and called him back for a second bow at the end. After an interlude of lieder sung by a lady from Saxony, Chopin reappeared on the stage to play a ‘free fantasy’ without orchestra. He started off by improvising on a theme from Boieldieu’s La Dame Blanche, which was playing to full houses in Vienna at the time, but was subsequently asked by the director of the theatre to play ‘something Polish’, whereupon he launched into an improvisation on a peasants’ wedding song, which, in his own words, ‘electrified’ the audience. When he had finished, the orchestra itself broke into applause, and he was called back for a second bow. Count Dietrichstein, the Emperor’s director of music, came onto the stage and publicly congratulated Chopin, urging him to prolong his stay in Vienna.

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Chopin could hardly believe his triumph. He had grown used to popularity in Warsaw, but a reception like this from an audience which was used to hearing the greatest masters was something else. His friends had dispersed themselves strategically among the audience and reported its reactions to him, the worst of which came from an old lady who enjoyed the music, but sighed: ‘What a pity the young man hasn’t got a better tournure!’

(#litres_trial_promo) But what really went to his head was the sincere admiration of renowned older musicians like the composer Conradin Kreutzer, the virtuoso violinist Josef Mayseder and Gyrowetz, whose concerto Chopin had played at his first public concert eleven years before. It is true that when asked how he had managed to grow into such a fine musician in Warsaw, he answered that ‘With Messrs Żywny and Elsner even a halfwit would learn,’ but this was probably said more out of bravado than conviction.

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The only criticism to be heard, not for the first or the last time in Chopin’s life, was that his playing lacked vigour and volume, or was, as he himself put it, ‘too delicate for those accustomed to the piano-bashing of the local artists’. This did not concern him unduly, but he felt obliged to warn his parents not to worry about it either, writing: ‘I expect that criticism to be made in the papers, particularly as the editor’s daughter enjoys nothing like a good thump at her piano.’

(#litres_trial_promo) While having dinner at the hotel after the concert, Chopin overheard unfavourable reactions from a man who had just come back from the Kärntnerthor, but as he remarked philosophically, ‘the man who will please everyone has not been born yet’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was not the first time he noticed that he pleased the more refined.

Prince Lichnowsky, Beethoven’s friend and patron, could not find words enough to praise Chopin, a reaction shared by others with resounding names such as Schwarzenberg and musical reputations like that of Czerny, a pupil of Beethoven and teacher of Liszt, whom Chopin found ‘warmer than any of his com positions’.

(#litres_trial_promo) They suggested he give a second concert, and he accepted without protest, excusing himself to his parents for his presumption with the observation that people in Warsaw would not believe that the first had been a success unless it was repeated.

Exactly a week later, on 18 August, Chopin again appeared at the Kärntnerthor. By this time Nidecki had helped him to rewrite the parts of the Krakowiak Rondo, so he was able to perform that. ‘Everyone from Kapellmeister Lachner right down to the piano tuner was astonished by the beauty of the piece,’ Chopin wrote home with pride.

(#litres_trial_promo) Again he was called back for a second bow, and even a third, after which the audience called for an encore, a rare occurrence in those days. Rarer still, the orchestra was prepared to join in, so he was able to play the La ci darem la mano Variations as an encore. If the success of the first concert had seemed a little unreal, there was no mistaking the reaction of the audience now. Chopin had got what he had been longing for: an appraisal at the hands of an unbiased and discerning public. As he quipped after the event, he would give up music and become a house-painter if he heard any unfavourable criticism after this.

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Chopin was still, at the age of nineteen, naïve and inexperienced, and this first brush with the commercial side of musical life did not fail to disillusion him. The tetchiness of the orchestra, underscored by petty jealousy, Haslinger’s calculations regarding the printing of the Variations, and the gracious way in which Count Gallenberg lent his theatre while taking money for tickets without volunteering to pay a fee had opened his eyes, and he felt ‘cleverer and more experienced by four years’.

(#litres_trial_promo) But such considerations counted for little when set against his reception and the reviews which began to appear as he was preparing to leave the Austrian capital.

‘Chopin surprised people, because they discovered in him not only a fine, but a very eminent talent,’ one of them explained, going on to say that ‘on account of the originality of his playing and compositions, one might almost attribute to him already some genius, at least as far as unconventional forms and pronounced individuality are concerned’. It went on to identify ‘a certain modesty which seems to indicate that to shine is not the aim of this young man’, and summed up accurately Chopin’s attitude when playing before an audience: ‘He emphasised but little, like one conversing in the company of clever people, not with the rhetorical aplomb which is considered by virtuosos as indispensable.’ The reviewer hailed him as a ‘true artist’, pointing out that his improvisation had delighted a public ‘in whose eyes few improvisers, with the exception of Beethoven and Hummel, have as yet found favour’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Another called him a ‘master of the first rank’, declaring that his compositions bore ‘the stamp of great genius’ and comparing his appearance in the musical world to that of ‘the most brilliant meteors’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The reviewer who must have pleased Chopin more than all the others wrote:

He is a young man who goes his own way, and knows how to please in this way, although his style of playing and writing differs greatly from that of other virtuosos, and indeed chiefly in this; that the desire to make good music predominates noticeably in his case over the desire to please.

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It was in high spirits that Chopin and his friends left Vienna for Prague, the next city on their itinerary. They spent three days there, sightseeing and calling on some of the local musicians, after which they travelled on towards Dresden, pausing at Toeplitz, whence they went on an excursion to Wallenstein’s castle at Dux. While in Toeplitz, Chopin stumbled on a Warsaw acquaintance who was a distant relative of the lord of the place, Prince Clary, and who took him along to meet the Prince that evening. Chopin’s pleasure at being in such company is evident:

We went in; the company was small but select – some Austrian Prince, a general whose name I forget, an English sea-captain, several young dandies, apparently Austrian Princes too, and a Saxon general called Leiser, covered in medals, with a scar on his face. After tea, before which I talked a good deal with Prince Clary himself, his mother asked me whether I would ‘deign’ to sit down at the piano (good piano – Graf ’s). I did ‘deign’, but asked the company to ‘deign’ to give me a theme to improvise on. Thereupon the table at which the fair sex were knitting, embroidering and crocheting came to life with cries of ‘Un thème!’ Three Princesses consulted together and finally sought the advice of Mr Fritsche (young Clary’s tutor I think), and he, with general assent, gave me a theme from Rossini’s Moses…

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The Clarys invited Chopin to spend another day in Toeplitz, but he wanted to press on to Dresden, where he arrived with his friends on 25 August. He visited the celebrated art gallery, went to the theatre to see Goethe’s Faust, called on some of the city’s musicians, and then left for Warsaw, feeling like a homecoming hero.

FOUR Adolescent Passions (#ulink_ccc5cf09-a5ea-50f6-ad69-975519b7c6db)

Chopin had an unpleasant surprise when he reached Warsaw on 12 September. The Warsaw Courier had somehow managed to misconstrue the reviews of his concerts and had published what amounted to an unfavourable account of his Viennese triumph. He was able to show his friends the original versions, but it was too late to scotch the general impression of failure which had attached itself to his trip.

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This only made Warsaw seem more provincial, and he could not even take solace in the sympathy of his friends. Białobłocki had died, Tytus Woyciechowski had retired to the country to look after his estate, others had gone abroad or, like Matuszyński and Fontana, were working hard at their university studies. Chopin had nothing to do, as he had finished his education and was waiting for the opportunity to begin his travels. As before, the main obstacle was lack of money. While he had been in Vienna, the rest of his family had paid a visit to Prince Antoni Radziwiłł at his summer residence of Antonin, and the consequence of this was an invitation for Chopin to spend the season in Berlin with the Prince. But he was not keen on the idea. Berlin had seemed provincial to him, and he longed for Vienna, Italy and Paris. He must have also considered the possibility of visiting England, for he was now, along with Julian Fontana, taking English lessons – from an Irishman called Macartney, who was usually drunk and trying to borrow cash from the two boys.

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Chopin struggled on with his F minor Concerto (op.21, usually referred to as no.2, although it was the first he wrote) and with the first set of Études. He went to every performance at the opera and to every concert, however uninspiring, and spent much time at Brzezina’s music shop. Like all similar establishments, this was a cross between a shop and a drawing room, with something of the atmosphere of a coffee house thrown in. People interested in music would drop in, see what had arrived from abroad, browse, play pieces through on the piano, and discuss musical topics. Chopin and other musicians used to meet on given days at the rooms of Joseph Kessler, formerly pianist to Count Potocki at Łańcut and now a music teacher in Warsaw. What they played depended on who turned up with what instruments. This way they managed to play through many chamber works that autumn, including pieces by Spohr and Hummel, and a Trio by Beethoven. ‘I have not heard anything quite so great for a long time – in this piece Beethoven makes fools of us all,’ Chopin wrote afterwards to Tytus Woyciechowski.

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Now that Chopin had time on his hands, he entered into the life of the city to a greater extent, and frequented the coffee houses and other haunts of the young intelligentsia, who were in a state of political ferment. The death of Tsar Alexander I in 1825 and the accession of his brother Nicholas I to the throne had altered the political climate in Poland. While all but the most radical had been prepared to accept the Russian hegemony under Alexander, this was becoming extremely difficult under the increasingly autocratic rule of his successor. Chopin’s generation grew restive as it watched the constitution violated, books censored and manifestations of national feeling suppressed, and by the end of 1829 there was a palpable spirit of rebellion. Coffee houses such as Brzezińska’s, which Chopin frequented for coffee in the daytime and punch in the evenings, were the scene of fervent discussions and conspiratorial activity.

But while he was with his generation in spirit, Chopin was not interested in politics, and his closest companions were not revolutionaries but poets. Some, like Stefan Witwicki and Bohdan Zaleski, were also caught up in the nationalist movement, although the one he liked best, Dominik Magnuszewski, was an erratic dilettante poet and amateur musician with a melancholy bent and a sense of alienation from his contemporaries. But from Chopin’s letters to Tytus it is clear that he never developed real intimacy with any of them. ‘You cannot imagine how much I lack something in Warsaw now,’ he wrote. ‘I haven’t got anyone I can say two words to, anyone I can confide in.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He had a great deal he wished to confide, as he was still nurturing a secret love for Konstancja Gładkowska.

Throughout his childhood and teens Chopin had found the process of musical composition relatively effortless, and he had always been relaxed in his relations with others. Now, at the age of nineteen, he was finding it difficult to fulfil himself either artistically or emotionally, and the resulting sense of frustration pervades his letters. This makes it more difficult to assess his real feelings towards Konstancja, as they are inextricably bound up with that frustration whenever he touches on them. She certainly had no idea of what was going through the composer’s mind, and carried on flirting with a couple of officers less bashful than Chopin. The presence on the scene of these strapping young bloods only served to underline his sense of his own physical shortcomings. His reaction was to withdraw into himself and wallow in self-pity.

In October, Chopin’s sombre thoughts were dispelled by a pleasant distraction. He had been asked down to the country by his godmother, Mrs Wiesiołowska, née Skarbek, whose estate lay close to Prince Radziwiłł’s Antonin, and although he was originally unenthusiastic about the idea, he did go on to stay at Antonin afterwards. He had a delightful sojourn in this ‘paradise’ with its two ‘Eves’, the young princesses, who managed to chase all thoughts of Konstancja from his head. The Prince was charming to him and showed him his own music, amongst which was an accompaniment to Goethe’s Faust which Chopin found surprisingly good.

(#litres_trial_promo) As well as talking music they made music, for the Prince was a good cellist. Chopin wrote a Polonaise for piano and cello specially for him and his daughter to play. ‘It is nothing but glitter, for the drawing room, for the ladies,’ he explained to Tytus. ‘I wanted Princess Wanda to learn to play it; I’m vaguely supposed to be giving her some lessons while I’m here. She’s young (seventeen), pretty, and it’s a real joy placing her little fingers on the keys.’ He always warmed to anything delicate, pretty and refined. ‘I could have stayed there until I was thrown out,’ he later wrote, but he soon returned to Warsaw, having promised to join the Radziwiłłs in Berlin in May 1830, which he hoped would give him time for another visit to Vienna first. Nothing was to come of these plans.

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