Chopin

These and similar stories are recounted to Tytus in tones of mawkish self-pity, alongside assurances that he, Tytus, is in fact the most important person in Chopin’s life. While reaffirming his constant and undying love for the girl, he would write to his friend that he thought constantly of him: ‘I do not forget you, I am with you, and it shall be so till death.’

(#litres_trial_promo) It was Tytus who would have a portrait of Chopin before Konstancja, and it was Tytus who was the recipient of what would have been love letters to Konstancja, had Chopin dared write to her. These letters, sometimes friendly, sometimes petulant, sometimes verging on the passionate, are freely strewn with declarations of love and affinity, and contain passages of extraordinary sensuality.

This has prompted some to conclude that the two young men were or had been lovers. On the face of it, the equivocal references to passions, secrets and torment combine with the extremely specific terms of endearment to make this appear plausible. Chopin signs off one letter to Tytus with the following jumble of childishness and coy eroticism:

I must go now and wash. So don’t embrace me now, as I haven’t washed myself yet. – You? If I anointed myself with fragrant oils from the East, – you wouldn’t embrace me, not unless I forced you to by magnetic means. But there are forces in Nature, and tonight you will dream that you are embracing me. – I have to pay you back for the nightmare you caused me last night!

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Taken out of context, this may appear a little risqué, as might the endless kisses sent and demanded by Chopin. But these expressions were, and to some extent still are, common currency in Polish, and carry no greater implication than the ‘love’ people regularly sign off with today. And the traces of infantile eroticism in the letters are of little significance in themselves. The spirit of the times, pervaded by the Romantic movement in art and literature, favoured extreme expression of feeling and glorified transcendent friendship, and it is probably this that lies at the heart of these letters, written as they were at a period in Chopin’s life when he came nearest to living out the Romantic ideal.

While the possibility cannot be ruled out entirely, it is highly unlikely that the two were ever lovers. Had the slightly sentimental relationship between the older, stronger boy and his gentler, more emotional classmate really developed into a sexual rapport, it would almost certainly, knowing Chopin’s malleable and undecided nature, have become an exclusive and long-lasting passion. In such a case there would have been no reason for Chopin to sit about being bored in Warsaw while the bucolic seclusion of Tytus’s estate beckoned.

Tytus’s role in Chopin’s life was nevertheless an important one. ‘I swear that only you have power over me, you and…no one else!’ Chopin wrote, somewhat dramatically, to his friend, and he was hardly exaggerating.

(#litres_trial_promo) His upbringing had marked his character. The strong paternal authority to which he had been subjected had rendered him almost incapable of making a decision on his own. His loving mother and admiring sisters had led him to demand and expect boundless affection from people. The sheltered and regular life of the Chopin household only served to make the outside world and its cares seem more problematic and frightening. While his early exposure to a wide acquaintance had developed in him a gift for easy sociability, this was, apparently, accompanied by a certain fear of giving himself. All this made Chopin dependent, now that he was beginning to live outside his family, on the support of friends. Since he was finding it increasingly difficult to get close to people, he clung more and more to his old friend Tytus. He kept trying to abdicate responsibility, begging Tytus for advice and direction, but Tytus apparently evaded the responsibilities of a mentor and pressed Chopin to take a hold on himself. At the same time he became the recipient of some of Chopin’s repressed or frustrated feelings, which is why some of the letters he received from the young composer read like love letters.

In Warsaw, Chopin’s only close friends were Jan Matuszyński, who was pursuing medical studies, and Julian Fontana, who had now, after finishing his studies at the Conservatoire, taken up law at the University. Along with Witwicki, they formed a small group which often met at the house of their friend the poet Dominik Magnuszewski. The latter lived with his grandfather, a former judge who seemed to embody the spirit of pre-partition Poland, still dressing in the traditional costume of the Polish nobility. Chopin and his friends loved to listen to him talking about that past which now seemed so distant. The atmosphere of the old Poland had been superseded by the more modern and secular spirit of the 1820s, and Chopin was strongly drawn to what was heroic and elegant about it – it was this he was attempting to capture in the rhythmic and melodic gestures of the more sophisticated Polonaises he was beginning to write.

The atmosphere at Magnuszewski’s house was congenial, and here he could let himself go with abandon. ‘Everyone always wanted him to improvise,’ Magnuszewski’s sister recorded. ‘He never tried to wriggle out of this, but first he would ask my sister Klara, who had a beautiful voice, to sing something, and it was only afterwards that he would start. We would sit in silence for hours, listening to that music which fired our young souls, and afterwards we would usually start dancing. At that point the dreamy improviser would turn into a lusty player and start thundering out Mazurkas, Waltzes and Polkas until, tired of playing and eager to join in the dancing himself, he would cede the keyboard to a humbler replacement, Fontana, who played fluently and beautifully.’

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By mid-September, Chopin was trying out various movements of his new E minor Concerto in quartet or other forms, and on the twenty-second he arranged a full performance of the work in the Chopin apartment, again with a select audience of music-lovers, amongst whom were Count Skarbek, Grzymała and Witwicki. It was they who reviewed the event in the press and prompted a public clamour for Chopin to make himself heard. His travel plans had again been put off. He therefore agreed to give a concert, and what is more, invited Konstancja and her fellow pupils to take part in it. This entailed obtaining permission from the Minister of the Interior, which was not difficult, and also getting Kurpiński, who had a natural right to be the conductor, to cede his place to Soliva for the evening, which was a more delicate matter. This activity woke Chopin from his lethargy, and he was now seriously planning his departure as well. ‘A week after the concert at the latest I shall have left Warsaw,’ he wrote to Tytus, who had agreed to accompany him.

(#litres_trial_promo) Chopin was, for once, decided; he had bought a trunk and clothes, and was writing out the scores he would need on his travels.

The concert which took place on 11 October 1830, his last in his native country, went off perfectly. He played his E minor Concerto and the Fantasia on Polish Airs. The concerto benefited from the conducting of Soliva, who took it slowly and did not let the over-excited Chopin get carried away. ‘I was not the slightest bit nervous, and I played as I play when I’m alone,’ he wrote to Tytus. Konstancja sang an aria as never before and looked seductive, the other performances were good, and the Fantasia, which he played at the end, delighted him and the audience. ‘This time I understood what I was doing, the orchestra understood what they were doing, and the public understood as well,’ he wrote. ‘It seemed to me that I had never been so much at ease when playing with an orchestra.’

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Chopin was delighted with every aspect of the evening, but it is worth noting that the hall, with only seven hundred people in the audience, was not quite full, and that notwithstanding the deafening applause, there was only one review of the concert, and that a short one.

Chopin himself was convinced that the theatre had been full, and was probably relieved by the silence in the press. He was by now busy with the preparations for his departure, and had to pay farewell calls on all his acquaintances, many of whom gave him letters of introduction to friends and relatives in Vienna. On 25 October he called on Konstancja in order to take his leave.

At some stage in the course of the previous weeks Chopin had at last given her some intimation of his feelings, and he had apparently met with a good reception. Rings were exchanged and Chopin was allowed to write to her, through the discreet agency of Matuszyński. At this last meeting, she wrote a little verse into his album, which ended with the lines:

Others may value and reward you more.

But they can never love you more than we do.

[At some later date, Chopin added, in pencil: ‘Oh yes they can!’]

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On the evening of 1 November, a party of friends organised a farewell dinner attended by Nicolas Chopin, Żywny, Magnuszewski, Fontana and others. They sang, danced and played late into the night, after which they walked Chopin back to his house. The next morning he made his last farewells while Ludwika finished copying some of the scores he was taking with him, and in the afternoon the family accompanied him to the coaching station. Neither the young man nor his worried family knew how long he would be away or how he would fare alone in the world.

The coach trundled away, through the dingy western suburb of Wola, but was stopped just after passing the city gates. It was surrounded by a group of men, who turned out to be Elsner with a small male choir. To the accompaniment of a guitar, they performed a cantata which the old man had composed for the occasion. It exhorted Chopin to remember his motherland, and to keep its harmonies in his soul wherever he might find himself. There was something prophetic, both in the words and in the emotion with which Elsner embraced his pupil, as though he never expected to see him again. After the last tearful embrace, Chopin climbed back into the coach, which rolled away, bearing him off from his native land for ever.

FIVE Vienna (#ulink_db810752-2a7a-5779-b7e2-28effe74f707)

Chopin was not alone for long. At Kalisz, the first halt, he was joined by Tytus, whose company quickly banished the sorrows of leave-taking. Together they went on to Breslau, where they spent four days. One afternoon they wandered idly into the Merchants’ Hall to find a rehearsal for the evening’s concert in progress. During a break, Chopin sat down at the piano and started showing off. The local pianist who was billed to play at the concert heard him and immediately renounced his role in terror, with the result that the unsuspecting public were that evening treated not to the Moscheles concerto advertised, but to Chopin playing two movements of his E minor Concerto as a solo.

From Breslau they travelled to Dresden, which Chopin knew already. He revisited the art gallery, its main attraction for him. ‘There are pictures there at the sight of which I hear music,’ he explained to his parents in one of the very few references he ever made to the other arts.

(#litres_trial_promo) Chopin liked the beautiful eighteenth-century city, with its large Polish colony surviving from the days when Poland and Saxony had been united under one crown, but he was less keen on the traditional form of transport, the sedan chair, which made him feel foolish as he was carried to a soirée.

He called on the principal musical figures in the city, some of whom suggested that he give a concert before moving on. But he refused. A concert in Dresden would have earned him some money and would certainly not have done his reputation any harm, but he was in such a sanguine frame of mind that he thought it a waste of time; he was in a hurry to reach Vienna. He felt he knew Vienna and that Vienna knew and valued him, and it was in high spirits that he arrived there on 22 November 1830.

‘How happy I am to have reached Vienna, where I shall make so many interesting and useful acquaintances, and where I may even fall in love!’ he wrote to Matuszyński the moment he and Tytus had settled into their rooms at the Stadt London Hotel.

(#litres_trial_promo) That evening they went off to the opera to see Rossini’s Otello, eyeing the girls in the street on the way (although Chopin did not fail to insert a pious reference to Konstancja in his letter to the go-between Matuszyński).

The next morning he received the greatest possible compliment of a visit from Hummel. Such a mark of respect from the most eminent composer left in what was still the capital of music could not have failed to encourage Chopin’s boldest expectations. But these were a little clouded later that morning by the publisher Haslinger, whom he hastened to call on. Haslinger had probably lost money on the La ci darem la mano Variations, and had therefore not published the C minor Sonata (op.4) or the variations that Chopin had left with him on his previous visit. He declared that he had no intention of giving Chopin any money for the two concertos he had brought him. He did intimate that he might consider publishing one of them if Chopin let him have the copyright for nothing, but Chopin was determined not to let himself be exploited further. ‘From now on it’s: “Pay up, Animal!”’ he announced in a letter to his family, explaining that he was growing wary of the ‘crooks and Jews’ who stood between him and making money.

(#litres_trial_promo) With the reputation he had built up and the contacts he had made, he felt he could afford to be firm with them.

After a few days Chopin and Tytus moved to a cheaper hotel while they waited for the lodgings they had found to be vacated by their current tenant, an English admiral. ‘An Admiral! Yes, but I shall be held in admiration, so the lodgings will lose nothing in the change!’ Chopin blustered in his letter home.

(#litres_trial_promo) The three spacious rooms were ‘beautifully, luxuriously and elegantly furnished’, the rent was low, and the landlady, a pretty young widow who professed a love for Poles and contempt for Austrians and Germans, had been to Warsaw and had heard of Chopin. But it was the position of the apartment, on the third floor of a house on the Kohlmarkt, which particularly delighted the two young men. As Chopin pointed out to his parents, it was ‘right in the centre of town, with a wonderful promenade below’, the music shop of Artaria on the left, and those of Mechetti and Haslinger on the right, and the opera just behind – ‘what else could one possibly need?’

(#litres_trial_promo) Graf, whose soft-toned pianos enchanted him, and to whose shop he had been going every afternoon in order to ‘loosen [his] fingers after the journey’, had promised to move an instrument into the lodgings free of charge, and this would enable Chopin to invite people to come and listen to him.

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His immediate preoccupation was to arrange a concert, and he duly called on musicians and others who might help him in this purpose. He looked up Nidecki, who had settled in Vienna, and the composer Czerny, who was in a tremendously good mood, having just finished writing out ‘an overture for eight pianos and sixteen players’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Old Würfel, now bedridden with tuberculosis, proffered advice on where the concert should be held and which of the two concertos Chopin should play. He was categorical that Chopin should under no circumstances perform free, advice which was seconded by Count Husarzewski and others who promised to help organise the event.

One of the most prominent of these was a new acquaintance, the imperial physician and erstwhile friend of Beethoven, Dr Giovanni Malfatti, who had a somewhat unusual position both at court and in Viennese society. Chopin had a letter of introduction to Malfatti’s wife, a Polish countess, and was greeted ‘like a member of the family’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The doctor promised to introduce him to the most notable musical personages and to arrange a concert for him at court, which was not immediately possible since this was in mourning following the recent death of the King of Naples.

‘I shall be giving a concert, but where, when and how, I still cannot say,’ Chopin wrote home at the end of his first week, which ‘flew by’. He basked in the novelty of living in his own rooms, of eating out in the restaurants Mozart and Beethoven had frequented, of spending his days entirely as he wished and of going to the opera almost every evening. He went five times during the first week, three of them to operas he did not know – Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, Auber’s Fra Diavolo and Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. He found the standard of singing just as high as in the previous year, and what was most welcome to him was the continual change of programme, which meant that he could rapidly improve his education in this field.

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Chopin was suffering from a cold, or ‘swollen nose’ as he put it, which is why he did not immediately call on the grander ladies to whom he had introductions. As soon as he recovered, however, he began to make up for lost time, and called on Countess Rzewuska, at whose home he expected to meet ‘the cream of Viennese society’, and several other Polish ladies married to Austrians. He also delivered his most important letter of introduction, from Grand Duke Constantine to Countess Tatischev, wife of the Russian ambassador. It was while he was awaiting her pleasure to receive him that, on 5 December, news arrived from Warsaw which shattered his hopes.

On 29 November, revolution had broken out in the Polish capital. The Grand Duke had narrowly escaped being assassinated in the Belvedere by a group of cadets, while the Russian troops in the city were attacked and disarmed by bands of patriots. Although the reports were far from clear, both Chopin and Tytus were well aware of what lay behind them and of what probably lay ahead – national insurrection and armed conflict with Russia. After emotional deliberations lasting all night, Tytus prepared to return to Warsaw in order to fight in the national cause, but Chopin was prevailed upon to remain in Vienna.

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‘After Tytus left, too much suddenly fell on my shoulders,’ Chopin complained.

(#litres_trial_promo) He was utterly unprepared, either practically or psychologically, to cope on his own, and he naturally fretted about family and friends in Warsaw. More to the point, events taking place there had a direct bearing on his position in Vienna. Austria was one of the three powers that had dismembered and abolished the Polish state at the end of the previous century, and while a degree of cordiality reigned between Poles and Austrians at the social level, their national interests were diametrically opposed. Events taking place in Warsaw did not directly threaten anyone in Vienna, but they evoked hostility and apprehension. Although after the initial outburst the leadership of the Polish rising was assumed by Prince Adam Czartoryski, Viennese society shared Metternich’s view that it was a revolution against the established order of Europe, and it was feared and disapproved of as much as the French Revolution had been. Even in the cheap trattoria where he sometimes took his dinner, Chopin overheard remarks such as ‘God made a mistake in creating the Poles,’ and ‘Nothing worthwhile has ever come out of Poland,’ which he took as personal as well as national insults.

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