Chopin

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperPress in 2010

Copyright © Adam Zamoyski 2010

Adam Zamoyski asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007341849

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2010 ISBN: 9780007351824

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To Emma

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Illustrations

Preface

One A Prodigy Restrained

Two School Days

Three Musical Genius

Four Adolescent Passions

Five Vienna

Six Romantic Paris

Seven Pianist à la Mode

Eight Second Love

Nine Art and Politics

Ten Love Above All

Eleven Conjugal Life

Twelve The Church of Chopin

Thirteen The End of the Affair

Fourteen An Ugly Fracas

Fifteen London and Scotland

Sixteen The Jealousy of Heaven

Appendix A

Appendix B

Notes

Sources

Index

Other Books By

About the Publisher

ILLUSTRATIONS

Justyna Chopin.

Nicolas Chopin.

The house at Żelazowa Wola in which Chopin was born.

Ludwika Chopin.

Izabela Chopin.

Emilia Chopin.

The Warsaw Lycée.

The Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw.

Wojciech Żywny.

The drawing room of the Chopin apartment.

Józef Elsner.

Tytus Woyciechowski.

Chopin drawn by Eliza Radziwiłł, 1826.

Chopin at the age of twenty, by Ambroży Mieroszewski.

Konstancja Gładkowska.

Jan Matuszyński.

Chopin, portrait by an unknown artist, early 1830s.

Hector Berlioz.

Franz Liszt.

Felix Mendelssohn.

Hiller and Chopin, a contemporary medal.

Vincenzo Bellini.

Chopin in the mid-1830s.

Delfina Potocka.

Chopin’s apartment on the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin.

Astolphe de Custine.

Wojciech Grzymała.

Julian Fontana.

Maria Wodzińska.

Chopin, watercolour by Maria Wodzińska, 1836.

George Sand.

Marie d’Agoult.

George Sand’s house at Nohant.

Chopin in the early 1840s.

Chopin, drawing by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1847.

Ignaz Moscheles.

Pauline Garcia-Viardot.

Auguste Franchomme.

Adam Mickiewicz, sketch by Delacroix.

Stefan Witwicki.

Bohdan Zaleski.

Eugène Delacroix.

Chopin, caricature by Pauline Viardot, 1844.

Marcelina Czartoryska.

Maria Kalergis.

Chopin, photograph taken during the last months of his life.

Jane Stirling.

Preface

Two centuries have passed since Chopin came into this world, yet his legacy is all around us today. The quiet revolution he wrought influenced the development of Western music profoundly, and he is still one of the very few most widely studied and revered composers. For many, he is the object of a cult. Yet most people know little of his life, of the man, his thoughts and his feelings; his public image is a sugary blur of sentimentality and melodrama.

The aim of this book is to cut through the myths and legends, to delve into everyday reality in order to tell the story of his life, and to reveal all that can be discovered of Chopin as a person. I had already attempted this in a previous book, published in 1979, and since this has been out of print for many years, I decided to update it, taking into account all the new material that has come to light and the many excellent studies on specific aspects of Chopin’s life that have appeared since then.

I also decided that some of these were worth exploring further. I felt I should devote more space to the composer’s state of health, which has been the subject of professional study in recent years. And I wished to place him within the intellectual and spiritual environment of his day, about which I had learnt much in the intervening period. In the process, I found myself reworking the text thoroughly. So, although I held to my original approach and did not fundamentally alter the structure, I believe this to be in many respects a different book, and that is why I have issued it under a new title.

Adam Zamoyski

London, 2009

ONE A Prodigy Restrained

On 30 October 1849 a large crowd gathered at the church of La Madeleine in Paris, and hundreds of carriages clogged the surrounding streets, causing a jam that stretched as far as the place de la Concorde. The front of the enormous temple-like church was draped with panels of black velvet bearing the initials ‘F.C.’ embroidered in silver. Entry was by ticket only, and those who had not managed to obtain one thronged the monumental steps.

‘At noon, the grim servants of death appeared at the entrance to the temple bearing the coffin of the great artist. At the same time a funeral march familiar to all admirers of Chopin burst from the recesses of the choir. A shiver of death ran through the congregation,’ recalled the French poet Théophile Gautier. ‘As for me, I fancied I could see the sun grow pale and the gilding of the domes take on an evil greenish tint…’1

Mozart’s Requiem was sung, with the legendary mezzo-soprano Pauline Garcia-Viardot and the famous bass Luigi Lablache supported by the orchestra and choir of the Paris Conservatoire, the finest in Europe. During the offertory, the organist of the Madeleine played two of Chopin’s preludes.

After the service, the coffin was borne from the church to the cemetery of Père Lachaise. The mourners were led by Prince Adam Czartoryski, widely regarded as Poland’s uncrowned king, and the pall-bearers included the most famous operatic composer of the day, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and the painter Eugène Delacroix. Behind the coffin came dozens of musicians and artists, and thousands of the dead man’s friends and admirers, with even the grandest ladies walking on foot, their escutcheoned carriages following in a long cortège. At the cemetery, the coffin was lowered into the grave without a homily, and the mourners dispersed in silence.2

With the possible exception of Beethoven, no musician had ever had such a splendid funeral, and few have been so mourned. A year later, a monument was placed over the grave, and this quickly became, and remains to this day, not only a place of pilgrimage but also the recipient of letters and messages. Some merely express admiration and gratitude, but most are personal communications, often passionate and sometimes pathological in nature, professing a decidedly possessive love.

Chopin has been worshipped not only for his music, but for himself, and not only worshipped but desired and appropriated. This most private and diffident of men has been taken over by musicians, musicologists, artists, biographers, film-makers and even politicians who believed they understood him and knew him intimately, moulding his image to their own purposes. Musicians have imposed their own often highly subjective interpretations on his music, musicologists have rewritten it, artists have painted him as they would like to see him, biographers have introduced their own dramatic imagination into his life, film-makers have dripped blood on the keyboard and politicians have attempted to claim him, for France, for Poland, for Slavdom and even for Poland’s Jewish community.

Chopin was reticent by nature and extremely guarded when it came to private matters. He was too lazy to keep a diary and too self-deprecating to write his memoirs. He left no wife or son who might fashion his image for posterity. This left the field open to acquaintances who, as is usual in such cases, adapted or invented in order to project the desired image of themselves. The majority of Chopin’s private papers were destroyed, in two world wars, a national insurrection and a personal vendetta. Biographers have therefore resorted to speculation and fantasy to fill the gaps, with every generation projecting its own aesthetics and desires on the blank canvas. It is only comparatively recently that historical discipline was brought to bear, and that the composer’s origins have been fully established.

They lie with a family of indigent peasants by the name of Chapin who moved at the end of the seventeenth century from the village of Saint-Crépin in the Dauphiné region of France to the more prosperous duchy of Lorraine. By the mid-eighteenth century they were wine-growers and wheelwrights in the village of Marainville-sur-Madon in the Vosges, and their name had changed to Chopin. The Duchy of Lorraine was then ruled by King Stanisław Leszczyński, father-in-law of Louis XV, who had received it in 1737 as a consolation prize for losing his Polish throne, and it became home to many of his Polish supporters and courtiers. It was in Marainville that the composer’s father, Nicolas, was born in 1771, to François Chopin, the village administrator (though there was a persistent rumour, allegedly encouraged in later life by Nicolas himself, that he was the natural son of the local châtelain, a courtier of King Stanisław).

In 1780 the château of Marainville was bought by a Polish nobleman, Michał Jan Pac. His estate manager, Adam Weydlich, also a Pole, was married to a middle-class Parisienne who, it seems, taught the young Nicolas Chopin to read and write, and possibly to play the flute. When, after the death of Pac and the sale of the estate in 1787, the Weydlichs returned to Poland, they took the sixteen-year-old Nicolas with them. In Warsaw, he was installed in the household of Weydlich’s brother Franciszek, who taught German and Latin at the Cadet School. He earned his keep by working for a couple of years as accountant at the Warsaw tobacco factory and, after it closed in 1789, acting as tutor to the Weydlich children. He was honest and reliable, and must have acquired a considerable degree of education, as well as well-placed protectors, as he then became tutor to the son of the mayor of Warsaw, Jan Dekert, and in 1792 to the children of the Dziewanowski family on their estate at Szafarnia.

Two years earlier, an opportunity had presented itself to Nicolas to visit his family in Marainville, as someone had to go there in connection with Pac’s estate. But he did not avail himself of this, and indeed appears never to have sought to make contact with them again. He was also probably discouraged from going by the possibility of being trapped in revolutionary France and even drafted into the army. This did not shield him from war, which came in 1792, when Russian armies invaded Poland. After a brief campaign, the country lost a large part of its territory to Russia and a smaller one to Prussia, and was occupied by Russian troops. In 1794 a national insurrection broke out in an attempt to liberate the country from Russian control. Nicolas Chopin enlisted in the Warsaw militia, and was wounded in the Russian assault on the city, which effectively put an end to the insurrection.3

Later that year or at the beginning of the next, he moved to the country estate of Kiernozia, to act as father-figure as well as tutor to the newly orphaned children of Maciej Łączyński (one of whom, Maria, was to become famous after her marriage to Anastazy Walewski as Napoleon’s mistress). Nicolas remained there until 1802, when he moved to a similar job in the household of Count Skarbek on the estate of Żelazowa Wola, where he looked after the Count’s four children. In 1806 the thirty-five-year-old Nicolas Chopin married Tekla Justyna Krzyżanowska, the reputedly beautiful and sweet-natured twenty-four-year-old daughter of an impoverished nobleman who had worked for Skarbek as an estate manager.

The following year the Chopins had a daughter, Ludwika, and moved into one of the outbuildings of the manor, a spacious single-storey house with a thatched roof, in which they occupied a couple of rooms. It was in one of these whitewashed rooms with its clay floor that their son was born in 1810. He was christened Fryderyk Franciszek in honour of his godfather, the young Count Fryderyk Skarbek, and Nicolas Chopin’s own father, François. The baptismal register of the parish church of Brochów, near Żelazowa Wola, states that the child was born on 22 February, but the Chopin family and the composer himself always gave the date of his birth as 1 March. To complicate matters further, his age was consistently increased by a year whenever he was mentioned in the press or appeared in public as a child, giving rise to the impression, held by some of his friends, that he had been born in 1809. The parish register is not a record of birth, and the date mentioned would have been supplied by Nicolas Chopin or his wife. There is therefore no reason to favour either date, and one can only be thankful that the year, 1810, is certainly accurate.4

The Chopins moved to Warsaw only six months after the birth of their son. The city and its surrounding area had been liberated from foreign rule following Napoleon’s victory at Jena in 1806, and in 1807 reconstituted as a new state, the Duchy of Warsaw. Politically a satellite of France, the Duchy was modelled on the French pattern, and the French language became more of a necessity than a luxury, which favoured Nicolas Chopin. He obtained a post teaching French at the Warsaw high school, the Lycée (Liceum), starting in October 1810, and later another at one of the military training schools.

Warsaw was an unusual metropolis, whose aspect reflected its chequered past. There was a medieval walled city jostling for space on the escarpment overlooking the Vistula with the Royal Castle, by then sadly dilapidated. To the south of this stretched a few elegant eighteenth-century streets and, beyond that, a curiously rural city of palaces and villas, many with extensive grounds, interspersed with humbler dwellings and wooden hovels. One traveller likened it to a drawing room full of furniture, some of it very fine, which had never been properly arranged. Many of the palaces had become public buildings, while others had been divided up into apartments.

The Lycée was housed in a redundant palace built by the Saxon kings of Poland, a grandiose eighteenth-century building with white stucco façades. As there was no accommodation provided for pupils from the country, teachers were encouraged to take apartments in one of the wings of the palace if they were prepared to take in paying boarders. The thrifty Nicolas Chopin seized on this opportunity to increase his income, and moved into the Saxon Palace with his family. He took in six boys, who slept in two rooms and took all their meals with the family.

Nicolas identified himself entirely with his adopted country, and considered himself a Pole. In this he was not being eccentric. Most of his colleagues at the Lycée, from the Rector Samuel Bogumil Linde down, were of foreign origin, and sported names such as Kolberg, Ciampi and Vogel, but had become enthusiastically Polish in outlook. Nicolas Chopin always insisted on speaking Polish, and would not tolerate any other language in his home, even though he spoke it badly and had to resort to French when writing letters.

He was a competent teacher, stern and literal, and was described by one of his pupils as ‘a rather ceremoniously grave personage with a certain elegance of manner’.5 He was not religious, and felt no reverence for the institutions of monarchy and aristocracy, but he was no revolutionary; he believed firmly in acknowledging the ruling power and accepting the limits imposed by the society he lived in. His attitude to art and music was prosaic, although he played the flute a little, until his baby son broke it, and later took up the violin.

The only artistic influence in the household was provided by Justyna, who could play the piano well and sing quite respectably. In contrast to her husband, she was very religious. She was gentle and quiet, but although her role in the family was confined to that of mother and housekeeper, she stood out by her dignified bearing and social graces. Her presence was a considerable comfort to her son, providing as it did a counterbalance to his severe, scrupulous and pedantic father. The eldest daughter, Ludwika, was intelligent and gifted, and also played the piano well from an early age. Izabela, born a couple of years after Fryderyk, was a spirited girl with no intellectual or artistic pretensions, but the youngest, Emilia, was exceptionally gifted, writing poetry by the age of eight.

The little Chopin was of delicate health. Slightly built and chronically underweight, he was prone to all the ailments of childhood. Such staples as smallpox threatened, and it was impossible to avoid contact with the ubiquitous tuberculosis, which would carry away one of his siblings, at least one of his teachers, several of his father’s boarders and eventually his father too. He needed a well-ordered childhood and healthy conditions if he was to survive for long, and the Chopin household provided this.

In 1817 the Lycée was moved to a less grandiose but more appropriate site. This was the Kazimierzowski Palace, a much-reconstructed seventeenth-century former royal residence, a large building with a colonnaded portico flanked by two detached wings. The Chopins occupied an apartment in one of the wings, and now took in ten boarders. The palace was pleasantly situated in what had once been a botanical garden, which sloped away towards the Vistula behind the main building, and the Chopin children, along with those of other teachers and the boarders, made this territory their own.

The various stories which have been dredged up in order to illustrate Chopin’s extraordinary sensitivity as a baby – that he would burst into tears if someone played the piano badly, or, alternatively, sit for hours under the instrument listening in spellbound rapture – can be disregarded. They are the sort of detail that someone ‘remembers’ fifty years later, and even if true are largely meaningless, for there can be few babies who will not either bawl their heads off or else listen in fascination if a musical instrument is played in their presence. One cannot ascribe this to artistic sensitivity at the nappy stage, any more than one can believe a story coined after the composer’s death to the effect that one night he crawled out of his cot, hoisted himself onto the piano stool and began to improvise Polonaises, to the astonishment of his family, drawn from their beds by the sound of music.

Chopin was introduced to the piano by his mother when he was four, and by the age of six he was noted for his ability to play relatively difficult pieces as well as for his gift for playing around with a few notes or a motif and producing simple melodic variations. In 1816 he started taking piano lessons from an old friend of his father’s, the sixty-year-old Adalbert Żywny. Żywny had come to Poland from his native Bohemia and played the violin in a Polish aristocrat’s court orchestra before becoming a freelance music teacher in Warsaw. He was a tall man with a huge purple nose and no teeth. He wore a lopsided, old-fashioned and yellowed wig, and a thickly quilted frock-coat of eighteenth-century cut, which, along with his cravat, his waistcoat and even his vast Hungarian boots, was thoroughly impregnated with snuff. He never bathed, confining himself to a rub-down with vodka on hot summer days, and his only attempt at elegance was a collection of fancy waistcoats. These he had had made up from a job lot of breeches he had bought cheaply when King Stanisław Augustus’s wardrobe was auctioned off after the last partition of Poland in 1795. It is not clear whether this rather curious link with Poland’s glorious past was intentional or not, but Żywny too had become very Polish, not the least of the attributes which endeared him to Nicolas Chopin. Little Chopin adored him, and he became a regular visitor to the household, usually dining with the family and often spending his evenings with them.6

Żywny was an eighteenth-century musician; his gods were Bach, Haydn and Mozart. The only contemporary composers he acknowledged were Hummel and Moscheles, he had no time for Beethoven or Weber, and positively hated the new Italian school of Spontini and Rossini. His pedagogic method was much as one might expect. ‘Apart from his commodious half-pound snuff-box, the lid of which was decorated with a portrait of Mozart or possibly Haydn, and his large red chequered kerchief,’ wrote one of his pupils, ‘Żywny always had about him a gigantic square pencil which he used for correcting printers’ errors in the scores, or else for rapping his less diligent pupils over the head or knuckles.’7 He was in many ways an unlikely person to initiate one of the nineteenth century’s most revolutionary composers; yet he proved an ideal teacher, because of his limitations rather than in spite of them.

By the time Żywny had come to teach Chopin, the boy had already developed a familiarity with the keyboard which he himself probably lacked. ‘The mechanism of playing took you but little time, and it was your mind rather than your fingers that strained,’ Nicolas Chopin later wrote to his son, adding that ‘where others have spent days struggling at the keyboard, you hardly ever spent a whole hour at it’.8 Faced with this prodigy, Żywny wisely refrained from interfering. Not being a pianist himself, the only thing he could have taught Chopin was the accepted method of fingering and the traditional hand movements. In view of the boy’s instinctive dexterity, he did not bother with these technicalities. Instead, he concentrated on acquainting his pupil with great music, by guiding him through the keyboard works of Bach, Haydn and Mozart, as well as a little Hummel, explaining the theory behind them as he went.

The result of this unorthodox musical education was that Chopin was allowed to develop his own method of playing, hitting the notes he wanted with the fingers he thought appropriate, not with those specified by textbooks. At the same time he developed a love for and an understanding of the great classical composers which he was never to lose, and which was to set him apart from most of his contemporaries.