Chopin
Prince of the Romantics
Adam Zamoyski

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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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.

This musical education was complemented by the music Chopin heard in homes and drawing rooms around Warsaw. Some of this was taken from the popular Italian operas of the day, but much of it was national in character. Polish piano music was dominated by the Polonaise, a musical form built on the rhythm of a slow, minuet-like court dance dating back to the sixteenth century. This rhythm had been familiar to many composers, including Bach, Telemann and Mozart, but they had merely used it as a tempo for melodies of their own. Towards the end of the eighteenth century Polish composers had begun to write Polonaises of a more authentic character. The trend was taken up by Prince Michał Kleofas Ogiński, a distinguished amateur composer, as well as the pianist Marya Szymanowska, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century the Polonaise had started a new life as a short piece for the piano.

Unsurprisingly, Chopin’s own first steps in composition took this form. By the age of seven he was already composing short pieces which Żywny would help him write out, as he had not yet mastered this skill. Few of these survive. Those that do are unremarkable, and are only impressive if the boy’s age is taken into account. It was in 1817 that Chopin’s first printed work appeared, privately published by Canon Cybulski of St Mary’s church, a friend of the Chopin family. It was entitled ‘Polonaise in G minor, dedicated to Her Excellency Countess Victoria Skarbek, composed by Frederick Chopin, a musician aged 8’. It is probable that his godfather, Count Fryderyk Skarbek, who had just returned from studies abroad and taken up a teaching post at Warsaw University, had helped to pay for this, which would account for the dedication to his sister. His godfather was also responsible for the article on Chopin which appeared in January 1818 in the Warsaw Recorder (Pamiętnik Warszawski) and hailed the young composer as ‘a true musical genius’. ‘Not only can he play with great facility and perfect taste the most difficult compositions for the piano,’ Skarbek wrote, ‘he is also the composer of several dances and variations which do not cease to amaze the connoisseurs.’⁹

The first known reference to Chopin’s appearance outside the family circle is to be found in the diary of a young lady who went to a soirée at Countess Grabowska’s, where ‘young Chopin played the piano, a child in his eighth year whom the connoisseurs declare to be Mozart’s successor’.¹⁰ Countess Grabowska, a friend of the Skarbeks, was the wife of one of the governors of Warsaw University, who was later to become Director of the Government Commission on Education. He belonged to a conservative patriotic milieu which had adopted a pragmatic approach to the realities of Poland’s position.

After Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, the whole of Poland had been overrun by Russian troops, and Tsar Alexander was determined to hold on to as much of it as possible. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815 he managed to force through his solution to the Polish problem and created a small Kingdom of Poland whose constitutional king was the Tsar of Russia. It was a precarious compromise, and while many patriots regarded it as little better than captivity, a group of aristocrats worked at promoting the national cause within the limited autonomy it allowed.

The prime salon of this circle was that of the Blue Palace, the Warsaw residence of Count Stanisław Zamoyski. It was also the Warsaw home of his brother-in-law Prince Adam Czartoryski, whose close friendship with Tsar Alexander, distinguished diplomatic career and position as head of what was arguably the richest and most influential family in the Kingdom, made him a key figure in Polish society and politics. The Blue Palace was frequented by the most venerable figures of the past as well as the youngest members of the Polish aristocracy. Countess Zamoyska and her sister, Princess Marya of Württemberg, organised entertainments and thés dansants for children between the ages of eight and twelve, designed to instil good manners and patriotic values, which Chopin probably attended.¹¹

The Countess was also the founder of the Warsaw Benevolent Society, and it was not long before she recognised Chopin’s fund-raising potential. Julian Niemcewicz, the poet and Nestor of Polish literature, a devotee of the Blue Palace, describes a meeting of the Society in one of his one-act plays:

The Countess: You see how little money we have; all our efforts come to nothing. We are begging high and low, but everyone is deaf to us, or rather, to the voice of the poor. There is nothing for it but to carry on with our usual methods, but with certain modifications. I flatter myself that Monsieur Łubieński and I have perfected our techniques. There is to be a concert next Tuesday in which little Chopin is to play; if we were to print on the bills that Chopin is only three years old, everyone would come running to see the prodigy. Just think how many people would come and how much money we would collect!

All: Bravo! Bravo! A wonderful idea, excellent! Let us print on the bills that Chopin is only three years old!

Princess Sapieha: I think it would make even more of a sensation if we wrote on the bills that little Chopin will be carried in by his nanny.

All: Bravo! Bravo! What a capital idea, princess! ¹²

What was probably the first of these concerts took place on 24 February 1818. Whatever the bills may finally have said, the press notice actually gave Chopin an extra year, stating that he was nine. The concert took place in the ballroom of a public building often used for such events, the former Radziwiłł Palace, and Chopin played a concerto by the Czech composer Adalbert Gyrowetz. It was his first appearance before such a large audience, and almost certainly the first time he had performed a work of this length.

After this event Chopin’s fame spread throughout the capital, and it was not long before a carriage would draw up before the Chopin apartment to carry the eight-year-old boy off to the Belvedere Palace, the residence of Tsar Alexander’s brother Grand Duke Constantine, commander-in-chief of the Polish army. Constantine was a martinet who spent his days drilling his soldiers mercilessly, often forcing them to perform feats that could only end in their death or that of their horses. He epitomised everything that was grotesque and brutal about Russian rule in Poland, and he was universally reviled.

Nicolas Chopin was not one to allow sentiment to get in the way of his son’s prospects. It was an honour for the boy to be asked to play at the Belvedere, and a triumph when it turned out that he could soothe the Grand Duke’s notorious fits of temper with his playing. Chopin presented him with a military march of his own composition, and it was said the Grand Duke was so delighted that he had it scored for full military band and played at parades. What was more remarkable was that Chopin was not fetched merely to entertain the Grand Duke and his wife, but to play with his beloved natural son and Alexandrine de Moriolles, the daughter of his tutor.¹³

Chopin’s was an unusual upbringing; from his sheltered home with its middle-class atmosphere, he was propelled into some of the most elegant drawing rooms in Europe, where he performed before the greatest personages in the country, was spoilt by their wives, and played on an equal footing with their children. He quickly acquired polished manners as well as an ability to feel at ease in the most exalted company and mix with any kind of person, and while he was sociable and a little precocious, he was not, by all accounts, conceited. There is a plausible anecdote relating to one of his first public appearances; when he returned home, his mother asked him what the audience had liked best, to which he is alleged to have replied: ‘My new English collar.’ Whether this is true or not, it is in character, as he would remain remarkably modest about his music throughout his life. This was largely the consequence of his father’s determination not to let his talent go to his head, and insistence on treating his son’s gift as a pleasant amenity rather than the central feature of his life. This redounds to Nicolas Chopin’s credit, consider ing how ruthlessly most child prodigies were exploited by their parents.

Nicolas Chopin was a product of the eighteenth century, and to him the profession of musician was hardly more respectable than that of actor. Having risen in the world himself, he was determined that his son should continue the ascent. Even when obliged to acknowledge his son’s exceptional gift, he would not allow him to exploit it in what he considered a socially demeaning way.

Chopin was shown off whenever this might improve his prospects. In 1818 the mother of Tsar Alexander and Grand Duke Constantine, the Empress Maria Feodorovna, visited Warsaw and indulged in the usual round of visiting institutions and schools. When she graced his class at the Lycée, the eight-year-old Chopin presented her with two Polonaises. At the end of 1819, when the famous singer Angelica Catalani came to give some concerts in Warsaw, the boy was again exhibited; she was so impressed that she presented him with an inscribed gold watch. He was also a regular performer at the Benevolent Society’s concerts, and often played at soirées in aristocratic houses. Charity events were permissible, as he performed alongside aristocratic amateur musicians or children reciting poetry, but there was no question of the boy playing for money or taking part in commercial concerts, for that would have branded him as a professional musician.

How Chopin saw himself by the time he had reached the age of eight is impossible to tell, but one thing is certain: that he already knew music to be his most personal form of expression. Every year on his name day in December, Nicolas Chopin was presented with little hand-painted greetings from his son. The verse offering for 1818 opens with the words: ‘Dearly beloved father; it would be easier for me to express my feelings in musical phrases…’¹⁴

He had by now learned to write down music, as can be seen from the beautifully written-out Polonaise he dedicated and presented to Żywny on the latter’s birthday in 1821, one of the few surviving compositions of this period. The majority of the pieces he wrote at this time remained in manuscript form among his own papers, with which they were later destroyed by Russian troops, or were written into albums, most of which suffered similar fates. Judging from the one or two pieces which have survived, they were clever but hardly distinguished.

At about the same time it became clear that Żywny’s task was over, and that there was no more he could do for Chopin. He remained a close friend of the family and often brought his violin to play duets with his pupil, but stopped giving him lessons.

While Żywny was not replaced by another teacher, and Chopin essentially worked at the piano on his own, he was not left entirely without guidance. The piano and organ teacher at the Conservatoire, the Bohemian-born Wilhelm Vaclav Würfel, who had worked in Vienna where he won the admiration of Beethoven, was a friend of the Chopin household, and he guided the boy on a friendly basis.

Another who contributed to Chopin’s musical education was Józef Elsner, a Silesian who had established himself in Warsaw some thirty years before. He was a prolific composer of operas, masses, oratorios, symphonies and chamber music, whose recently revived works reveal him as an interesting and original musician. He was also an excellent teacher, and had been appointed head of the newly founded Warsaw Conservatoire.

He was interested in drawing Chopin into this institution, so he gave him a few lessons in musical theory and presented him with a book on the rules of harmony. But for the time being Nicolas Chopin’s views on the boy’s future prevailed, and he would have no formal musical instruction over the next four years.

TWO School Days

The review of a charity concert in which Chopin had taken part in February 1823 concluded with the following observation:

The latest number of the Leipzig musical gazette reports, in an article from Vienna, that an equally young amateur by the name of List [sic] astonished everyone there by the precision, the self-assurance, and the strength of tone with which he executed a concerto by Hummel. After this musical evening, we shall certainly not envy Vienna their Mr List, as our capital possesses one equal to him, and perhaps even superior, in the shape of young Mr Chopin…¹

Chopin himself would not have envied the Viennese prodigy. For while Franz Liszt, one year his junior, was steered into the gruelling career of performing musician, Chopin enjoyed a normal childhood. Later that year he donned the semi-military uniform of blue frock-coat with a single row of buttons and a high collar with a white stripe on it, and joined the fourth form of the Warsaw Lycée like any other schoolboy.

While he was by no means robust, he was neither sickly nor timid, and was among the most popular members of his class. Unaffected and unselfconscious as he was, ‘little Frycek’ had no difficulty in making friends. He won the avuncular and slightly protective friendship of older boys, such as Jan Białobłocki and Tytus Woyciechowski, respectively five and two years his senior. But he was also at the heart of a gang of the livelier members of his own class, such as Dominik Dziewanowski, Julian Fontana and Jan Matuszyński.

Chopin had an irreverent wit and a keen eye for the ridiculous. He drew incisive caricatures and satirised Poles speaking French or foreigners speaking Polish. He fooled about on the piano, making musical jokes or providing an accompaniment to stories. But it was his gift for mimicry that really astonished people. He could transform not only his expression, but his very appearance, and was barely recognisable when imitating one of the Lycée masters or some public figure. Many years later, the celebrated French actor Pierre Bocage was to say that Chopin had wasted his talents by becoming a musician.

But while he neglected no opportunity for fun, Chopin also worked hard, and at the end of the academic year in July 1824 he collected the fourth-form prize jointly with Jan Matuszyński. The real prize, however, was an invitation to go and stay in the country with his classmate Dominik Dziewanowski.

Apart from the occasional short visit the Chopin family had made to the Skarbeks at Żelazowa Wola, this was Chopin’s first real taste of the country. The Dziewanowski estate, Szafarnia, lay not far from Żelazowa Wola, on the flat Mazovian plain, west and slightly north of Warsaw, the only part of the Polish countryside with which Chopin was ever to become familiar. The estates in that area were not rich, and the country houses reflected this. The house at Szafarnia has not survived, but it probably conformed to the general pattern of timber or rendered brick manor houses: long and low, classical in style, with a colonnaded portico. These houses were often elegant, occasionally even grandiose in their conception, but the execution was sometimes rustic. The same went for life inside them, with the accent on comfort: there would be a piano in a fine drawing room, but there might be geese wandering about the back porch.

Chopin’s holiday in Szafarnia had undoubtedly been dictated, at least in part, by concern for his health, which was far from good; it is possible that he had contracted tuberculosis, which was widespread. He was armed with pills and put on a strict diet: six or seven cups of acorn coffee per day, various tisanes, plenty of food, a little sweet wine, very ripe fruit, but, much to his chagrin, no bread.

This did not mar his enjoyment, and his letters home are full of the excitement caused by the novelty of his experiences. The books he had brought from Warsaw were hardly opened, and although he played the piano a great deal, he wrote little during his stay. Most of his time was spent out of doors, running about with his friend Dominik, going for drives through the surrounding countryside, visiting their friend Jan Białobłocki, whose parents’ estate lay not far away, and even riding. ‘Don’t ask whether I ride well or not,’ he wrote to a friend in Warsaw, ‘but I do ride; that is to say the horse goes slowly where it wants, and I sit on it in terror, like an ape on the back of a bear; I haven’t fallen off yet, because the horse hasn’t bothered to throw me.’² This was hardly surprising, since it was being led about on a rein by Dominik’s aunt Miss Ludwika Dziewanowska.

Chopin wrote most of his letters home in the form and under the heading of the Szafarnia Courier, a pastiche on the Warsaw Courier, using the same layout of Home News, Foreign News and Society News. The customary censor’s stamp was in this case applied by Miss Ludwika. The Szafarnia Courier is full of schoolboy wit, with detailed news of how many flies settled on his nose, arch descriptions of battles between farmyard animals, Homeric accounts of quarrels between servants and notes on the misdemeanours of the domestic cat. There is also a great deal on the comings and goings of the Jewish traders who were a ubiquitous part of country life, and whom Chopin treats with predictable mockery. But the Szafarnia Courier also gives some idea of his wry, hyperbolic sense of humour and of his tendency to ridicule himself, the Pichon of the entries:

On 26th Inst. Monsieur Pichon visited the village of Golub. Amongst other sights and wonders of this exotic place, he saw a pig (imported) which for some time totally absorbed the attention of this distinguished voyageur.³

Monsieur Pichon is suffering great discomfort on account of the mosquitoes, of which he has encountered fabulous quantities at Szafarnia. They bite him all over, except, mercifully, on the nose, which would otherwise become even bigger than it is. ⁴

On 1st Inst. Monsieur Pichon was just playing ‘the Jew’ [a newly composed Mazurka on a Jewish dance theme], when Monsieur Dziewanowski, who had business with one of his Jewish tenants, asked the latter to pronounce judgement on the young Jewish virtuoso’s playing. Moses came up to the window, inserted his exalted aquiline nose into the room and listened, after which he declared that if Mons. Pichon were to go and play at a Jewish wedding, he would earn at least ten thalers. Such a declaration encouraged Mons. Pichon to study this kind of music with diligence, and who knows whether one day he may not give himself over entirely to this branch of the arts.⁵

The fourteen-year-old boy found everything about life in the country new and interesting, but what fascinated him more than anything else were the unfamiliar sounds. The only popular music he had heard before was Warsaw street musicians’ renderings of folk songs and dances. As he listened to peasant girls singing their songs of love or sorrow, to the old women chanting in the fields, and to the drinking songs issuing from village taverns, a whole new world of music opened up before him. When he returned to Warsaw in September, it was with his head full of these new harmonies.

He had by now achieved such mastery of the keyboard that the Polonaises he turned out were far superior in technical terms to their Ogiński model. With the A flat major Polonaise, written in 1821 and dedicated to Żywny, he had moved on to writing in the so-called ‘brilliant’ style; it is a sparkling bravura piece designed to show off the virtuosity of the performer rather than to plumb the depths of musical expression. At the same time, he continued to seek the key to a deeper understanding of the language of music, following his own instinct and taking advantage of every opportunity to expand his knowledge.

He was profoundly affected by the new Italian music, represented most notably by the operas of Spontini and Rossini, now fashionable in Warsaw. It was being promoted by the conductor and composer Karol Kurpiński, himself the author of several operas in a similar style. Chopin was struck by the melodic brilliance and the ‘singing’ quality produced by the Italian composers, and strove to bring some of these into his own playing.

In his fourteenth year he began writing waltzes and Mazurkas (the Gallicised name of the mazur, the principal dance of the peasants of Mazovia) as well as Polonaises, often for more than one instrument. Lack of evidence precludes any serious analysis of his output, and the main source of information on the compositions of this period is the album of Countess Izabela Grabowska, which was fortunately described by a musicologist before it was lost in the war. The Countess was a cousin of Fryderyk Skarbek and an enthusiastic violinist, and as she lived not far from the Chopin apartment, the young composer spent a good deal of time with her.

Most of the music in the album was written, possibly in collaboration with the Countess, around 1824. The book contained a large number of compositions for the piano, and quite a few for piano and violin. The musicologist who examined it thought many of these unremarkable and imitative of Hummel, and noted a lack of experience and a certain untidiness in the way the harmonies were developed. But he was also astonished by the number of passages which showed originality and seemed to announce Chopin’s mature work.⁶

Chopin expanded his education and experience by taking part in a variety of musical events, most of them of an amateur nature. Documentary evidence is scarce, but we do know that he was closely involved in a series of musical performances put on by a friend of Nicolas Chopin, Józef Jawurek, the director of music of the Warsaw Evangelical church, which had a fine neo-classical rotunda with good acoustics. In 1824 and 1825 Chopin took part, along with his sister Ludwika and Jan Białobłocki, in performances of Haydn’s Creation and works by Elsner, and it is highly likely that he was involved in other similar events.⁷

In April 1825 the capital prepared for an official visit from Tsar Alexander, and it was Chopin who was singled out by the Warsaw instrument-maker Brunner and the inventor Professor Hoffmann to show off their latest invention, the eolomelodicon, at a public concert. It was a sort of miniature organ, and Chopin played part of a Moscheles piano concerto and an improvisation of his own on it at a grand instrumental and vocal concert at the Conservatoire on 27 May. As the makers had hoped, both the instrument and the boy’s playing caused such a stir that the Tsar came to hear of it, and a special recital was organised for him. This command performance took place in the Evangelical church, with Chopin dressed in his Lycée full-dress uniform of blue tailcoat, breeches and stockings, pumps with silver buckles and white gloves. The Tsar was so taken with his playing that he presented him and the makers of the instrument with diamond rings.⁸

This recognition coincided with the first commercial publication, on 2 June 1825, of one of Chopin’s works, the Rondo in C minor, op.1. The Benevolent Society managed to persuade all the artists who had taken part in the May concert to repeat their performance for charity on 10 June, and on this occasion Chopin played the newly published Rondo on the strange instrument, and then launched into a long improvisation, which earned him his first mention in the press outside Poland. The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung of Leipzig reported that ‘young Chopin distinguished himself in his improvisation by a wealth of musical ideas, and under his hands this instrument, of which he is a great master, made a deep impression’.⁹

International acclaim was one thing, but the laws of the Chopin family were rigid, and as the boy only had a month left before his end-of-year exams, he was made to apply himself to his work. ‘I have to sit and sit, sit, still sit, and perhaps sit up all night,’ he wrote to his friend Białobłocki, who had now settled in the country, adding in a subsequent letter that he would at best scrape through the exams.¹⁰ In the event, he once again jointly topped his class, this time with his friend Julian Fontana. The next day he rushed out to buy himself a new pair of corduroy breeches and then climbed into a carriage with Ludwika Dziewanowska, who had come to take him and Dominik to Szafarnia.

The summer of 1825 was so fine that Chopin hardly played any music. He spent his days out of doors with his friend, walking, riding, shooting, and occasionally going off on longer excursions with the whole house party. They visited various neighbouring estates, dropped in on Jan Białobłocki, who was ill with tuberculosis, and on one outing got as far as the city of Toruń. Chopin spent the day there admiring the Gothic churches, which impressed him by their age, sampling the celebrated local gingerbread, and visiting the house in which Copernicus was born. He was appalled by the condition of the house, and incensed that the room in which the great astronomer was born was now inhabited by ‘some German who stuffs himself with potatoes and then probably passes foul winds’.¹¹

The climax of the summer was the harvest festival, which Chopin described at length in a letter to his parents. ‘We were sitting at dinner, just finishing the last course,’ he wrote. ‘We suddenly heard in the distance a chorus of falsetto voices; old peasant women whining through their noses and girls squealing mercilessly half a tone higher, to the accompaniment of a single violin, and that only a three-string one, whose alto voice could be heard repeating each phrase after it had been sung through.’¹² The two boys left the dinner table and went out to watch the column of peasants approaching, led by four girls carrying the traditional wreaths and bunches of harvested crops. When they reached the manor house, the harvesters sang a long piece in which there was a verse addressed to each of the people staying there. When Chopin’s turn came, they teased him for his weedy looks and his interest in one of the peasant girls.

The girls carried the wreaths into the house, where they were ambushed by a couple of stable boys who drenched them with buckets of water. Barrels of vodka were rolled out, candles were brought onto the porch, and the violinist struck up a hearty mazur. Chopin opened the dancing with a young cousin of the Dziewanowskis, and carried on with other girls. He then took over from one of the peasants who was playing a double-bass, which was down to one string, and accompanied the flagging violinist. The warm, starry night was well advanced before Chopin and Dominik were called to bed and the peasants moved on to the village to continue their carousing. The whole evening made a vivid impression on Chopin, and left him a little wistful. His reminiscence of the jollity was tinged with a note of melancholy, and he had a vague foreboding that he would not be spending many more such carefree holidays in the Polish countryside.

He returned to Warsaw in September to embark on his final year at the Lycée. His father had at last given him a room of his own so he could apply himself to his studies; it was dwarfed by his piano, and rapidly filled up with sheet music, piled on shelves, chairs and cupboards. The composers most in evidence, apart from Bach, Mozart and Hummel, were Friedrich Wilhelm Kalkbrenner, a renowned pianist who composed mainly for that instrument, and Ferdinand Ries, a pupil of Beethoven who also wrote principally for it.

Music-making took up every available moment. Chopin took over from the organist of the Convent of the Visitation and played every Sunday at the Lycée and University Mass. With his sister Ludwika and other friends he sang in the choir of the Evangelical church. He was also often to be heard playing in drawing rooms around Warsaw. A contemporary diary gives the first detailed account of his playing, at a soirée given by Teresa Kicka. It describes how, after playing several works, he launched into an improvisation which he drew out for a very long time. This form of ad libitum playing revealed Chopin at his most poetic and inventive, and fascinated those fortunate enough to hear him. But the exercise visibly drained him as he played, and he began to look so pale and exhausted that the poet Niemcewicz eventually went up to him and pulled his hands away from the keyboard.¹³

Chopin was much too energetic for his constitution. During the Christmas season, for instance, he was often at the opera, at a concert or at a party, with the result that he was rarely in bed before two o’clock in the morning. He was incapable of taking things easy, and always had to join in whatever was going on. In a witty versified account, he described one occasion when he spent half of a party playing dances on the piano for the other guests, and then started dancing himself, not staid Polonaises or Quadrilles, but energetic mazurs and other country dances, during one of which he slipped and crashed to the floor, twisting his ankle.¹⁴ At the beginning of 1826 he fell ill. The symptoms were an inflammation of the throat and tonsils, and he retired to bed with a nightcap on his head and leeches at his throat.

His studies do not seem to have suffered from the illness, the active life he was leading or indeed from the now impressive volume of music he was writing. At the end of his final year at the Lycée, in July 1826, he once more managed to get through his exams, this time winning an honourable mention, along with Tytus Woyciechowski and Jan Matuszyński. This earned him a treat on the day after the exams: a trip to the opera to see the new production of Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra. But there was to be no month in the country that summer.

His younger sister Emilia was suffering from tuberculosis, and the disease had reached a critical stage. Her parents had decided to try the last resort of a spa cure, and their choice had fallen on Bad Reinerz (Duszniki Zdrój) in Silesia. Chopin was to be taken along as well, on the principle that it could only do him good too, and at the end of July Justyna set off with the two of them.

Life at Bad Reinerz was governed by a strict routine. The Chopins had to be at the spring by six in the morning for the first glass of mineral water. This was later complemented by draughts of whey, which were held to be good for the chest, and more glasses of mineral water at intervals during the day. A wheezing orchestra played while the clientele queued up for their glasses to be filled or walked up and down sipping the water. For Chopin, the only attraction of the place was the scenery: he had never seen anything more exciting than the flat Mazovian plain, and he was predictably impressed by the mountains in which the town nestled. He went for walks and enthused about the breathtaking views, but was depressed by the fact that he could not translate his sensations into his own medium. ‘There is something I lack here; something which all the beauties of Reinerz cannot make up for,’ he wrote to Elsner in Warsaw. ‘Imagine – there is not a single decent piano in the whole place.’¹⁵

Nevertheless, when a couple of children were suddenly orphaned by the death of their father who had come to take the waters, Chopin offered his services to help them. A piano was found, and he gave a recital in the Kurhaus for their benefit.¹⁶ It was so warmly received by the visitors to the spa that he was persuaded to give another. Humble as it was, this acclaim from an audience who had no idea of who he was provided another small measure of encouragement to the boy. It was also a weapon to be used in the battle against his father’s wish that he should enter the University rather than the Conservatoire. Both Żywny and Elsner must have been persuasive allies, and by the time Chopin returned to Warsaw, a decision had been reached on his future. It was a compromise: he was to enter the Conservatoire, and at the same time to attend lectures on certain subjects at the University.

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