Frederick Chopin, as a Man and Musician Part 44

[FOOTNOTE: To the above, unfortunately undated, note, which was published for the first time in the Menestrel of February 15, 1885, and reprinted in "Un nid d'autographes," lettres incites recueillies et annotees par Oscar Comettant (Paris: E.

Dentu), is appended the following P.S.:--"Do not forget, please, friend Herbeault. Till to-morrow, then; I expect you both."

La Mara's Musikerbriefe (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Hartel) contains likewise a friendly letter of Chopin to Camille Pleyel. It runs thus:

"Dearest friend,--I received the other day your piano, and give you my best thanks. It arrived in good tune, and is exactly at concert-pitch. As yet I have not played much on it, for the weather is at present so fine that I am almost always in the open air. I wish you as pleasant weather for your holidays. Write me a few words (if you find that you have not sufficiently exercised your pen in the course of the day). May you all remain well--and lay me at the feet of your mother and sister.--Your devoted, "F. CHOPIN."

The date given by La Mara is "Monday [May 20, 1842], Nohant, near La Chatre, Indre." This, however, cannot be right, for the 20th of May in 1842 was a Friday.]

And, again, how atrociously he reviles in the same letters the banker Leo, who lends him money, often takes charge of his ma.n.u.scripts, procures payment for them, and in whose house he has been for years a frequent visitor. Mr. Ch. Halle informed me that Chopin was on particularly good terms with the Leos. From Moscheles' diary we learn that the writer made Chopin's acquaintance at the banker's house.

Stephen h.e.l.ler told me that he met Chopin several times at Leo's, and that the Polish composer visited there often, and continued to go there when he had given up going to many other houses. And from the same informant I learned also that Madame Leo as well as her husband took a kindly interest in Chopin, showing this, for instance, by providing him with linen. And yet Leo, this man who does him all sorts of services, and whose smiling guest he is before and after, is spoken of by Chopin as if he were the most "despicable wretch imaginable"; and this for no other reason than that everything has not been done exactly as he wished it to be done. Unless we a.s.sume these revilings to be no more than explosions of momentary ill-humour, we must find Chopin convicted of duplicity and ingrat.i.tude. In the letters to Fontana there are also certain remarks about Matuszynski which I do not like. Nor can they be wholly explained away by saying that they are in part fun and in part indirect flattery of his correspondent. It would rather seem that Chopin's undoubtedly real love for Matuszynski was not unmixed with a certain kind of contempt. And here I must tell the reader that while Poles have so high an opinion of their nation in comparison with other nations, and of their countrymen with other countrymen, they have generally a very mean opinion of each other. Indeed, I never met with a Pole who did not look down with a self-satisfied smile of pity on any of his fellow-countrymen, even on his best friend. It seems that their feeling of individual superiority is as great as that of their national superiority. Liszt's observations (see Vol. I., p. 259) and those of other writers (Polish as well as non-Polish) confirm mine, which else might rightly be supposed to be based on too limited an experience. To return to Matuszynski, he may have been too ready to advise and censure his friend, and not practical enough to be actively helpful. After reading the letters addressed to them one comes to the conclusion that Fontana's and Franchomme's serviceableness and readiness to serve went for something in his appreciation of them as friends. At any rate, he did not hesitate to exploiter them most unconscionably. Taking a general view of the letters written by him during the last twelve years of his life, one is struck by the absence of generous judgments and the extreme rareness of sympathetic sentiments concerning third persons. As this was not the case in his earlier letters, ill-health and disappointments suggest themselves naturally as causes of these faults of character and temper. To these princ.i.p.al causes have, however, to be added his nationality, his originally delicate const.i.tution, and his cultivation of salon manners and tastes. His extreme sensitiveness, fastidiousness, and irritability may be easily understood to derive from one or the other of these conditions.

George Sand's Ma Vie throws a good deal of light on Chopin's character; let us collect a few rays from it:--

He [Chopin] was modest on principle and gentle [doux] by habit, but he was imperious by instinct, and full of a legitimate pride that did not know itself.

He was certainly not made to live long in this world, this extreme type of an artist. He was devoured by the dream of an ideal which no practical philosophic or compa.s.sionate tolerance combated. He would never compound with human nature.

He accepted nothing of reality. This was his vice and his virtue, his grandeur and his misery. Implacable to the least blemish, he had an immense enthusiasm for the least light, his excited imagination doing its utmost to see in it a sun.

He was the same in friendship [as in love], becoming enthusiastic at first sight, getting disgusted, and correcting himself [se reprenant] incessantly, living on infatuations full of charms for those who were the object of them, and on secret discontents which poisoned his dearest affections.

Chopin accorded to me, I may say honoured me with, a kind of friendship which was an exception in his life. He was always the same to me.

The friendship of Chopin was never a refuge for me in sadness.

He had enough of his own ills to bear.

We never addressed a reproach to each other, except once, which, alas! was the first and the last time.

But if Chopin was with me devotion, kind attention, grace, obligingness, and deference in person, he had not for all that abjured the asperities of his character towards those who were about me. With them the inequality of his soul, in turn generous and fantastic, gave itself full course, pa.s.sing always from infatuation to aversion, and vice versa.

Chopin when angry was alarming, and as, with me, he always restrained himself, he seemed almost to choke and die.

The following extracts from Liszt's book partly corroborate, partly supplement, the foregoing evidence:--

His imagination was ardent, his feelings rose to violence,-- his physical organisation was feeble and sickly! Who can sound the sufferings proceeding from this contrast? They must have been poignant, but he never let them be seen.

The delicacy of his const.i.tution and of his heart, in imposing upon him the feminine martyrdom of for ever unavowed tortures, gave to his destiny some of the traits of feminine destinies.

He did not exercise a decisive influence on any existence. His pa.s.sion never encroached upon any of his desires; he neither pressed close nor bore down [n'a etreint ni ma.s.se] any mind by the domination of his own.

However rarely, there were nevertheless instances when we surprised him profoundly moved. We have seen him turn pale [palir et blemir] to such a degree as to a.s.sume green and cadaverous tints. But in his intensest emotions he remained concentrated. He was then, as usually, chary of words about what he felt; a minute's reflection [recueillement] always hid the secret of his first impression...This constant control over the violence of his character reminded one of the melancholy superiority of certain women who seek their strength in reticence and isolation, knowing the uselessness of the explosions of their anger, and having a too jealous care of the mystery of their pa.s.sion to betray it gratuitously.

Chopin, however, did not always control his temper. h.e.l.ler remembers seeing him more than once in a pa.s.sion, and hearing him speak very harshly to Nowakowski. The following story, which Lenz relates in "Die grossen Pianoforte-Virtuosen unserer Zeit," is also to the point.

On one occasion Meyerbeer, whom I had not yet seen, entered Chopin's room when I was getting a lesson. Meyerbeer was not announced, he was king. I was playing the Mazurka in C (Op.

33), printed on one page which contains so many hundreds--I called it the epitaph of the idea [Grabschrift des Begriffs], so full of distress and sadness is the composition, the wearied flight of an eagle.

Meyerbeer had taken a seat, Chopin made me go on.

"This is two-four time," said Meyerbeer. Chopin denied this, made me repeat the piece, and beat time aloud with the pencil on the piano--his eyes were glowing.

"Two crotchets," repeated Meyerbeer, calmly.

Only once I saw Chopin angry, it was at this moment. It was beautiful to see how a light red coloured his pale cheeks.

"These are three crotchets," he said with a loud voice, he who spoke always so low

"Give it me," replied Meyerbeer, "for a ballet in my opera ("L'Africaine," at that time kept a secret), I shall show it you then."

"These are three crotchets," Chopin almost shouted, and played it himself. He played the mazurka several times, counted aloud, stamped time with his foot, was beside himself. But all was of no use, Meyerbeer insisted on TWO crotchets. They parted very angrily. I found it anything but agreeable to have been a witness of this angry scene. Chopin disappeared into his cabinet without taking leave of me. The whole thing lasted but a few minutes.

Exhibitions of temper like this were no doubt rare, indeed, hardly ever occurred except in his intercourse with familiars and, more especially, fellow-countrymen--sometimes also with pupils. In pa.s.sing I may remark that Chopin's Polish vocabulary was much less choice than his French one. As a rule, Chopin's manners were very refined and aristocratic, Mr.

Halle thinks they were too much so. For this refinement resulted in a uniform amiability which left you quite in the dark as to the real nature of the man. Many people who made advances to Chopin found like M. Marmontel--I have this from his own mouth--that he had a temperament sauvage and was difficult to get at. And all who came near him learned soon from experience that, as Liszt told Lenz, he was...o...b..ageux. But while Chopin would treat outsiders with a chilly politeness, he charmed those who were admitted into his circle both by amiability and wit.

"Usually," says Liszt, "he was lively, his caustic mind unearthed quickly the ridiculous far below the surface where it strikes all eyes."

And again, "the playfulness of Chopin attacked only the superior keys of the mind, fond of witticism as he was, recoiling from vulgar joviality, gross laughter, common merriment, as from those animals more abject than venomous, the sight of which causes the most nauseous aversion to certain sensitive and delicate natures." Liszt calls Chopin "a fine connoisseur in raillery and an ingenious mocker." The testimony of other acquaintances of Chopin and that of his letters does not allow us to accept as holding good generally Mr. Halle's experience, who, mentioning also the Polish artist's wit, said to me that he never heard him utter a sarcasm or use a cutting expression.

Fondness of society is a characteristic trait in Chopin's mental const.i.tution. Indeed, Hiller told me that his friend could not be without company. For reading, on the other hand, he did not much care. Alkan related to me that Chopin did not even read George Sand's works--which is difficult to believe--and that Pierre Leroux, who liked Chopin and always brought him his books, might have found them any time afterwards uncut on the pianist's table, which is not so difficult to believe, as philosophy and Chopin are contraries. According to what I learned from Hiller, Chopin took an interest in literature but read very little. To h.e.l.ler it seemed that Chopin had no taste for literature, indeed, he made on him the impression of an uneducated man. h.e.l.ler, I must tell the reader parenthetically, was both a great reader and an earnest thinker, over whom good books had even the power of making him neglect and forget mistress Musica without regret and with little compunction. But to return to Chopin. Franchomme excused his friend by saying that teaching and the claims of society left him no time for reading. But if Chopin neglected French literature--not to speak of other ancient and modern literatures--he paid some attention to that of his native country; at any rate, new publications of Polish books were generally to be found on his table. The reader will also remember that Chopin, in his letters to Fontana, alludes twice to books of poetry--one by Mickiewicz which was sent him to Majorca, the other by Witwicki which he had lost sight of.

Indeed, anything Polish had an especial charm and value for Chopin.

Absence from his native country so far from diminishing increased his love for it. The words with which he is reported to have received the pianist Mortier de Fontaine, who came to Paris in 1833 and called on him with letters of introduction, are characteristic in this respect: "It is enough that you have breathed the air of Warsaw to find a friend and adviser in me." There is, no doubt, some exaggeration in Liszt's statement that whoever came to Chopin from Poland, whether with or without letters of introduction, was sure of a hearty welcome, of being received with open arms. On the other hand, we may fully believe the same authority when he says that Chopin often accorded to persons of his own country what he would not accord to anyone else--namely, the right of disturbing his habits; that he would sacrifice his time, money, and comfort to people who were perhaps unknown to him the day before, showing them the sights of the capital, having them to dine with him, and taking them in the evening to some theatre. We have already seen that his most intimate friends were Poles, and this was so in the aristocratic as well as in the conventionally less-elevated circles.

However pleasant his relations with the Rothschilds may have been--indeed, Franchomme told me that his friend loved the house of Rothschild and that this house loved him, and that more especially Madame Nathaniel Rothschild preserved a touching remembrance of him [FOOTNOTE: Chopin dedicated to Madame la Baronne C. Rothschild the Waltz, Op. 64, No. 2 (Parisian Edition), and the Ballade, Op. 52.]--they can have been but of small significance in comparison with the almost pa.s.sionate attachment he had to Prince Alexander Czartoryski and his wife the Princess Marcelline. And if we were to compare his friendship for any non-Polish gentleman or lady with that which he felt for the Countess Delphine Potocka, to whom he dedicated two of his happiest inspirations in two very different genres (the F minor Concerto, Op. 21, and the D flat major Waltz, Op. 64, No. I), the result would be again in favour of his compatriot. There were, indeed, some who thought that he felt more than friendship for this lady; this, however, he energetically denied.

[FOOTNOTE: Of this lady Kwiatkowski said that she took as much trouble and pride in giving choice musical entertainments as other people did in giving choice dinners. In Sowinski's Musiciens polonais we read that she had a beautiful soprano voice and occupied the first place among the amateur ladies of Paris. "A great friend of the ill.u.s.trious Chopin, she gave formerly splendid concerts at her house with the old company of the Italians, which one shall see no more in Paris. To cite the names of Rubini, Lablache, Tamburini, Malibran, Grisi, Persiani, is to give the highest idea of Italian singing. The Countess Potocka sang herself according to the method of the Italian masters."]

But although Chopin was more devoted and more happy in his Polish friendships, he had beloved as well as loving friends of all nationalities--Germans, English, and even Russians. That as a good Pole he hated the Russians as a nation may be taken for granted. Of his feelings and opinions with regard to his English friends and the English in general, information will be forthcoming in a subsequent chapter.

The Germans Chopin disliked thoroughly, partly, no doubt, from political reasons, partly perhaps on account of their inelegance and social awkwardness. Still, of this nation were some of his best friends, among them Hiller, Gutmann, Albrecht, and the Hanoverian amba.s.sador Baron von Stockhausen.

[FOOTNOTE: Gutmann, in speaking to me of his master's dislike, positively ascribed it to the second of the above causes. In connection with this we must, however, not forget that the Germans of to-day differ from the Germans of fifty years ago as much socially as politically.

Nor have the social characters of their neighbours, the French and the English, remained the same.]

Liszt has given a glowing description of an improvised soiree at Chopin's lodgings in the Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin--that is, in the years before the winter in Majorca. At this soiree, we are told, were present Liszt himself, Heine, Meyerbeer, Nourrit, Hiller, Delacroix, Niemcewicz, Mickiewicz, George Sand, and the Comtesse d'Agoult. Of course, this is a poetic licence: these men and women cannot have been at one and the same time in Chopin's salon. Indeed, Hiller informed me that he knew nothing of this party, and that, moreover, as long as he was in Paris (up to 1836) there were hardly ever more numerous gatherings at his friend's lodgings than of two or three. Liszt's group, however, brings vividly before us one section of Chopin's social surroundings: it shows us what a poetic atmosphere he was breathing, amidst what a galaxy of celebrities he was moving. A glimpse of the real life our artist lived in the early Paris years this extravagant effort of a luxuriant imagination does not afford. Such glimpses we got in his letters to Hiller and Franchomme, where we also met with many friends and acquaintances with less high-sounding names, some of whom Chopin subsequently lost by removal or death. In addition to the friends who were then mentioned, I may name here the Polish poet Stephen Witwicki, the friend of his youth as well as of his manhood, to whom in 1842 he dedicated his Op. 41, three mazurkas, and several of whose poems he set to music; and the Polish painter Kwiatkowski, an acquaintance of a later time, who drew and painted many portraits of the composer, and more than one of whose pictures was inspired by compositions of his friend. I have not been able to ascertain what Chopin's sentiments were with regard to Kwiatkowski, but the latter must have been a frequent visitor, for after relating to me that the composer was fond of playing in the dusk, he remarked that he heard him play thus almost all his works immediately after they were composed.

As we have seen in the chapters treating of Chopin's first years in Paris, there was then a goodly sprinkling of musicians among his a.s.sociates--I use the word "a.s.sociates" advisedly, for many of them could not truly be called friends. When he was once firmly settled, artistically and socially, not a few of these early acquaintances lapsed. How much this was due to the force of circ.u.mstances, how much to the choice of Chopin, is difficult to determine. But we may be sure that his distaste to the Bohemianism, the free and easy style that obtains among a considerable portion of the artistic tribe, had at least as much to do with the result as pressure of engagements. Of the musicians of whom we heard so much in the first years after his coming to Paris, he remained in close connection only with one-namely, with Franchomme.

Osborne soon disappeared from his circle. Chopin's intercourse with Berlioz was in after years so rare that some of their common friends did not even know of its existence. The loosening of this connection was probably brought about by the departure of Hiller in 1836 and the quarrel with Liszt some time after, which broke two links between the sensitive Pole and the fiery Frenchman. The ageing Baillot and Cherubini died in 1842. Kalkbrenner died but a short time before Chopin, but the sympathy existing between them was not strong enough to prevent their drifting apart. Other artists to whom the new-comer had paid due homage may have been neglected, forgotten, or lost sight of when success was attained and the blandishments of the salons were lavished upon him.

Strange to say, with all his love for what belonged to and came from Poland, he kept compatriot musicians at a distance. Fontana was an exception, but him he cherished, no doubt, as a friend of his youth in spite of his profession, or, if as a musician at all, chiefly because of his handiness as a copyist. For Sowinski, who was already settled in Paris when Chopin arrived there, and who a.s.sisted him at his first concert, he did not care. Consequently they had afterwards less and less intercourse, which, indeed, in the end may have ceased altogether.

An undated letter given by Count Wodziriski in "Les trois Romans de Frederic Chopin," no doubt originally written in Polish, brings the master's feelings towards his compatriot, and also his irritability, most vividly before the reader.

Here he is! He has just come in to see me--a tall strong individual who wears moustaches; he sits down at the piano and improvises, without knowing exactly what. He knocks, strikes, and crosses his hands, without reason; he demolishes in five minutes a poor helpless key; he has enormous fingers, made rather to handle reins and whip somewhere on the confines of Ukraine. Here you have the portrait of S... who has no other merit than that of having small moustaches and a good heart.

If I ever thought of imagining what stupidity and charlatanism in art are, I have now the clearest perception of them. I run through my room with my ears reddening; I have a mad desire to throw the door wide open; but one has to spare him, to show one's self almost affectionate. No, you cannot imagine what it is: here one sees only his neckties; one does him the honour of taking him seriously....There remains, therefore, nothing but to bear him. What exasperates me is his collection of little songs, compositions in the most vulgar style, without the least knowledge of the most elementary rules of harmony and poetry, concluding with quadrille ritornelli, and which he calls Recueil de Chants Polonais. You know how I wished to understand, and how I have in part succeeded in understanding, our national music. Therefore you will judge what pleasure I experience when, laying hold of a motive of mine here and there, without taking account of the fact that all the beauty of a melody depends on the accompaniment, he reproduces it with the taste of a frequenter of suburban taverns (guinguettes) and public-houses (cabarets). And one cannot say anything to him, for he comprehends nothing beyond what he has taken from you.

Edouard Wolff came to Paris in 1835, provided with a letter of introduction from Chopin's master Zywny; [FOOTNOTE: See Vol. I., p. 31.]

but, notwithstanding this favourable opening of their acquaintanceship, he was only for some time on visiting terms with his more distinguished compatriot. Wolff himself told me that Chopin would never hear one of his compositions. From any other informant I would not have accepted this statement as probable, still less as true. [FOOTNOTE: Wolff dedicated in 1841 his Grand Allegro de Concert pour piano still, Op. 59, a son ami Chopin; but the latter never repaid him the compliment.] These remarks about Wolff remind me of another piece of information I got from this pianist-composer a few months before his death--namely, that Chopin hated all Jews, Meyerbeer and Halevy among the rest. What Pole does not hate the Jews? That Chopin was not enamoured of them we have seen in his letters. But that he hated Meyerbeer is a more than doubtful statement.

Franchomme said to me that Meyerbeer was not a great friend of Chopin's; but that the latter, though he did not like his music, liked him as a man. If Lenz reports accurately, Meyerbeer's feelings towards Chopin were, no doubt, warmer than Chopin's towards Meyerbeer. When after the scene about the rhythm of a mazurka Chopin had left the room, Lenz introduced himself to Meyerbeer as a friend of the Counts Wielhorski, of St. Petersburg. On coming to the door, where a coupe was waiting, the composer offered to drive him home, and when they were seated said:--

I had not seen Chopin for a long time, I love him very much. I know no pianist like him, no composer for the piano like him.

The piano lives on nuances and on cantilena; it is an instrument of intimacy [ein Intimitalsinstrument], I also was once a pianist, and there was a time when I trained myself to be a virtuoso. Visit me when you come to Berlin. Are we not now comrades? When one has met at the house of so great a man, it was for life.

Kwiatkowski told me a pretty story which se non vero is certainly ben trovato. When on one occasion Meyerbeer had fallen out with his wife, he sat down to the piano and played a nocturne or some other composition which Chopin had sent him. And such was the effect of the music on his helpmate that she came and kissed him. Thereupon Meyerbeer wrote Chopin a note telling him of what had taken place, and asking him to come and see their conjugal happiness. Among the few musicians with whom Chopin had in later years friendly relations stands out prominently, both by his genius and the preference shown him, the pianist and composer Alkan aine (Charles Henri Valentine), who, however, was not so intimate with the Polish composer as Franchomme, nor on such easy terms of companionship as Hiller and Liszt had been. The originality of the man and artist, his high aims and unselfish striving, may well have attracted Chopin; but as an important point in Alkan's favour must be reckoned the fact that he was also a friend of George Sand's. Indeed, some of the limitations of Chopin's intercourse were, no doubt, made on her account. Kwiatkowski told me that George Sand hated Chopin's Polish friends, and that some of them were consequently not admitted at all and others only reluctantly. Now suppose that she disliked also some of the non-Polish friends, musicians as well as others, would not her influence act in the same way as in the case of the Poles?