Frederick Chopin, as a Man and Musician Part 46

All who have had the good fortune to hear Chopin play agree in declaring that one of the most distinctive features of his style of execution was smoothness, and smoothness, as we have seen in the foregoing notes, was also one of the qualities on which he most strenuously insisted in the playing of his pupils. The reader will remember Gutmann's statement to me, mentioned in a previous chapter, that all his master's fingering was calculated for the attainment of this object. Fingering is the mainspring, the determining principle, one might almost say the life and soul, of the pianoforte technique. We shall, therefore, do well to give a moment's consideration to Chopin's fingering, especially as he was one of the boldest and most influential revolutionisers of this important department of the pianistic art. His merits in this as in other respects, his various claims to priority of invention, are only too often overlooked. As at one time all ameliorations in the theory and practice of music were ascribed to Guido of Arezzo, so it is nowadays the fashion to ascribe all improvements and extensions of the pianoforte technique to Liszt, who more than any other pianist drew upon himself the admiration of the world, and who through his pupils continued to make his presence felt even after the close of his career as a virtuoso.

But the cause of this false opinion is to be sought not so much in the fact that the brilliancy of his artistic personality threw all his contemporaries into the shade, as in that other fact, that he gathered up into one web the many threads new and old which he found floating about during the years of his development. The difference between Liszt and Chopin lies in this, that the basis of the former's art is universality, that of the latter's, individuality. Of the fingering of the one we may say that it is a system, of that of the other that it is a manner. Probably we have here also touched on the cause of Liszt's success and Chopin's want of success as a teacher. I called Chopin a revolutioniser of fingering, and, I think, his full enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the thumb, his breaking-down of all distinctions of rank between the other fingers, in short, the introduction of a liberty sometimes degenerating into licence, justifies the expression. That this master's fingering is occasionally eccentric (presupposing peculiarly flexible hands and a peculiar course of study) cannot be denied; on the whole, however, it is not only well adapted for the proper rendering of his compositions, but also contains valuable contributions to a universal system of fingering. The following particulars by Mikuli will be read with interest, and cannot be misunderstood after what has just now been said on the subject:--

In the notation of fingering, especially of that peculiar to himself, Chopin was not sparing. Here pianoforte-playing owes him great innovations which, on account of their expedience, were soon adopted, notwithstanding the horror with which authorities like Kalkbrenner at first regarded them. Thus, for instance, Chopin used without hesitation the thumb on the black keys, pa.s.sed it even under the little finger (it is true, with a distinct inward bend of the wrist), if this could facilitate the execution and give it more repose and evenness.

With one and the same finger he took often two consecutive keys (and this not only in gliding down from a black to the next white key) without the least interruption of the sequence being noticeable. The pa.s.sing over each other of the longer fingers without the aid of the thumb (see Etude, No. 2, Op.

10) he frequently made use of, and not only in pa.s.sages where the thumb stationary on a key made this unavoidably necessary.

The fingering of the chromatic thirds based on this (as he marked it in Etude, No. 5, Op. 25) affords in a much higher degree than that customary before him the possibility of the most beautiful legato in the quickest tempo and with a perfectly quiet hand.

But if with Chopin smoothness was one of the qualities upon which he insisted strenuously in the playing of his pupils, he was by no means satisfied with a mere mechanical perfection. He advised his pupils to undertake betimes thorough theoretical studies, recommending his friend, the composer and theorist Henri Reber as a teacher. He advised them also to cultivate ensemble playing--trios, quartets, &c., if first-cla.s.s partners could be had, otherwise pianoforte duets. Most urgent, however, he was in his advice to them to hear good singing, and even to learn to sing. To Madame Rubio he said: "You must sing if you wish to play"; and made her take lessons in singing and hear much Italian opera--this last, the lady remarked, Chopin regarded as positively necessary for a pianoforte-player. In this advice we recognise Chopin's ideal of execution: beauty of tone, intelligent phrasing, truthfulness and warmth of expression. The sounds which he drew from the pianoforte were pure tone without the least admixture of anything that might be called noise.

"He never thumped," was Gutmann's remark to me. Chopin, according to Mikuli, repeatedly said that when he heard bad phrasing it appeared to him as if some one recited, in a language he did not know, a speech laboriously memorised, not only neglecting to observe the right quant.i.ty of the syllables, but perhaps even making full stops in the middle of words. "The badly-phrasing pseudo-musician," he thought, "showed that music was not his mother-tongue, but something foreign, unintelligible to him," and that, consequently, "like that reciter, he must altogether give up the idea of producing any effect on the auditor by his rendering." Chopin hated exaggeration and affectation. His precept was: "Play as you feel." But he hated the want of feeling as much as false feeling. To a pupil whose playing gave evidence of nothing but the possession of fingers, he said emphatically, despairingly: "METTEZ-Y DONc TOUTE VOTRE AME!" (Do put all your soul into it!)

[FOOTNOTE: "In dynamical shading [im nuanciren]," says Mikuli, "he was exceedingly particular about a gradual increase and decrease of loudness." Karasowski writes: "Exaggeration in accentuation was hateful to him, for, in his opinion, it took away the poesy from playing, and gave it a certain didactic pedantry."]

On declamation, and rendering in general [writes Mikuli], he gave his pupils invaluable and significant instructions and hints, but, no doubt, effected more certain results by repeatedly playing not only single pa.s.sages, but whole pieces, and this he did with a conscientiousness and enthusiasm that perhaps he hardly gave anyone an opportunity of hearing when he played in a concert-room. Frequently the whole hour pa.s.sed without the pupil having played more than a few bars, whilst Chopin, interrupting and correcting him on a Pleyel cottage piano (the pupil played always on an excellent grand piano; and it was enjoined upon him as a duty to practise only on first-cla.s.s instruments), presented to him for his admiration and imitation the life-warm ideal of the highest beauty.

With regard to Chopin's playing to his pupils we must keep in mind what was said in foot-note 12 on page 184. On another point in the above quotation one of Madame Dubois's communications to me throws some welcome light:--

Chopin [she said] had always a cottage piano [pianino] by the side of the grand piano on which he gave his lessons. It was marvellous to hear him accompany, no matter what compositions, from the concertos of Hummel to those of Beethoven. He performed the role of the orchestra most wonderfully [d'une facon prodigieuse]. When I played his own concertos, he accompanied me in this way.

Judging from various reports, Chopin seems to have regarded his Polish pupils as more apt than those of other nationalities to do full justice to his compositions. Karasowski relates that when one of Chopin's French pupils played his compositions and the auditors overwhelmed the performer with their praise, the master used often to remark that his pupil had done very well, but that the Polish element and the Polish enthusiasm had been wanting. Here it is impossible not to be reminded of the contention between Chopin on the one hand and Liszt and Hiller on the other hand about the possibility of foreigners comprehending Polish national music (See Vol. 1., p. 256). After revealing the mystery of Chopin's tempo rubato, Liszt writes in his book on this master:--

All his compositions have to be played with this sort of balancement accentue et prosodie, this morbidezza, of which it was difficult to seize the secret when one had not heard him often. He seemed desirous to teach this manner to his numerous pupils, especially to his compatriots, to whom he wished, more than to others, to communicate the breath of his inspiration.

These [ceux-ci, ou plutot celles-la] seized it with that apt.i.tude which they have for all matters of sentiment and poesy. An innate comprehension of his thought permitted them to follow all the fluctuations of his azure wave.

There is one thing which is worth inquiring into before we close this chapter, for it may help us to a deeper insight into Chopin's character as a teacher--I mean his teaching repertoire. Mikuli says that, carefully arranged according to their difficulty, Chopin placed before his pupils the following compositions: the concertos and sonatas of Clementi, Mozart, Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, Dussek, Field, Hummel, Ries, Beethoven; further, Weber, Moscheles, Mendelssohn, Hiller, Schumann, and his own works. This enumeration, however, does not agree with accounts from other equally authentic sources. The pupils of Chopin I have conversed and corresponded with never studied any Schumann under their master. As to the cultivation of Beethoven, it was, no doubt, limited.

M. Mathias, it is true, told me that Chopin showed a preference for Clementi (Gradus ad Parna.s.sum), Bach, Field (of him much was played, notably his concertos), and naturally for Beethoven, Weber, &c.--Clementi, Bach, and Field being always the composers most laid under contribution in the case of debutants. Madame Rubio, on the other hand, confined herself to stating that Chopin put her through Hummel, Moscheles, and Bach; and did not mention Beethoven at all. Gutmann's statements concerning his master's teaching contain some positive evidence with regard to the Beethoven question. What he said was this: Chopin held that dementi's Gradus ad Parna.s.sum, Bach's pianoforte fugues, and Hummel's compositions were the key to pianoforte-playing, and he considered a training in these composers a fit preparation for his own works. He was particularly fond of Hummel and his style.

Beethoven he seemed to like less. He appreciated such pieces as the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata (C sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2).

Schubert was a favourite with him. This, then, is what I learned from Gutmann. In parenthesis, as it were, I may ask: Is it not strange that no pupil, with the exception of Mikuli, mentions the name of Mozart, the composer whom Chopin is said to have so much admired? Thanks to Madame Dubois, who at my request had the kindness to make out a list of the works she remembers having studied under Chopin, we shall be able to form a pretty distinct idea of the master's course of instruction, which, to be sure, would be modified according to the capacities of his pupils and the objects they had in view. Well, Madame Dubois says that Chopin made her begin with the second book of Clementi's Preludes et Exercices, and that she also studied under him the same composer's Gradus ad Parna.s.sum and Bach's forty-eight preludes and fugues. Of his high opinion of the teaching qualities of Bach's compositions we may form an idea from the recommendation to her at their last meeting--already mentioned in an earlier chapter--to practise them constantly, "ce sera votre meilleur moyen de progresser" (this will be your best means to make progress). The pieces she studied under him included the following ones: Of Hummel, the Rondo brillant sur un theme russe (Op. 98), La Bella capricciosa, the Sonata in F sharp minor (Op.

81), the Concertos in A minor and B minor, and the Septet; of Field, several concertos (the one in E flat among others) and several nocturnes ("Field" she says, "lui etait tres sympathique"); of Beethoven, the concertos and several sonatas (the Moonlight, Op. 27, No. 2; the one with the Funeral March, Op. 26; and the Appa.s.sionata, Op. 57); of Weber, the Sonatas in C and A flat major (Chopin made his pupils play these two works with extreme care); of Schubert, the Landler and all the waltzes and some of the duets (the marches, polonaises, and the Divertiss.e.m.e.nt hongrois, which last piece he admired sans reserve); of Mendelssohn, only the G minor Concerto and the Songs without Words; of Liszt, no more than La Tarantelle de Rossini and the Septet from Lucia ("mais ce genre de musique ne lui allait pas," says my informant); and of Schumann, NOTHING.

Madame Streicher's interesting reminiscences, given in Appendix III., form a supplement to this chapter.

CHAPTER XXIX.

RUPTURE OF THE SAND-CHOPIN CONNECTION.--HER OWN, LISZT'S, AND KARASOWSKI'S ACCOUNTS.-THE LUCREZIA FLORIANI INCIDENT.--FURTHER INVESTIGATION OF THE CAUSES OF THE RUPTURE BY THE LIGHT OF LETTERS AND THE INFORMATION OF GUTMANN, FRANCHOMME, AND MADAME RUBIO.--SUMMING-UP OF THE EVIDENCE.--CHOPIN'S COMPOSITIONS IN 1847.--GIVES A CONCERT, HIS LAST IN PARIS (1848): WHAT AND HOW HE PLAYED; THE CHARACTER OF THE AUDIENCE.--GEORGE SAND AND CHOPIN MEET ONCE MORE.--THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; CHOPIN MAKES UP HIS MIND TO VISIT ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND.

WE now come to the catastrophe of Chopin's life, the rupture of his connection with George Sand. Although there is no lack of narratives in which the causes, circ.u.mstances, and time of this rupture are set forth with absolute positiveness, it is nevertheless an undeniable fact that we are not at the present moment, nor, all things well considered, shall be even in the most distant future, in a position to speak on this subject otherwise than conjecturally.

[FOOTNOTE: Except the letter of George Sand given on p. 75, and the note of Chopin to George Sand which will be given a little farther on, nothing, I think, of their correspondence has become public. But even if their letters were forth-coming, it is more likely than not that they would fail to clear up the mystery. Here I ought, perhaps, to reproduce the somewhat improbable story told in the World of December 14, 1887, by the Paris correspondent who signs himself "Theoc." He writes as follows: "I have heard that it was by saving her letters to Chopin that M.

Alexandre Dumas won the friendship of George Sand. The anecdote runs thus: When Chopin died, his sister found amongst his papers some two hundred letters of Madame Sand, which she took with her to Poland. By chance this lady had some difficulties at the frontier with the Russian custom-house officials; her trunks were seized, and the box containing the letters was mislaid and lost. A few years afterwards, one of the custom-house officials found the letters and kept them, not knowing the name and the address of the Polish lady who had lost them. M. Dumas discovered this fact, and during a journey in Russia he explained to this official how painful it would be if by some indiscretion these letters of the ill.u.s.trious novelist ever got into print. 'Let me restore them to Madame Sand,' said M. Dumas. 'And my duty?' asked the customs official. 'If anybody ever claims the letters,' replied M. Dumas, 'I authorise you to say that I stole them.' On this condition M. Dumas, then a young man, obtained the letters, brought them back to Paris, and restored them to Madame Sand, whose acquaintance he thus made. Madame Sand burnt all her letters to Chopin, but she never forgot the service that M. Dumas had rendered her."]

I have done my utmost to elucidate the tragic event which it is impossible not to regard as one of the most momentous crises in Chopin's life, and have succeeded in collecting besides the material already known much that is new; but of what avail is this for coming to a final decision if we find the depositions hopelessly contradictory, and the witnesses more or less untrustworthy--self-interest makes George Sand's evidence suspicious, the instability of memory that of others. Under the circ.u.mstances it seems to me safest to place before the reader the depositions of the various witnesses--not, however, without comment--and leave him to form his own conclusions. I shall begin with the account which George Sand gives in her Ma Vie:--

After the last relapses of the invalid, his mind had become extremely gloomy, and Maurice, who had hitherto tenderly loved him, was suddenly wounded by him in an unexpected manner about a trifling subject. They embraced each other the next moment, but the grain of sand had fallen into the tranquil lake, and little by little the pebbles fell there, one after another...All this was borne; but at last, one day, Maurice, tired of the pin-p.r.i.c.ks, spoke of giving up the game. That could not be, and should not be. Chopin would not stand my legitimate and necessary intervention. He bowed his head and said that I no longer loved him.

What blasphemy after these eight years of maternal devotion!

But the poor bruised heart was not conscious of its delirium.

I thought that some months pa.s.sed at a distance and in silence would heal the wound, and make his friendship again calm and his memory equitable. But the revolution of February came, and Paris became momentarily hateful to this mind incapable of yielding to any commotion in the social form. Free to return to Poland, or certain to be tolerated there, he had preferred languishing ten [and some more] years far from his family, whom he adored, to the pain of seeing his country transformed and deformed [denature]. He had fled from tyranny, as now he fled from liberty.

I saw him again for an instant in March, 1848. I pressed his trembling and icy hand. I wished to speak to him, he slipped away. Now it was my turn to say that he no longer loved me. I spared him this infliction, and entrusted all to the hands of Providence and the future.

I was not to see him again. There were bad hearts between us.

There were good ones too who were at a loss what to do. There were frivolous ones who preferred not to meddle with such delicate matters; Gutmann was not there.

I have been told that he had asked for me, regretted me, and loved me filially up to the very end. It was thought fit to conceal this from me till then. It was also thought fit to conceal from him that I was ready to hasten to him.

Liszt's account is noteworthy because it gives us the opinion of a man who knew the two princ.i.p.al actors in the drama intimately, and had good opportunities to learn what contemporary society thought about it.

Direct knowledge of the facts, however, Liszt had not, for he was no longer a friend either of the one or the other of the two parties:--

These commencements, of which Madame de Stael spoke, [FOOTNOTE: He alludes to her saying: En amour, il n'y a que des commencemens.] had already for a long time been exhausted between the Polish artist and the French poet. They had only survived with the one by a violent effort of respect for the ideal which he had gilded with its fatal brilliancy; with the other by a false shame which sophisticated on the pretension to preserve constancy in fidelity. The time came when this fact.i.tious existence, which succeeded no longer in galvanising fibres dried up under the eyes of the spiritualistic artist, seemed to him to surpa.s.s what honour permitted him not to perceive. No one knew what was the cause or the pretext of the sudden rupture; one saw only that after a violent opposition to the marriage of the daughter of the house, Chopin abruptly left Nohant never to return again.

However unreliable Liszt's facts may be, the PHILOSOPHY of his account shows real insight. Karasowski, on the other hand, has neither facts nor insight. He speaks with a novelist's confidence and freedom of characters whom he in no way knows, and about whom he has nothing to tell but the vaguest and most doubtful of second-hand hearsays:--

The depressed invalid became now to her a burden. At first her at times sombre mien and her shorter visits in the sick-room showed him that her sympathy for him was on the decrease; Chopin felt this painfully, but he said nothing...The complaints of Madame Sand that the nursing of the invalid exhausted her strength, complaints which she often gave expression to in his presence, hurt him. He entreated her to leave him alone, to take walks in the fresh air; he implored her not to give up for his sake her amus.e.m.e.nts, but to frequent the theatre, to give parties, &c.; he would be contented in quietness and solitude if he only knew that she was happy. At last, when the invalid still failed to think of a separation from her, she chose a heroic means.

By this heroic means Karasowski understands the publication of George Sand's novel Lucrezia Floriani (in 1847), concerning which he says the story goes that "out of refined cruelty the proof-sheets were handed to him [Chopin] with the request to correct the misprints." Karasowski also reports as a "fact" that

the children of Madame Sand [who, by the way, were a man of twenty-three and a woman of eighteen] said to him [Chopin], pointing to the novel: "M. Chopin, do you know that you are meant by the Prince Karol?"...In spite of all this the invalid, and therefore less pa.s.sionate, artist bore with the most painful feeling the mortification caused him by the novel...At the beginning of the year 1847 George Sand brought about by a violent scene, the innocent cause of which was her daughter, a complete rupture. To the unjust reproaches which she made to him, he merely replied: "I shall immediately leave your house, and wish henceforth no longer to be regarded by you as living." These words were very welcome to her; she made no objections, and the very same day the artist left for ever the house of Madame Sand. But the excitement and the mental distress connected with it threw him once more on the sick- bed, and for a long time people seriously feared that he would soon exchange it for a coffin.

George Sand's view of the Lucrezia Floriani incident must be given in full. In Ma Vie she writes as follows:--

It has been pretended that in one of my romances I have painted his [Chopin's] character with a great exactness of a.n.a.lysis. People were mistaken, because they thought they recognised some of his traits; and, proceeding by this system, too convenient to be sure, Liszt himself, in a Life of Chopin, a little exuberant as regards style, but nevertheless full of very good things and very beautiful pages, has gone astray in good faith. I have traced in Prince Karol the character of a man determined in his nature, exclusive in his sentiments, exclusive in his exigencies.

Chopin was not such. Nature does not design like art, however realistic it may be. She has caprices, inconsequences, probably not real, but very mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences because it is too limited to reproduce them.

Chopin was a resume of these magnificent inconsequences which G.o.d alone can allow Himself to create, and which have their particular logic. He was modest on principle, gentle by habit, but he was imperious by instinct and full of a legitimate pride which was unconscious of itself. Hence sufferings which he did not reason and which did not fix themselves on a determined object.

Moreover, Prince Karol is not an artist. He is a dreamer, and nothing more; having no genius, he has not the rights of genius. He is, therefore, a personage more true than amiable, and the portrait is so little that of a great artist that Chopin, in reading the ma.n.u.script every day on my writing- desk, had not the slightest inclination to deceive himself, he who, nevertheless, was so suspicious.

And yet afterwards, by reaction, he imagined, I am told, that this was the case. Enemies, I had such about him who call themselves his friends; as if embittering a suffering heart was not murder, enemies made him believe that this romance was a revelation of his character. At that time his memory was, no doubt, enfeebled: he had forgotten the book, why did he not reread it!

This history is so little ours! It was the very reverse of it There were between us neither the same raptures [enivrements]

nor the same sufferings. Our history had nothing of a romance; its foundation was too simple and too serious for us ever to have had occasion for a quarrel with each other, a propos of each other.

The arguments advanced by George Sand are anything but convincing; in fact, her defence is extremely weak. She does not even tell us that she did not make use of Chopin as a model. That she drew a caricature and not a portrait will hardly be accepted as an excuse, nay, is sure to be regarded as the very head and front of her offending. But George Sand had extraordinarily naive notions on this subject, notions which are not likely to be shared by many, at least not by many outside the fraternities of novelists and dramatists. Having mentioned, in speaking of her grand-uncle the Abbe de Beaumont, that she thought of him when sketching the portrait of a certain canon in Consuelo, and that she had very much exaggerated the resemblance to meet the requirements of the romance, she remarks that portraits traced in this way are no longer portraits, and that those who feel offended on recognising themselves do an injustice both to the author and themselves. "Caricature or idealisation," she writes, "it is no longer the original model, and this model has little judgment if it thinks it recognises itself, if it becomes angry or vain on seeing what art or imagination has been able to make of it." This is turning the tables with a vengeance; and if impudence can silence the voice of truth and humanity, George Sand has gained her case. In her account of the Lucrezia Floriani incident George Sand proceeds as usual when she is attacked and does not find it more convenient simply to declare that she will not condescend to defend herself--namely, she envelops the whole matter in a mist of beautiful words and sentiments out of which issues--and this is the only clearly-distinguishable thing--her own saintly self in celestial radiance. But notwithstanding all her arguments and explanations there remains the fact that Liszt and thousands of others, I one of them, read Lucrezia Floriani and were not a moment in doubt that Chopin was the prototype of Prince Karol. We will not charge George Sand with the atrocity of writing the novel for the purpose of getting rid of Chopin; but we cannot absolve her from the sin of being regardless of the pain she would inflict on one who once was dear to her, and who still loved her ardently. Even Miss Thomas, [FOOTNOTE: In George Sand, a volume of the "Eminent Women Series."] who generally takes George Sand at her own valuation, and in this case too tries to excuse her, admits that in Lucrezia Floriani there was enough of reality interwoven to make the world hasten to identify or confound Chopin with Prince Karol, that Chopin, the most sensitive of mortals, could not but be pained by the inferences which would be drawn, that "perhaps if only as a genius he had the right to be spared such an infliction," and that, therefore, "one must wish it could have appeared in this light to Madame Sand."

This is a mild way of expressing disapproval of conduct that shows, to say the least, an inhuman callousness to the susceptibilities of a fellow-being. And to speak of the irresistible prompting of genius in connection with one who had her faculties so well under her control is downright mockery. It would, however, be foolish to expect considerateness for others in one who needlessly detailed and proclaimed to the world not only the little foibles but also the drunkenness and consequent idiocy and madness of a brother whose family was still living. Her practice was, indeed, so much at variance with her profession that it is preposterous rather to accept than to doubt her words. George Sand was certainly not the self-sacrificing woman she pretended to be; for her sacrifices never outlasted her inclinations, they were, indeed, nothing else than an abandonment to her desires.

And these desires were the directors of her reason, which, aided by an exuberant imagination, was never at a loss to justify any act, be it ever so cruel and abject. In short, the chief characteristic of George Sand's moral const.i.tution was her incapacity of regarding anything she did otherwise than as right. What I have said is fully borne out by her Ma Vie and the "Correspondance," which, of course, can be more easily and safely examined than her deeds and spoken words.

And now we will continue our investigations of the causes and circ.u.mstances of the rupture. First I shall quote some pa.s.sages from letters written by George Sand, between which will be inserted a note from Chopin to her. If the reader does not see at once what several of these quotations have to do with the matter under discussion, he will do so before long.

Madame Sand to Madame Marliani; Nohant, September 1, 1846:--

It is exceedingly kind of you to offer me shelter [un gite].

We have still our apartments in the Square Saint-Lazare [Square d'Orleans], and nothing would prevent us from going there.