FREDERICK FRANCIS CHOPIN was born near Warsaw, in 1810, of French
extraction. He learned music at the age of nine from Ziwny, a pupil of
Sebastian Bach, but does not seem to have impressed anyone with his
remarkable talent except Madame Catalani, the great singer, who gave
him a watch. Through the kindness of Prince Radziwill, an enthusiastic
patron of art, he was sent to Warsaw College, where his genius began
to unfold itself. He afterwards became a pupil of the Warsaw
Conservatory, and acquired there a splendid mastery over the science
of music. His labour was prodigious in spite of his frail health; and
his knowledge of contrapuntal forms was such as to exact the highest
encomiums from his instructors.
Through his brother pupils he was introduced to the highest Polish
society, for his fellows bore some of the proudest names in Poland.
Chopin seems to have absorbed the peculiarly romantic spirit of his
race, the wild, imaginative melancholy, which, almost gloomy in the
Polish peasant, when united to grace and culture in the Polish noble,
offered an indescribable social charm. Balzac sketches the Polish
woman in these picturesque antitheses:--"Angel through love, demon
through fantasy; child through faith, sage through experience; man
through the brain, woman through the heart; giant through hope,
mother through sorrow; and poet through dreams." The Polish gentleman
was chivalrous, daring, and passionate; the heir of the most gifted
and brilliant of the Slavic races, with a proud heritage of memory
which gave his bearing an indescribable dignity, though the son of a
fallen nation. Ardently devoted to pleasure, the Poles embodied in
their national dances wild and inspiring rhythms, a glowing poetry of
sentiment as well as motion, which mingled with their Bacchanal fire a
chaste and lofty meaning that became at times funereal. Polish society
at this epoch pulsated with an originality, an imagination, and a
romance, which transfigured even the common things of life.
It was amid such an atmosphere that Chopin's early musical career was
spent, and his genius received its lasting impress. One afternoon in
after years he was playing to one of the most distinguished women in
Paris, and she said that his music suggested to her those gardens in
Turkey where bright parterres of flowers and shady bowers were strewed
with gravestones and burial mounds. This underlying depth of
melancholy Chopin's music expresses most eloquently, and it may be
called the perfect artistic outcome of his people; for in his sweetest
tissues of sound the imagination can detect agitation, rancour,
revolt, and menace, sometimes despair. Chateaubriand dreamed of an Eve
innocent, yet fallen; ignorant of all, yet knowing all; mistress, yet
virgin. He found this in a Polish girl of seventeen, whom he paints as
a "mixture of Odalisque and Valkyr." The romantic and fanciful passion
of the Poles, bold, yet unworldly, is shown in the habit of drinking
the health of a sweetheart from her own shoe.
Chopin, intensely spiritual by temperament and fragile in health, born
an enthusiast, was coloured through and through with the rich dyes of
Oriental passion; but with these were mingled the fantastic and ideal
elements which,
"Wrapped in sense, yet dreamed of heavenlier joys."
And so he went to Paris, the city of his fate, ripe for the tragedy
of his life. After the revolution of 1830, he started to go to London,
and, as he said, "passed through Paris." Yet Paris he did not leave
till he left it with Mdme. Sand to live a brief dream of joy in the
beautiful Isle of Majorca.