[Illustration: CHOPIN. From a Drawing by George Sand.]
FREDERICK CHOPIN:
A MAN OF SOLITUDE
_By_
GUY DE POURTALÈS
_Translated from the French by_
CHARLES BAYLY, JR.
THORNTON BUTTERWORTH LIMITED
15 BEDFORD STREET, LONDON, W.C.2
_First published . . . 1927_
_All rights reserved_
MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
_“He used his art only to play
to himself his own tragedy.”_
Liszt.
DEDICATION
When I suggested the example of Liszt to a soul stricken but still
capable of enthusiasm, I thought also of offering him this story
of Chopin. Not that this latter should serve to discount whatever
slight exuberance there might be in the former. On the contrary: they
complement and complete each other, and show, the one concave and the
other convex, the twofold visage of that symbolic being whom we call
the artist. Or, the sensitive man, the cognizant—he, in short, whom we
envy.
One of these masks portrays glory and passion: the other, sorrow and
loneliness.
I quite realize the romantic sound of these four words in an age when
they are so out-moded. But if I agree that in our time every thing
possible has been tried, indeed, to eliminate from our orchestra those
harps, those tremolos, those rubatos, those great billows of harmony
that transported three admiring generations with the struggles between
heaven and hell, it is nevertheless necessary only to open a newspaper
at the section on the courts of law, to gaze into the show windows of
the picture dealers, or to hear a saxophone, to convince myself that
the themes of the human legend have in no degree changed. The rhythm,
the harmonies, are different, but our responsive vibrations are just
the same as they were in the most guileless epochs.
The real disaccord between our parents and us is that the ugly—or what
they called the ugly—has been incorporated to-day in the beautiful—or
what we call the beautiful. In other words, there are to-day no such
things as beauty and ugliness, harmony and discord, there is no longer
any æsthetic prohibition. As one of our sages, Paul Valéry, has
written: “I see the modern man as a man with an idea of himself and of
the world that is no longer fixed.... It has become impossible for him
to be a man of a single viewpoint, to hold, really, to one language,
to one nation, to one faith, to one physical type.” Let us add: to one
music.
Thanks to the rigorous method of science, it has become easy to believe
everything, or nothing. To love everyone, or no one. But do we gain
other than in childishness and dotage? I question whether this new
abundance enriches us more than their apparent poverty fertilized our
fathers. This mass of sensations and perceptions has not increased our
lucidity any more than the steam siren and the typewriter have added
new notes to our scale. And yet we should hardly consent to the loss of
one of these recent contributions.
But if a very ironic, very cynical jazz enchants me, it in no way
removes the pleasure I feel in hearing Chopin. I should be sorry not
to be able to savour two such different forms of modern sadness, the
one born in New Orleans and the other in a Warsaw garret. To pursue
still further the little problem which the two parallel existences of
Liszt and Chopin pose for our reflection, let us say that on certain
days we are more apt for action, for youth, for expenditure in any
form; on other days for reserve, for shrinking, for incertitude, for
concentration, and—even though the word has lost its beauty—for mystery.
The life of Liszt is an open book. He wrote it everywhere in ink and
in adventure. Of the life of Chopin almost nothing remains. His nature
protected him from needless experiences, and fate furthermore decreed
that a great many of his letters and relics should be burned in a
house in which his sister lived at Warsaw in 1863. We can discover him
therefore only in his music, in a few scraps of correspondence, and in
the memories of his friends. Meanwhile, his life was always so simple
and so logical that a slight commentary is necessary to understand
it, as an _appoggiatura_ enhances the value of a note. Save for two
or three journeys, the outside world had little chance to penetrate
this imagination that ever turned inward. Its poetry lies in whatever
qualities of possibility and of song that were added to the illusions
of his days. Badly served in love, in friendship, in everything that
demanded blindness or excessive pedal, this clear-sighted sufferer saw
himself in only one mirror: the ebony of his piano. “Piano, marvellous
instrument,” he said. Naturally, since the piano is an orchestra in
itself. But it is something more: it is an instrument. Hence a soul.
It was the only one Chopin ever knew; and he made his piano his only
legatee.
If Liszt has given you the daring to seize the joys of the moment and a
little confidence in yourself, Chopin can become not less a brotherly
companion. His life is that of your anxious shadow. His music is
perhaps nothing but the risen song of your inner loneliness.
All art is rich above all in the measure of what you yourself bring
to it. Every soul possesses you in the measure of the effort you make
to receive it. Welcome this one as the purest expression, for which
there are no words, of what there is in love that must remain for ever
inexpressible.
G. de P.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I “An angel, fair of face as a tall, sad woman” 17
II The Childhood of Chopin 20
III The Birth of the Poet 25
IV “Sorrow” and “Ideal” 30
V Revolution at Warsaw and Solitude at Vienna 43
VI “I doubt whether there is a city on Earth where more
pianists are to be found than in Paris” 55
VII Happy Years, Working Years 67
VIII Marie Wodzinska and the Dusk 76
IX First Sketch of George Sand 94
X Letters of Two Novelists 103
XI The Chartreuse of Valdemosa 127
XII “If music be the food of love, play on” 144
XIII On some Friendships of Chopin, and on his Æsthetics 159
XIV Misunderstandings, Loneliness 177
XV Chagrin, Hate 192
XVI The Story of an Estrangement 205
XVII Swan Song 228
XVIII “The Cypresses have their caprices” 247
XIX The Death of Chopin 251
XX An Epitaph for a Poet 257
Sources 263
Index 267
CHAPTER I
“An angel, fair of face as a tall, sad woman”
“An angel, fair of face as a tall, sad woman...” This portrait of
Chopin, penned by a hand he loved, should stand as the frontispiece of
this study. Naïve painters in the Middle Ages—who also came to pray for
pardon—hung their expiatory offerings in the shadows of the cathedrals.
This once caressing woman’s hand, now dead, surely yielded, while
writing these words, to the inner necessity of knowing absolution. It
added: “There was never anything more pure and at the same time more
exalted than his thoughts...”
And perhaps with faint trembling: “... but this being only understood
that which was inherent within himself. One would have needed a
microscope to peer into his soul, where so little light of the living
ever penetrated.”
A microscope has never helped to reveal a soul. No optical instruments
are necessary in order to follow the teaching of Liszt: let us try to
see with our hearts.
* * * * *
At the head of these pages must stand a name; because that name
breathes life into the whole being of whom we write: Poland. Ever
since 1795 that unhappy country had been completely dismembered, until
Napoleon, that great poet of geography, after his first campaign in
Prussia, created the Duchy of Warsaw (1807). This was to last until the
fall of the Emperor, that is, barely eight years. Yet these eight years
were sufficient to endow the Poles with a singularly youthful hero
worship for France.
Now in 1806, a certain M. Nicolas Chopin, professor of French,
entrusted with the education of the son of the Countess Skarbek,
married in the village of Zelazowa Wola, six leagues from Warsaw,
a Mlle. Justine Krzyzanowska. He was of French origin, a native of
Marainville, a small village near the Hill of Sion, in the heart of
Lorraine, the history of which is so curiously interwoven with that of
Poland. The fiancée of this one-time clerk who had become a teacher
was a girl of twenty-four, of an impoverished noble family. In the
household of the Countess she held, as did others of rank, the position
of attendant and lady-in-waiting, according to the tradition of such
proud, poor seigneurs.
Close to the seigneurial dwelling, which was screened by a group of
trees, stood a small house flanked by an outside staircase. Right
through it ran a passage, at the end of which could be seen the court,
the stables, and, at a distance, the fields of alfalfa and of colza.
Here the young couple settled down. At the right of the entrance were
three low rooms where one could touch the ceiling. After a time a
girl was born, and was named Louise. This obscure event was rapidly
succeeded by the French campaign in Prussia—Tilsit, Austerlitz, Jéna,
Wagram, and the Polish eagles flying in the train of the Imperial
eagles. Haydn died while the cannon of Napoleon were thundering for
the second time under the walls of Vienna. When four shells had fallen
close to him, the old composer said to his terrified servants, “Why
this panic? Remember that wherever Haydn is no accident can happen.”
Stendhal, a commissioner in the army, was present at his obsequies. He
afterwards made the following note: “Why is it that all Frenchmen who
are really great in literature—La Fontaine, Corneille, Molière, Racine,
Bossuet—should have met together about 1660? Why should all the great
painters have appeared about 1510? Why, since these two happy periods,
has nature been so sparing? Will music have the same fate?”
Yet Beethoven at that date was writing the _Quatuor serioso_ and
the sonata in E flat major, which is called _The Farewells_. He
had already composed six of his symphonies, the _Kreutzer Sonata_,
the _Appassionata_, and _Fidélio_. Liszt, Schumann and Wagner were
approaching. Goethe was flourishing; Byron was publishing his first
verses. Shelley and Keats were outlining theirs. Balzac, Hugo, Berlioz
were warming the school benches. And on the 22nd of February, 1810, at
six o’clock in the evening, in the little house in Zelazowa Wola, was
born Frederick François Chopin.
He came into a world of music. For exactly at that moment, under the
windows of his mother, rustic violins were giving a serenade for a
village wedding.