On some Friendships of Chopin, and on his Æsthetics
It was not only furniture and habits that were held in common in
the rue Pigalle, but friends as well. Sharing,—that was the great
doctrine of Pierre Leroux, George’s new director of conscience and
“preacher of eternal Truth in its steady progress.” According to this
philosophic typographer, it passed from people to people according
to mysterious laws, becoming incarnate now in one, now in another,
and had just settled in Poland. The mission of the Poles was thus all
equality, fraternity, love. Chopin smiled at this, without revealing
his opinion. But he often invited his compatriots, who joined all of
George’s friends: Leroux, Delacroix, Pauline Viardot, the great singer,
and Heinrich Heine at the head. Frederick introduced the Grzymala
brothers, Prince Czartoryski, Franchomme, the violoncellist, Fontana,
the poets Slowacki and Krasinski, the artist Kwiatkowsky, and above all
Miçkiewicz, the author of _Dziady_ (or _The Feast of the Dead_), whom
they thought profounder than Goethe and Byron.
He was an ecstatic, a visionary, inspired, at any rate, and,
like Socrates, St. John, or Dante, was smitten occasionally with
“intellectual falling-sickness.” At such times he became fired with an
eloquence that enraptured his listeners and sent them into veritable
trances. George Sand, so sensitive to disturbances, either the highest
or the lowest, found herself ravished to the point of ecstasy before
the sublime abstractions of this dreamer, the whispers of his soul,
by which she was led into those dangerous regions where reason and
madness go hand in hand. Ecstasy is contagious. Assuredly it is an
evil for simple souls; but with the great spirits, such as Apollonius
of Tyre, Moses, Swedenborg, Pierre Leroux, Miçkiewicz, and, who knows,
George Sand, perhaps, is it not a sacred enthusiasm, a divine faculty
of understanding the incomprehensible, “capable of producing the most
noble results when inspired by a great moral and metaphysical cause?”
This is the question George put to herself in her _Journal_. Meanwhile,
this Miçkiewicz gave at the College de France a course of lectures full
of logic and clarity. He was great hearted, had himself perfectly in
hand, and reasoned with mastery. But he was transported into exaltation
by the very nature of his beliefs, by the violence of his partially
savage instincts, the momentum of his poetic faith, and the sentiment,
so fecund in all these exiles, of the misfortunes of their fatherland.
Chopin also believed in the mystic aureole of this saintly bard. He
did not know that Miçkiewicz, overjoyed at having been able to win
so great a convert as George, thought her lover “her evil genius,
her moral vampire, her cross, who tortured and would possibly end by
killing her.” How surprising such a judgment from one who received
secret communications from the other world! Fortunately, Sainte-Beuve
came along, lent his delicate ear to Miçkiewicz and declared that
if he had eloquence his faults should be noticed as well. However
delicate Chopin’s perceptions, he no longer regarded them because for
him Miçkiewicz was the great bell that tolled the sorrows of Poland.
Who could be more stimulating than this apostle prophesying the
resurrection of his country? The Redeemer was announced. The Saviour
was about to arise, and his coming must be hastened by deeds of faith
and by repentance.
Sometimes in the evening the seer came to the rue Pigalle accompanied
by several of his compatriots. He would retire into a dim corner of the
little salon and read his _Infernal Comedy_ or one of his _Ballades_,
some new poem filled with the odour of his forests. Or else, in a
divine delirium, he would improvise. That great Slavic dismay, mute
and passive, soon appeared on the face of the exiles and was prolonged
in a silence loaded with memories. Then Chopin would rise and seat
himself at the piano. The lamp would be still further lowered. He would
begin with feathery arpeggios, stealing over the keys in his usual
way, until he encountered the _blue note_, the pitch which seemed to
correspond best to the general atmosphere. Then he would start one of
his favourite pieces, the _Etude_ in thirds from the second volume,
for instance (G sharp minor). One of his compatriots called it _The
Siberian_ because it symbolized the journey of the deported Pole.
The snow falls on the endless plains. (An ascending and descending
scale for each hand pictures this universal infinity in a striking
manner.) You hear the bells of the troika that approaches, passes, and
disappears towards the horizon. And each one of them has seen a brother
or a friend pass by, escorted by two Russian police who were taking
him off for ever. Or else a _scherzo_ takes shape, crystallizes: an
old popular refrain that Frederick has heard in his childhood at the
doors of the village inn. All of them, recognizing it, follow with
muted humming from between tightened lips, while tears cover their
faces. And the artist varies it, scans it softly, throws it up and
catches it again, neglects the colouring, seeking only the design.
For him the design is the soul. In spite of effects of resonance, of
cloudlike fluidity, it is the design he pursues, the pure line of his
thought. One of the friends who heard him writes: “His eyes burned with
a feverish animation, his lips became blood-red, his breath short.
He felt, we felt, that part of his life was running out with the
sounds.” Suddenly a little dry cough, a sudden pause in a _pianissimo_
passage, and in the dim light Chopin raises his fine white face with
black-circled eyes.
But the evenings did not always end on this affecting scene. Sometimes,
on the contrary, there would burst out from behind the piano the
Emperor of Austria, an insolent old man, a phlegmatic Englishman, a
sentimental and ridiculous Englishwoman, a sordid old Jew. It was again
Chopin, past master of grimaces, who, after having drawn tears from
all eyes, wrinkled their faces with fits of laughter.
* * * * *
Among George Sand’s old friends was a delicate, pale, nervous little
man, with however, a will and a mind so strong that he stands out from
his time like a bronze figure in an Olympus of plaster casts. In his
own profession he was at once the most violent, the steadiest, the
purest of creators. But, as in art everything is, as he said, a matter
of the soul, here is an opinion which coming from his pen has some
weight. He wrote: “Times without number, I have talked intimately to
Chopin, whom I like greatly. He is a man of rare distinction and the
truest artist I have ever met. He is of that small number that one can
admire and esteem.”
This man was named Eugène Delacroix. His very young friend, Baudelaire,
said of him that he loved the big, the national, the overwhelming, the
universal, as is seen in his so-called decorative painting or in his
_big machines_. What could be farther from Chopin’s whole æsthetic?
But they had both a certain taste for the conventional, especially in
the arts which were not their own. Delacroix, the powerful innovator,
liked only the classic in literature, only Mozart in music. Chopin, in
painting, greatly preferred M. Ingres to Delacroix. Opposite as they
were in culture, in tendencies, in taste, yet Chopin and Delacroix
understood each profoundly in their hearts. Delacroix, a great lover
and connoisseur of music, soon placed Chopin directly after Mozart.
As for Chopin, who loved and respected the man, he continued to detest
his painting. It was above all in temperament that they were brothers.
“... A mixture of scepticism, politeness, dandyism, of burning will,
of finesse, of despotism, and finally of an especial kind of goodness,
and of _restrained tenderness_ that always goes with genius.” Well now,
who is the subject of this portrait that so resembles Chopin? It is
still Baudelaire talking of Delacroix. A hater of crowds, a polished
sceptic, a man of the world entirely preoccupied in dissimulating the
cholers of his heart,—such characteristics applied to either of them.
Both violent, both reserved, both modest, such were these aristocrats
born among the people. Delacroix taking his old servant to the Louvre
to explain the Assyrian sculpture to her, or Chopin playing the piano
for his valet,—these are pictures which give a better critical estimate
than ten pages of abstractions. Let us add that both of them were
invalids, both sufferers, both tubercular, and that the only revenge
they could take upon life was to live by the spirit. I should say: by
the emotional spirit. Exquisite judges of nuances, music furnished
them with incomparable ones. Mozart was their God because his science
naturally was equal to his inspiration. Of the works of Beethoven they
said: “Vulgar passages side by side with sublime beauty.” To the ear of
Delacroix he was sometimes diffuse, tortuous; to Chopin’s too athletic,
too Shakespearean, with a passion that always bordered on a cataclysm.
Yet the painter admired him because he found him modern, entirely of
his own times. That is precisely the reason that made him suspect to
Chopin, who before everything demanded a delicately decanted wine, a
liqueur from which rose the bouquet of memory. Nietzsche said later on:
“All music begins to have its _magical_ effect only from the moment
when we hear the language of our past in it.” Now that exile, Chopin,
never heard anything but the oldest voices of his memory. That was his
poetry.
“When Beethoven is obscure,” he said, “and seems to lack unity, the
cause is not the rather savage, pretended originality, for which people
honour him; it is that he turns his back on the eternal principles;
Mozart never. Each of the parts has its own direction which, even while
harmonizing with the others, forms a song and follows it perfectly. In
that is the counterpoint, _punto contrapunto_. It’s the custom to learn
harmony before counterpoint, that is, the succession of notes that
lead up to the chords. Berlioz pounds out the chords and fills up the
intervals as best he can. In music, the purest logic is the _fugue_. To
know the fugue thoroughly is to know the element of all reason and all
deduction.”
Sand tells us that one day she came to Delacroix’s studio to take him
to dine at her house where Chopin was asking for him. She found him at
work, his neck wrapped in woollens, just like her “regular invalid,”
coughing like him, and husky, but raging none the less against Ingres
and his Stratonice. They joined Chopin. He did not like the Stratonice
either; he found the figures mannered, but the “finish” of the painting
pleased him. In everything he was a lover of the exact, of the finished.
“About colour,” he said, “I don’t understand a thing.”
They dined. At dessert, Maurice asked his master to explain the
phenomenon of reflections to him, and Delacroix drew a comparison
between the tones of a painting and the sounds of music. Chopin was
astonished.
“The harmony of music,” explained the painter, “is not only in the
construction of chords, but also in their relations, their logical
sequence, their sweep, their auditory reflections. Well, painting is no
different. The reflection of reflections...”
Chopin bursts out: “Let me breathe. One reflection is enough for the
moment. It’s ingenious, new, but it is alchemy to me.”
“No, it’s pure chemistry. The tones decompose and recompose themselves
constantly, and the reflection is not separated from the _relief_.”
Here is Delacroix well in the saddle. He explains colour, line, flat
tones; that all colour is an exchange of reflections; that what M.
Ingres lacks is half of painting, half of sight, half of life, that he
is half a man of genius, the other half an imbecile.
But Chopin is not listening. He rises and goes to the piano. He
improvises an instant, stops.
“But,” cries Delacroix, “it’s not finished.”
“It’s not begun. Nothing comes to me... Nothing but reflections,
shadows, reliefs that won’t become clear. I look for colour, and can’t
even find design.”
“You’ll never find one without the other, and you are going to find
both of them.”
“But if I only find moonlight?”
“You will have found a reflection of a reflection.”
Chopin returned to his theme without seeming to begin again, so vague
was his melody. Then the _blue note_ sounded, and they were transported
into the heavens, straying with the clouds above the roofs of the
square.
* * * * *
Several times already we have noticed this _blue note_. It did not
alone proceed from the characteristic Chopin pitches. It was the
song of his touch, the timbre of his hand. Like Liszt, Chopin had a
distinct state of consciousness in each of his fingers. He managed to
disassociate their impressions, to make them transmit to his brain
a harmony of infinitely varied manual sensations. It was a whole
education in technique and observation which taught a new method of
self-knowledge, how to think of oneself in a new way.
For him, a good technique had for its object not the ability to play
everything with an equal tone but to acquire a beautiful quality of
touch in order to bring out nuances perfectly. “For a long time,” he
said, “pianists have gone against nature in trying to give equal tone
to each finger. On the contrary, each finger should play its proper
part. The thumb has the greatest strength, because it is the largest
and most independent of the fingers. After that comes the little
finger, at the other end of the hand. Then the index, the principal
support of the hand. Then the middle finger, the weakest of all. As for
its Siamese twin, some pianists try, by putting all their strength into
it, to make it independent. That is impossible, and perfectly useless.
So there are several kinds of tones, as there are several fingers. It
is a matter of profiting by these differences. This, in other words, is
the whole art of fingering.”
Chopin had worked a great deal on these questions of transcendental
mechanics. Taking his hand, which was small, people were surprised by
its bony resistence. One of his friends has said that it was the frame
of a soldier covered with the muscles of a woman. Another, on the
contrary, thought it a boneless hand. Stephen Heller was stupefied to
see him cover a third of the keyboard, and compared his hand to the jaw
of a snake opening suddenly to swallow a whole rabbit in one mouthful.
He had invented a method of fingering all his own. His touch was,
thanks to this care, softer than any other in the world, opposed to all
theatricality, and of a beauty that charmed from the first bars. In
order to give the hand a correct position, he had it placed lightly on
the keyboard in such a way that the fingers struck the _E, F sharp, G
sharp, A sharp_, and _B_. This was, to his mind, the normal position.
Without changing it, he made his pupils do exercises designed to
give independence and equality to the fingers. Then he put them at
_staccato_, to give them lightness, then at _staccato-legato_, and
finally at _accented-legato_. He taught a special system to keep the
hand in its close and easy position while using the thumb in scales and
in _arpeggio_ passages. This perfect ease of the hand seemed to him
a major virtue, and the only means of attaining exact and equalized
playing, even when it was necessary to pass the thumb under the fourth
or fifth finger. But these exercises explain also how Chopin executed
his extremely difficult accompaniments (unknown until his time), which
consist in striking notes that are very distant from each other. We can
easily understand how much he must have shocked the pianists of the
old school by his original fingering, which had always the object of
keeping the hand in the same position, even while passing the third or
fourth finger over the fifth. Sometimes he held it completely flat, and
thus obtained effects of velvet and of finesse that threw Berlioz, and
even Liszt, into ecstasy. To acquire the independence of the fingers,
he recommended letting them fall freely and lightly, while holding the
hand as if suspended in the air without any pressure. He did not want
his pupils to take the rapid movements too soon, and made them play all
the passages very _forte_ and very _piano_. In this way the qualities
of sound were formed of themselves, and the hand was never tired. It
is he who, always for the purpose which he considered so important, of
gaining the independence of the fingers, conceived the idea of making
his pupils play the scales with an accent on each third or fourth note.
He was very angry when accused of being too free in his handling of
the beat. “Let your left hand be your precentor,” he said, “while your
right hand plays _ad lib_.”
Reading these rapid technical indications ought not to be
disheartening. In every art the technique and the material are the
living joys of the intelligence. They are the beautiful secrets of the
potter. Chopin, moreover, did not leave a _method_. He dreamed of it,
but it all remained in the state of a project. The big, the developed,
the scholarly frightened him. He always inhabited closed regions where
he did not much like to be accompanied. He never felt the strength to
compose an opera. His teachers and his friends pressed him to do it.
“With your admirable ideas,” demanded M. de Perthuis, “why don’t you do
an opera for us?”
“Ah, Count,” replied Chopin, “let me write only piano music. I do not
know enough to build operas.”
He had a taste for the rare and the finished rather than for great
applause. It was in the detail that he excelled. His most pregnant
harmonic inventions are made of nothings, but of nothings essential to
the character of his art. Professor Kleczynski, one of his compatriots
to whom I am indebted for several of these details, has written: “Given
the richness of his talent, he, like Schumann, disappointed us a
little. But on the other hand, putting his whole soul into the little
things, he finished and perfected them in an admirable manner.” It
is precisely in these “little things” that Chopin was great. Perhaps
for him nothing was little. Indeed, where does the little end, and the
big begin? Without doubt he put his soul into everything from which he
expected a pitch of perfection.
“When I am ill-disposed,” he said, “I play on an Erard piano, and
easily find a _ready-made_ tone; but when I feel keyed up, and strong
enough to discover _my own tone_, then I need a Pleyel piano.”
* * * * *
Another friend of Chopin’s was Liszt, a friend by heart and by
profession. People often tried to pitt one against the other, to
persuade each of them that the contrast of their methods, of their
playing as of their characters, made them rivals. But this was not
so, and if Chopin sometimes seemed rather retiring, and even timid
before the other great virtuoso of his time, it is because the women
interfered.
George Sand and Marie d’Agoult had known each other for a long time.
Before the reign of Chopin George had gone to Geneva, where she had
sojourned for a season in the intimacy of this pretty, romantic
left-handed establishment. Then Franz and Marie had come to spend a
summer at Nohant. On both sides there had been curiosity, admiration,
but also secret jealousies. The Countess prided herself on her writing.
She had a noble style, a sceptical but well-furnished mind, and, except
in love, balance in everything. With George, spontaneity carried the
day. She had at first a temperamental sympathy for this beautiful tall
woman who threw her bonnet over the great houses of the Faubourg. It
was a brilliant putting into practice of her theories on love and
liberty. “You seem to me the only beautiful, estimable and truly noble
thing that I have seen shine in the patrician sphere,” she wrote to
her. “You are to me the true type of the Princess of romance, artistic,
loving and noble in manner, language, and dress, like the daughters
of the Kings in heroic days.” But this extravagant admiration was
entirely literary. So also was it with Marie d’Agoult, who was much
more interested in the almost illustrious novelist than in this strange
descendant of a line of kings and of a bird-seller. She soon decided
to withdraw Liszt from her influence, and it was with displeasure that
she saw the arrival of that Chopin whose sweet and profound genius her
lover prophesied. So they became cold. They separated. George sent the
Countess to all the devils.
But Liszt continued to see Chopin because he loved him. No one played
the Pole’s compositions better than he, because no one knew them
better, nor had sounded them more deeply and played them more in his
concerts. “I love my music when Liszt plays it,” said Chopin. In the
work which Liszt dedicated, later on, to his friend, he compares the
_Etudes_, the _Preludes_, and the _Nocturnes_ to the masterpieces of
La Fontaine. I do not know that anyone has made a truer comparison.
Two great poets, who tried to hold the very-big in the very-little,
and who salted with irony their daily-wounded hearts. This is the
place to recall the words of Heine, who called Chopin “the Raphaël
of the pianoforte.” In his music “each note is a syllable, each bar
a word,” and each phrase a thought. He invented “those admirable
harmonic progressions by which he dowered with serious character even
those pages which, in view of the lightness of their subject, seemed
to have no claim to such importance.” It is by their sentiment that
they excel, and on closer examination one recognizes, according to
Liszt, those transitions that unite emotion and thought, these degrees
of tone of which Delacroix speaks. Of the _classic_ works of Chopin,
Liszt admired above all the _adagio_ of the _Second Concerto_, for
which Chopin himself had a marked predilection. “The secondary melodies
belong to the author’s most beautiful manner; the principal phrase is
of admirable breadth: it alternates with a _recitative_ that strikes
the minor key and is like an antistrophe.” In several of the _Etudes_
and of the _Scherzos_ Liszt discovers the concentrated exasperation,
the proud and ironic despair of Fritz. Yet it takes a trained ear,
because Chopin allowed hardly a suspicion to be entertained of the
“secret convulsions” that disturbed him. His character “was made up of
a thousand nuances which, in overlapping, disguised each other in an
indecipherable manner.” And Liszt, whose intelligence always stands out
so sharply, wrote this fine comment on the last works of Chopin: “He
used his art only to play to himself his own tragedy.” After having
sung his feeling, he set himself to disintegrate it. But even then,
the emotion that inspired these pages remains pure nobility, their
expression rests within “the true limits of the language of art,”
without vulgarity, without wild shrieks, without contortion. “Far from
being diminished, the quality of the harmonic stuff becomes only more
interesting in itself, more curious to study.”
Needless to say Chopin considered himself a romantic, and yet
he invoked two masters: Bach and Mozart; Bach, whom he admired
boundlessly, without a single reserve, and Mozart, in whom he found
“the laws of all the liberties of which he made abundant use.” And yet
he would not admit that “one should demolish the Greek architrave with
the Gothic tower, nor that one should abolish the pure and exquisite
grace of Italian architecture to the profit of the luxuriant fantasy of
Moorish buildings... He never lent the lightest approval to what he did
not judge to be an effective conquest for art. His disinterestedness
was his strength.” (Liszt.) We know that Beethoven, Michelangelo,
Shakespeare, frightened him. It seems stranger that he should not have
liked Schumann more. He found Mendelssohn common, and he would not
willingly listen to certain works of Schubert, “whose contours were too
sharp for his ear, where the feelings seemed to be stripped naked. All
savage brutality repelled him. In music, as in literature, as in the
habit of life, everything that approached melodrama was torture to
him.” Apropos of Schubert he said to Liszt one day:
“The sublime is defamed when the common or the trivial takes its place.”
Even in Mozart he found blemishes. He regretted certain passages of
_Don Juan_, the work that he adored. “He managed,” Liszt always said,
“to forget what was repugnant to him, but to reconcile himself to it
was always impossible.” Romantic that he was, yet he never engaged in
any of the controversies of the epoch. He stood apart from the battles
into which Liszt and Berlioz wholeheartedly threw themselves, but he
brought to their group, nevertheless, convictions that were “absolute,
stubborn, and inflexible.” When his opinions had prevailed, like a
true _grand Seigneur_ and party leader, he kept himself from pushing
his victory too far, and returned to all his habits of art and of the
spirit.
How often did Liszt bend over the keyboard at Chopin’s side to follow
the sylph-like touch! He studied it with love and infinite care, and
he was the only one who succeeded in imitating it. “He always made
the melody undulate ...; or else he made it move, indecisive, like an
airy apparition.” This is the famous _rubato_. But the word
conveys nothing to those who know, and nothing to those who do not
know, and Chopin ceased to add this explanation to his music. If one
has the intelligence it is impossible not to divine this _rule of
irregularity_. Liszt explained it thus to one of his pupils: “Look at
those trees; the wind plays in their leaves and awakens life in them,
yet they do not stir.” His compositions should be played “with this
kind of accented and prosodic balance, this _morbidezza_ of which it
is difficult to grasp the secret when one has not often heard Chopin
himself play.... He impressed upon all of them some mystery of nameless
colour, of vague form, of vibrating pulsations, that were almost devoid
of materiality, and, like imponderable things, seemed to act upon the
soul without passing through the senses. Chopin also liked to throw
himself into burlesque fantasies; of his own accord he sometimes evoked
some scene from Jacques Callot, with laughing, grimacing, gambolling
caricatures, witty and malicious, full of musical flings, crackling
with wit and English humour like a fire of green boughs. One of these
piquant improvisations remains for us in the fifth _Etude_, where only
the black keys are played,—just as Chopin’s gaiety moved only on the
higher keys of the spirit.”
It was to his compatriots that he demonstrated it most willingly, to
a few choice friends. It is said that even to-day the pupils of his
pupils shine in the reflected glory of these preciously transmitted
recipes. Doubtless there will always be born here or there a Chopinian
soul; but can the intangible be taught? Liszt said: “Chopin passed
among us like a phantom.”