V.

The name of Frederic Francis Chopin is so closely linked in the minds

of musical students with that of Schumann in that art renaissance which

took place almost simultaneously in France and Germany, when so many

daring and original minds broke loose from the petrifactions of custom

and tradition, that we shall not venture to separate them here. Chopin

was too timid and gentle to be a bold aggressor, like Berlioz, Liszt,

and Schumann, but his whole nature responded to the movement, and his

charming and most original compositions, which glow with the fire of a

genius perhaps narrow in its limits, have never been surpassed for their

individuality and poetic beauty. The present brief sketch of Chopin

does not propose to consider his life biographically, full of pathos and

romance as that life may be.*

* See article Chopin, in "Great German Composers."

Schumann, in his "N'eue Zeitschrift," sums up the characteristics of the

Polish composer admirably; "Genius creates kingdoms, the smaller states

of which are again divided by a higher hand among talents, that these

may organize details which the former, in its thousand-fold activity,

would be unable to perfect. As Hummel, for example, followed the call

of Mozart, clothing the thoughts of that master in a flowing, sparkling

robe, so Chopin followed Beethoven. Or, to speak more simply, as Hummel

imitated the style of Mozart in detail, rendering it enjoyable to the

virtuoso on one particular instrument, so Chopin led the spirit of

Beethoven into the concert-room.

"Chopin did not make his appearance accompanied by an orchestral army,

as great genius is accustomed to do; he only possessed a small cohort,

but every soul belongs to him to the last hero.

"He is the pupil of the first masters--Beethoven, Schubert, Field. The

first formed his mind in boldness, the second his heart in tenderness,

the third his hand to its flexibility. Thus he stood well provided with

deep knowledge in his art, armed with courage in the full consciousness

of his power, when in the year 1830 the great voice of the people arose

in the West. Hundreds of youths had waited for the moment; but Chopin

was the first on the summit of the wall, behind which lay a cowardly

renaissance, a dwarfish Philistinism, asleep. Blows were dealt right

and left, and the Philistines awoke angrily, crying out, 'Look at the

impudent one!' while others behind the besieger cried, 'The one of noble

courage.'

"Besides this, and the favorable influence of period and condition, fate

rendered Chopin still more individual and interesting in endowing him

with an original pronounced nationality; Polish, too, and because this

nationality wanders in mourning robes in the thoughtful artist, it

deeply attracts us. It was well for him that neutral Germany did not

receive him too warmly at first, and that his genius led him straight

to one of the great capitals of the world, where he could freely poetize

and grow angry. If the powerful autocrat of the North knew what a

dangerous enemy threatens him in Chopin's works in the simple melodies

of his mazurkas, he would forbid music. Chopin's works are cannons

buried in flowers.... He is the boldest, proudest poet soul of to-day."

But Schumann could have said something more than this, and added that

Chopin was a musician of exceptional attainments, a virtuoso of the very

highest order, a writer for the piano pure and simple preeminent beyond

example, and a master of a unique and perfect style.

Chopin was born of mixed French and Polish parentage, February 8,

1810, at Zelazowa-Wola, near Warsaw. He was educated at the Warsaw

Conservatory, and his eminent genius for the piano shone at this time

most unmistakably. He found in the piano-forte an exclusive organ for

the expression of his thoughts. In the presence of this confidential

companion he forgot his shyness and poured forth his whole soul.

A passionate lover of his native country, and burning with those

aspirations for freedom which have made Poland since its first partition

a volcano ever ready to break forth, the folk-themes of Poland are

at the root of all of Chopin's compositions, and in the waltzes and

mazurkas bearing his name we find a passionate glow and richness of

color which make them musical poems of the highest order.

Chopin's art position, both as a pianist and composer, was a unique one.

He was accustomed to say that the breath of the concert-room stifled

him, whereas Liszt, his intimate friend and fellow-artist, delighted in

it as a war-horse delights in the tumult of battle. Chopin always shrank

from the display of his powers as a mere executant. To exhibit his

talents to the public was an offense to him, and he only cared for his

remarkable technical skill as a means of placing his fanciful original

poems in tone rightly before the public. It was with the greatest

difficulty that his intimate friends, Liszt, Meyerbeer, Nourrit,

Delacroix, Heine, Mme. George Sand, Countess D'Agoult, and others, could

persuade him to appear before large mixed audiences. His genius only

shone unconstrained as a player in the society of a few chosen intimate

friends, with whom he felt a perfect sympathy, artistic, social, and

intellectual. Exquisite, fastidious, and refined, Chopin was loss an

aristocrat from political causes, or even by virtue of social caste,

than from the fact that his art nature, which was delicate, feminine,

and sensitive, shrank from all companions except those molded of the

finest clay. We find this sense of exclusiveness and isolation in all

of the Chopin music, as in some quaint, fantastic, ideal world, whose

master would draw us up to his sphere, but never descend to ours.

In the treatment of the technical means of the piano-forte, he entirely

wanders from the old methods. Moscheles, a great pianist in an age of

great players, gave it up in despair, and confessed that he could not

play Chopin's music. The latter teaches the fingers to serve his own

artistic uses, without regard to the notions of the schools. It is said

that M. Kalkbrenner advised Chopin to attend his classes at the Paris

Conservatoire, that the latter might learn the proper fingering. Chopin

answered his officious adviser by placing one of his own "Études" before

him, and asking him to play it. The failure of the pompous professor

was ludicrous, for the old-established technique utterly failed to do it

justice. Chopin's end as a player was to faithfully interpret the poetry

of his own composition. His genius as a composer taught him to make

innovations in piano-forte effects. He was thus not only a great

inventor as a composer, but as regards the technique of the piano-forte.

He not only told new things well worth hearing which the world would not

forget, but devised new ways of saying them, and it mattered but little

to him whether his more forcible and passionate dialectic offended what

Schumann calls musical Philistinism or no. Chopin formed a school of his

own which was purely the outcome of his genius, though as Schumann, in

the extract previously quoted, justly says: "He was molded by the

deep poetic spirit of Beethoven, with whom form only had value as it

expressed truthfully and beautifully symmetry of conception."

The forms of Chopin's compositions grew out of the keyboard of the

piano, and their _genre_ is so peculiar that it is nearly impracticable

to transpose them for any other instrument. Some of the noted

contemporary violinists have attempted to transpose a few of the

Nocturnes and Études, but without success. Both Schumann and Liszt

succeeded in adapting Paganini's most complex and difficult violin works

for the piano-forte, but the compositions of Chopin are so essentially

born to and of the one instrument that they can not be well suited to

any other. The cast of the melody, the matchless beauty and swing of the

rhythm, his ingenious treatment of harmony, and the chromatic changes

and climaxes through which the motives are developed, make up a new

chapter in the history of the piano-forte.

Liszt, in his life of Chopin, says of him: "His character was indeed

not easily understood. A thousand subtile shades, mingling, crossing,

contradicting, and disguising each other, rendered it almost

undecipherable at first view; kind, courteous, affable, and almost

of joyous manners, he would not suffer the secret convulsions which

agitated him to be ever suspected. His works, concertos, waltzes,

sonatas, ballades, polonaises, mazurkas, nocturnes, scherzi, all reflect

a similar enigma in a most poetical and romantic form."

Chopin's moral nature was not cast in an heroic mold, and he lacked the

robust intellectual marrow which is essential to the highest forms of

genius in art as well as in literature and affairs, though it is not

safe to believe that he was, as painted by George Sand and Liszt, a

feeble youth, continually living at death's door in an atmosphere of

moonshine and sentimentality. But there can be no question that the

whole bent of Chopin's temperament and genius was melancholy, romantic,

and poetic, and that frequently he gives us mere musical moods and

reveries, instead of well-defined and well-developed ideas. His music

perhaps loses nothing, for, if it misses something of the clear,

inspiring, vigorous quality of other great composers, it has a subtile,

dreamy, suggestive beauty all its own.

The personal life of Chopin was singularly interesting. His long and

intimate connection with George Sand; the circumstances under which it

was formed; the blissful idyl of the lovers in the isle of Majorca; the

awakening from the dream, and the separation--these and other striking

circumstances growing out of a close association with what was best in

Parisian art and life, invest the career of the man, aside from his art,

with more than common charm to the mind of the reader. Having touched

on these phases of Chopin's life at some length in a previous volume of

this series, we must reluctantly pass them by.

In closing this imperfect review of the Polish composer, it is enough to

say that the present generation has more than sustained the judgment

of his own as to the unique and wonderful beauty of his compositions.

Hardly any concert programme is considered complete without one or more

numbers selected from his works; and though there are but few pianists,

even in a day when Chopin as a stylist has been a study, who can do

his subtile and wonderful fancies justice, there is no composer for the

piano-forte who so fascinates the musical mind.