youth, without visions of a virtuoso-life?--he sometimes did so;
but even then with little enthusiasm. If he was heard in Paris, it
was at very select matinées at the Pleyel salon, to which only with
difficulty was admission to be obtained. The exiled aristocracy of
Poland, the world of Parisian art and letters, and ladies, sat
around and listened. _Réunions intimes_, _concerts de fashion_, as
Liszt called them, were the purest piano-recitals ever given. The
artist knew his audience; and in that small circle there was free
play for the isolated poesy which sounded from the instrument. A
delicate genius had won back for the piano its reserved nobility.
There was here no _fracas pianistique_, no noisy circus-scene before
a many-headed, unknown, indeterminate public; but courtly culture
without the court. When in 1834 Chopin gave a great recital in the
Italian Opera, he was undeceived by the want of response which he
found, and necessarily found, in those great halls, which only
dissipated his dainty playing. He said to Liszt, “I am not fitted for
public playing. The public frightens me, its breath chokes me, I am
paralysed by its inquisitive gaze, and affrighted at these strange
faces; but you, you are meant for it. If you can’t win the love of the
public, you can astonish it and deafen it.”
Chopin once said of himself that he was in this world like the E
string of a violin on a contrabass. His finely-strung nature sought
retirement, and fate had given him precisely that longing for rest
and harmony which of necessity made the contrabass of this world
excessively painful to him. He ran restlessly from one abode to
another, till he found in the Place de Vendôme the best for dying
in; he became more and more retiring, called for peaceful pearl-gray
carpets, and gave full play to all his decorative emotions, which are
the external proof of a harmonic soul. The art of his life was driven
into isolation, into inclusion in the sacred recesses of his musical
poems; and he knew well how so to level his life to the external
observer, that the biographers--apart from his one great passion--had
never so uneventful a life to record. The well-known description of
an evening with the master, which Liszt gives in his fanciful but yet
so true biography of Chopin, is so rich in character that reality
itself could hardly have done it better. A melting twilight in the
room, the dark corners seeming to produce themselves into infinity,
the furniture covered with white hangings, no candle except by the
piano and by the fireside. We distinguish Heine, Meyerbeer, the tenor
Nourrit, Hiller Delacroix, the unemotional Minkiewicz, the gray-haired
Niemcewicz, and George Sand with propped arm leaning back in a chair.
The people stand round Chopin in the twilight, and hardly know whence
these magic tones come. [The English reader will recall the exquisite
description of Chopin’s playing in Crawford’s romance “With the
Immortals.”]
We can easily see why Chopin could never compose duets. Not only
did he devote himself exclusively to the piano--he wrote nothing in
which the piano does not bear a part--but he broke with the custom of
writing duets for one or two pianos. A single Rondo for two pianos,
of the year 1828, was found among his remains. How he smiled once
at Czerny, who “had composed another overture for eight pianos and
sixteen persons, and was very happy over it.” Chopin opened to the two
hands a wider world than Czerny could give to thirty-two. And further,
he selects and rejects with great care before publishing. He prints
nothing which does not absolutely satisfy his mind both as a whole and
in its details.
Between his youth in Poland--which was soon closed to him on political
grounds--and his last journey through England and Scotland, his stay
in France stretches like a peaceful background of exclusively artistic
activity. A thousand anecdotes cluster round him, but only a few of
them have stood the test of criticism and comparison. In his “Life of
Chopin”--and there are few musical biographies equally good--Niecks
has collected everything that is told, and all the arguments against
the authenticity of the various tales. Even upon that famous scene,
in which the Countess Potocka sings the dying Chopin to his eternal
slumber, the traditions are contradictory. There are few letters to
help us. Chopin was too reserved to write them. It was said that he
would rather go right through Paris to decline an invitation by word
of mouth than write his excuse. And of the few letters he actually
did write, the best appear to have been burnt in the sack of Warsaw.
Nevertheless there is a certain charm in being thus obliged, as it
were, to see him in shadow.
[Illustration: George Sand, in man’s dress. Lithograph by Cecilia
Brandt.]
A sweet tie bound him to his native country. The fundamental
characteristic of the Poles, who united the merits of the Gaul and of
the Slav, that character of modesty and resignation, of sadness and of
reminiscence, flowed all the purer into the works of the artist. It
was easy to see that almost every one of Chopin’s compositions, even
if it was _not_ a Mazurka, sprang from the rhythm and sentiment of
the Mazur (Magyar) music; but it had been all steeped in the spirit
of the Parisian life. A _milieu_ of his own was here, of a charming
and cultivated kind, of which there are but few; the _milieu_ of fair
Polish ladies, who in Paris lived for their aspirations and their
temperaments. As Liszt said, the French alone saw in the daughters of
Poland a yet unknown ideal: the other nations had not the slightest
suspicion that there was anything worthy of admiration in these
elusive sylphs of the dance, who smiled so happily of an evening,
and in the morning lay sobbing at the foot of the altar; in these
apparently distracted travellers, who, if they journeyed through
Switzerland, drew the curtains of their carriages lest the sight
of the mountain-landscape should erase the memory of the limitless
horizon of their own native plains. Is not this a paraphrase of
Chopin’s music?
That enigmatical daemon, whom fate had allowed to grow up within the
walls of Paris--George Sand--was Chopin’s one grand passion. This was
his one overmastering emotion--but its influence never faded. The
beginning and the end of their association were varied a hundredfold.
His love for her seems to have begun in hate and to have ended in it;
hers began in dreaming, and ended with emotion; and, as she carried
through the episode in actual life with _bel esprit_, so she clothed
it poetically with the same. Who can reproach a Don Juan nature with
wickedness? George Sand must have been wicked to play her vampire-part
to the end. But there was nothing petty about the style in which she
played it.
The Powers were cruel who brought these two persons together. Now in
Paris, now at George Sand’s country place at Nohant, now in travel,
Fate compelled them to play this fearful comedy, in which, at bottom,
neither truly knew or comprehended the other. The woman remained a
_bel esprit_, and the artist remained a dreamer. And in the midst of
the comedy stands the ridiculous idyll of Majorca, in which these
two persons live near each other, in a prison of their souls. The
man delicate and pining, with agile limbs, slight hands, slight
feet, silky-brown hair, transparent complexion, finely-curved nose,
quiet smile, voice muffled “like a creeper whose calyx rocks on the
delicate stem, dressed in wonderful colours, but of such airy texture
that it tears at the slightest motion.” The woman, with an ideal
Greek countenance on a somewhat thick-set body; a face that might
seem to have come down from earlier ages, as Heine describes it, but
softened by a surprising gentleness--Musset’s “femme à l’œil sombre.”
They sit in the midst of the cypresses, oranges, and myrtles in the
deserted monastery of Valdemosa with its chapels, churches, carved
statues, and moss-grown stonework. In the evening the populace come
out and dance ghostlike boleros with castanets, or at other times the
wind howls as if possessed and the rain falls without intermission.
Eating is impossible; ships cannot come through the storm. A Pleyel
piano, brought there with difficulty, stands in the deserted halls,
and Chopin sits at it and shivers. He longs for home; and she is soon
compelled to recognise that nothing increased his chest-complaint so
much as this winter in Majorca, which she had aided him in planning.
This winter in Majorca was that of 1838 and 1839. It has long been
believed that it gave rise to Chopin’s Preludes. Some have even
fancied they recognised in the dropping motives of some of them,
especially the E minor, the B minor, and the D flat major, the effect
of the constant rain of Majorca. The truth is that a large part of the
Preludes were written, or half written, before this, and that only the
last touches were given to them in Majorca. Nay, it is even possible
that the mighty and fiery A major Polonaise was conceived and finished
under the gloomy sky of Majorca. Dates are difficult to obtain, and
also of very little importance. Chopin writes his works so entirely
from the heart that they have very little dependence on the moment of
their composition. The single case of an impulse of this kind would
seem to be the news of the sack of Warsaw, upon which he is said to
have written the stormy C minor Étude. Poetic influences, also, Polish
or French, move him only as it were on the circumference. He is a
delicately emotional nature, but far from a literary one.
Chopin’s habit of conceiving his pieces as great wholes is precisely
what renders an analysis of his works impossible. Chopin, with all the
charms we know so well, with all his wide embracing harmonies, his
spirited voice-outlines, is but one, and one whole: and this single
Chopin takes now one, now another, isolated form, in which, from the
original motives, ever fresh creations are fused together. In every
piece he is entirely present. There are, it is true, a few weaker
pieces of his youth; and Fontana has published a large stock from
his remains (these are numbered from Op. 66 on)--a thing to which he
would have objected; he hated this stirring of dead bones. But these
pieces have now vanished even from the practising repertoire of the
following generations. Certain lines can always be drawn over his
general work. We see him, at first, plainly dominated by his only
true forerunner, Hummel, for whom he felt a passionate admiration,
and whose method of execution he has only further enlarged; so that
in Chopin’s daintiest colourations a keen observer can detect the
relics of the old “manieren” and ornamental flourishes. The E flat
major Rondo, the Concert-Polonaise, and, above all, the two Concertos
in E minor and F minor, show clearly the influence of Hummel, notably
in their jerky insertion of étude-like murmuring motives, their
simply broken accompaniment to the cantilena, their brilliant effects
in the high registers, their easy drawing-room phrases, and their
surprisingly Mozart-like charm in melodic line. But the concertos,
the most fairy-like in the whole range of that class of literature,
already point to regions so far out of the reach of Hummel that they
cannot be exhaustively summed up under that category. Scarcely to
be separated chronologically from them are the pure commencements
of the genuine art of Chopin, which is clearly visible in the first
Mazurkas, and stretches far into the forties. Even those remarkable
spirited variations in B flat minor, dated 1833, on an operatic theme
of Herold, in which Chopin seemed to make a concession to fashion,
are not removed a hair’s breadth from the distinction of his best
style. In 1840, a year so fruitful for Schumann also, appeared Op. 35
to 50. Chopin was thirty-one, the age at which Schubert died. At last
a certain later style has been marked off; restrained, contrapuntal,
and yet unfettered. His most brightly-coloured examples he gave in the
wildly poetical Barcarolle, the spiritual B major Nocturne, and the
full-bodied Fantasia-Polonaise.
Chopin’s work shows but few departures from his regular lines.
Of these we may mention the beautiful pasticcio of the F minor
Fantasia, which should be played with a sort of extempore laxity; the
Barcarolle; the Tarantelle; the Bolero; and the refined Berceuse,
in which, over the uniform accompaniment, a splendid succession
of motives ascends or descends; which form an epitome of Chopin’s
“manieren,” as the Goldberg Variations were of Bach’s, the Diabelli
of Beethoven’s, or the C sharp minor of Schumann’s. Apart from these
his pieces fall into symmetrical groups, each of which has its own
pronounced character.
His sonatas remain most strange to us; they are sonatas in the strict
sense as little as the other sonatas by the Romantics. Chopin cares so
little for form that he avoids the recurrence to the first theme. The
whole falls into fragments: the B flat minor has its wild first theme
and its dainty second; the capricious Scherzo, the Funeral March,
which, alas! has become so popular (it was introduced into the Sonata
only by an afterthought), and the spirited unisono storm of the last
Presto, right on to the fortissimo concluding bar. But from the B
minor Sonata, the sultry Largo, and the last movement, a kind of giant
boating-piece, strike us as most remarkable.
Chopin finds his true form in the Ballades and Scherzi. This is the
extempore form, which even in the Impromptus has for long not been so
unfettered. The dividing lines of the sections are drawn from free
invention, and the thought is constrained by no scheme. An artistic
order introduces the rhythm of the arrangement with which the moment
would have been obliged to dispense. It is naturalism lifted into the
sphere of discrete art.
The improvised form is shown in the Preludes still more purely, but
with less pretension. They are a succession of musical aphorisms, from
the sketch to the finished piece, running through the gamut of all
forms.
In these Ballades, Scherzi and Preludes, we reach again one of those
solitary peaks of piano literature in which improvisatorial invention
and artistic construction meet again in a higher unity.
The Études crown the efforts of this period, to bring technique
and tune into the friendly relation peculiar to them. While we
admire their mechanical value in point of polyrhythmical effects,
wide stretches, double trills, independence of the left hand, airy
piano-effects, freedom of the wrist, and quickness of finger-change,
we praise their poetry, the grace of the C major or the magic of the A
flat major, the solemnity of the C sharp minor, or the intoxication of
the G flat major, the Titanic force of the C minor, or the melancholy
of the E flat minor.
The Nocturnes--with the silken web of the D flat major in their
midst--are the high songs of melody which Chopin nowhere else has
framed with such entrancing aspiration or such broad exclamatory
sighs. But the dances are the high songs of rhythm, to which never yet
was so intellectual a homage paid. The Polonaises have the _galant_
and knightly features of the old Polish nobility; and Chopin’s head
rears itself in them more proudly than one would have expected from
his feminine nature. But the Mazurkas are bourgeois little joys,
half bathed in sorrow, half crushing their pain in the jubilation of
the rhythm--an unparalleled series of intellectual inspirations. In
the Waltzes we have only a higher kind of Mazurkas, with less of the
national spirit, like Poles in the Parisian drawing-room. The slow
Waltz in A minor, not without reason, was dearest to Chopin’s own
heart.
Chopin’s playing was the rapture of his contemporaries. All agree that
his individuality could only be made intelligible by himself. How long
did Moscheles torment himself with the remarkable harmonic transitions
which he found in Chopin’s compositions! But when he heard the master
himself, all doubt vanished; what had seemed violent now became
self-intelligible. Chopin’s playing was dainty and airy; his fingers
seemed to glide sideways, as if all technique were a glissando; even
the Forte was in him not an absolute but a relative forte--relative,
that is, to the gentle voice of the rest; and it rises, the older
he grew, so much the less by force than by a subtle play of touch.
All execution has made way for a certain free extempore poesy; the
_rubato_ softens the harshness of bar-accent. Liszt’s definition of
the rubato is well known--“You see that tree; its leaves move to and
fro in the wind and follow the gentlest motion of the air; but its
trunk stands there, immovable in its form.” Chopin seems never to have
carried the rubato so far that this trunk itself would have stirred.
Once already had a player arisen who cultivated this graceful and
airy kind of execution. Field, a Scot by birth, Clementi’s pupil,
a pale and dreamy man, had anticipated the delicate breadth of
Chopin’s touch; and the world had been enraptured with his melancholy
renderings by means of apparently motionless hands. Alongside of not
very important sonatas, concertos, and rondos, he had published a
series of song-like pieces, which he called “Nocturnes,” and in which
he put to special use his longing melodies, his dreamy _portamenti_,
his rose-chains of airy colourations. Compared with Chopin’s
Nocturnes, these must necessarily appear pale and even monotonous; but
in his whole essence, in the form of his pieces, and the delicacy of
his touch, Field was a prelude to Chopin--as Dussek or Louis Ferdinand
were in their kind. When Chopin once played before Alexander Klengel,
Clementi’s pupil, the latter was strongly reminded of Field. And when
Chopin, after his arrival in Paris, conceived the idea of taking
further lessons under Kalkbrenner, whose delicate playing he admired
above everything, the latter likewise thought that the style reminded
him of Cramer, but the playing of Field. “Were you Field’s pupil?” he
asked. Chopin’s true teacher, the forgotten Elsner of Warsaw, had had
no share in it. Chopin had formed his own playing, as he formed his
own style. In early years he had a mania for width of stretch, and
even invented a device for stretching the fingers. The experiment was
fortunately more successful than Schumann’s attempt to increase the
independence of the fingers by means of a sling. The difference is
noteworthy: Chopin aimed at a richer impression of voluptuous fullness
in the chords; Schumann at increased independence of part playing.
Chopin, as a sensitive artist, laid special stress on the kind of
instrument he used. In his youth he would only willingly play on
Graf’s pianos; in Paris only on those of Pleyel, whose silvern muffled
tone was specially attractive to him. In those of Erard he thought
the tone too insistent. “If I am in a bad humour I play an Erard, and
easily find there the tone ready-made. But if I am in the humour, and
strong enough to make my own tone, I use a Pleyel.” The fingering,
also, he regulates for himself. For the sake of a better execution
he never objects to put his thumb on a black key in suitable places,
or to glide with one finger over two keys, or to let longer fingers
pass over the shorter without using the thumb. In his Études he has
expressly written marks for many such naturalistic fingerings.
The special character of Chopin’s method, which in this literature
created an epoch, consisted in an effective use of three voices. Of
course it is not meant that he constantly writes strictly in three
parts; quite on the other hand, he has made a quite unique use of the
unison in the B flat minor Sonata, in the fourteenth and eighteenth
Preludes, and in the second movement of the F minor Concerto; and
there are plenty of examples in him of the simple accompaniment of a
simple melody. But the peculiar charm of his technique begins only
in the parallel application of three voices (I am not using this
term in the contrapuntal sense), in the laying alongside of three
motived systems, three musical thoughts, three principal paths. In
the Berceuse, for example, upon the heels of the one voice over the
accompaniment treads instantly a second, and the threefold combination
of accompaniment and two overparts is carried through in all possible
variations. The two overparts are no less present in several passages,
which appear on paper merely as zigzag runs, which bind together
continuously the two melodic lines. In favourable cases, as in the
boldly accented chords toward the conclusion of the B flat minor
Scherzo, this peculiar line-counterpoint is carried to an extreme.
The fusion of unfusable things in melody, rhythm, and harmony is
the new synthesis by means of which this art advances. The charm of
certain melodies of Chopin is increased by their taking up intervals
foreign to the key, which affect us half with Eastern, half with
ecclesiastical associations, but on closer inspection these are seen
to be merely due to the collision of two melodic lines.[132] There
are, for example, resolutions of suspensions, which are postponed
for the moment; the main melody of the First Ballade, the whispering
second Intermezzo of the famous B flat major Mazurka, the D in the C
sharp minor Nocturne, the A in the B minor Prelude, are instances.
It is a _rubato_ of melody: a musical, not a rhythmical rubato. If
a section of a Mazurka in Op. 30, 3 is repeated pianissimo, it does
not shock us, if certain notes already played reappear a semitone
lower, precisely as if the dynamic weakening had a musical weakening
as its result. It is an effect of intellectual naturalistic charm.
Everywhere the straight line is by preference avoided. Suspensions
(retardations) are boldly prolonged at the conclusion of a bar, as in
the B flat major Mazurka or in the stretto of the G minor Ballade. The
melodies wind themselves round invisible axles, and the _fioriture_
play in turn round the supports of the melodies. The time is ignored,
incommensurable passages can only be worked in by the _feel_, triplets
and duplets are mingled with each other, or a wonderful pseudo-rhythm,
as in the F major theme of the A flat major Ballade, makes us
waver pleasantly between two time-emotions. There is constantly a
combination, by the two independent hands, or by the independent
movement of an upper or under group of fingers in one hand: this is
the extreme attainment of artistic finger-mechanism on a harmonic
instrument.
The sensuous charm of sound in Chopin’s music rests essentially on
this _use_ of the individualisation of the fingers. Formerly the
fingers had only been tools, which rendered on the piano the general
many-voiced piece. Now, however, a music had arisen from the essence
of the fingers which was quite peculiar to the piano. The pedal held
the dissected music again together. The left hand continues its own
melodic lines under the right, as we find in the E minor Prelude, in
the C sharp minor Étude, in the middle movement of the C sharp minor
Polonaise, and the Scherzo of the B flat minor Sonata, in the F sharp
major Impromptu, in the G minor Ballade, in the A flat major Waltz
(Op. 34, 1), or in so many Études with characteristic full figuration
in the left hand. Or in passages which run swiftly enough to allow
this little acoustic deception to grow into a charm, the two melodic
passages or one melody unite with their retardation notes into those
zig-zag contours which became Chopin’s distinguishing mark. There is
a long spirited series from the first Hummel-like pieces in the E
minor Concerto, through the ethereal sounds in the middle movement of
the third Scherzo, to the B minor Scherzo which forms its wild main
movement entirely by means of this mannerism. The concluding trills
of the concertos, the arpeggios of wide chords; the ornamentations
in the middle of the chords, take a share in the using-up of the
polyphony for sound effects; until at last we meet the threefold or
fourfold web in the concluding sections of the Barcarolle.