Genius is essentially sympathetic and would draw all men into rapport
with its world of light and love. Companioned it must be, aye, close
companioned! But descend it will never because to Genius its world
embodies more of reality than does all this terrestrial globe.
Happy the master gathering around him his little following! Happy
indeed the genius, the solitary being, who finds among men an ideal
friend; one to whom self-explanation, so hateful to Genius, is
needless; one who knows instinctively the soul life of the other! To
Genius that friend is a proof of its mission; a witness that it lives
not a thing more useless than the most ordinary mortal; an assurance
that it yet will come into the fullness of its own. Such a friend
Chopin was now to find within that great Paris which like a gigantic
lodestone was drawing him to herself.
Franz Liszt, the Hungarian composer, pianist and litterateur, was
born in 1811, and in 1831, the date of Chopin's advent in the French
capital, he was but twenty years of age, and so by two years the junior
of the Pole. Soon the fame of the younger man would eclipse even that
of Kalkbrenner, esteemed the first pianist of the day. Liszt was
steadily nearing an eminence ever afterward his own against all comers,
that of the world's unparalleled pianoforte virtuoso.
The artist who, in days to come, would first divine and adequately
measure the comprehensiveness of Wagner; the timely helper who would
deem it a duty, a privilege, to aid and cheer the impecunious political
refugee in the despondent years of his exile; the whole-hearted
enthusiast whose determined arm would open for the composer of
«Lohengrin,» the close-shut door of the Temple of Fame, was the friend
in whom Chopin now saw reflected his own peculiar genius. As the
painter, stepping backward from his easel, scans his work as a whole,
and in the most favorable light, so, from the view-point of Liszt's
intuitive rendering, Chopin better estimated his own productions than
could otherwise have been possible.
That consummate interpretation of a work proves not one's ability to
create its like is shown by the coming together of Chopin and Liszt.
While Liszt was indubitably of advantage to Chopin, the latter in turn
reacted upon the former. In the nature of the fiery Hungarian, and that
of the dreamy Pole, were those resemblances and differences which make
high friendship a possibility and also a means of mutual growth through
reciprocity of ideas.
The fascinating and dominating Liszt was by nature a Bohemian.
From first to last he dwelt in the realm of those laxities and
unconventionalities which dismay the ordinary mortal, but whose glamour
is over the life of many an artist. And yet, despite every shortcoming,
Liszt had that which was much indeed, a virtue frequently the saving
one of genius, to wit, the artistic conscience.
Beneath a demeanor disguising rather than revealing his inner
self, Chopin was an ardent soul, a Polish patriot from whose heart
overflowed, to his every page, the sorrows of his native land. Those
sorrows were a cloud shadowing the radiance of his ideal world, and at
times dulling it almost to the sombre hues of this earth, begetter of
many sorrows.
It is regrettable that Chopin sought to bind within the limits of
conventional forms, already half outgrown, his poetical ideas amenable
only to the requirements of those freer forms for which Berlioz and
Schumann were striving, and to which Wagner ultimately attained.
In his Impromptus, and a few other ventures beyond self-imposed
barriers, Chopin made most praiseworthy use of freedom, but quickly
he returns to contemplation of his beloved Mozart, that perfect
master of classical form. Naturally the polished frequenter of the
Parisian drawing-room and salon, found no lasting pleasure in the wild
freedom and amplitude of the forest of Romanticism. The change was too
abrupt and novel. Those far-reaching vistas of unfrequented shade!
How different from the metropolitan thoroughfare! Those mighty but
fantastically-growing trees thick-planted by Nature's careless hand!
those never-trimmed and irregular branches! those fallen and dismantled
trunks! How unlike the well-kept parks of Paris and Versailles!
While composing, Chopin never quite divorced himself from the keyboard
of his piano, and yet the writer who would attain to untrammeled
expression, in both matter and form, should compose beneath a roof no
narrower than the dome of heaven. Let the study be his reference room,
his library, and, for convenience, his place of final elaboration. Like
Beethoven and Wordsworth, let him receive at first hand the impartings
of Nature that needed teacher of us all.
In the heart of Chopin the melodies of his beloved Poland, mingling
with his own imaginings, became invested with a subtle, poetical charm
and a delicate sweetness idealizing their own quaint loveliness.
The Mazurka! does it not bring the peasant gathering on the green;
the evening or the holiday of swaying forms and agile feet and rustic
beauty in the graceful round? The Polonaise! does it not bring the
brilliant hall; the jewelled fair; the stately-moving, king-led company
of lords and noble dames? Yes, such were the scenes which, to the
dances of his people, Chopin had conjured from the happy, bygone days.
How appealing this music to those of the old Polish nobility then
finding in Paris their most congenial abode in exile! Largely through
the influence of these the Parisian success of Chopin was speedier,
although more circumscribed, than that of Meyerbeer, who, only by
laborious and painstaking adaptation of his methods to the requirements
of the French operatic stage, won the Parisian public and brought them
to their knees before the shrine of «Robert.»
In the homes of rank and wealth, Chopin now mingles with princes,
ministers, ambassadors and literary notables. Titled ladies are his
pupils and, because he would have it so, he deems his musical self best
understood by the lionizing fashionables of French society who, in
fact, looked not beneath the finished, but by no means robust virtuoso,
and polished gentleman conforming to their every convention.
The fashionables of French society! Oh for a moment natural and true
amidst the false and artificial hours! A candid, soul-sprung greeting
to shame the outward suavity where envy rankles, or where hatred
burns within! Oh for a laden word to prove the hollowness of empty
tongues! A normal heart of innocence in that blasé assembly! Oh for
an individuality unrepressed; a potent unit in that crowd of merest
ciphers!
It is almost incredible that in such environment Chopin composed
many of his noblest works. His Rondo in C minor Op. 1, published in
1825, when he was but sixteen years of age, and therefore in the old
Warsaw days, had announced the advent of a writer of the highest rank,
one authoritatively proclaimed by Schumann on the appearance of the
variations in B flat Op. 2. Arriving in Paris late in the year 1831,
the man of two-and-twenty was already known to musicians like Franz
Liszt and Ferdinand Hiller, as creator of such music as the Concerto
in F minor, the Concerto in E minor, and the Funeral March in C minor.
This last was afterward eclipsed by the great march in the B flat minor
Sonata. But the bulk of Chopin's pianoforte works was written during
the next seventeen years, and despite adverse conditions other than
those of environment.