During this study of Frederic Chopin, the musician, certain incidents
in his career, those favorably or unfavorably affecting his artistic
development, have been touched on. Notable among them was his
friendship with Liszt; but we have now to record the effects of another
coming together, that of Chopin and George Sand. This latter was not
the marriage of two minds musically preëminent, but, in fact, the
result of the drawing near, until under one sky, of two related worlds:
that of the musician, and that of the poet, for such, in fact, was
the world of the imaginative French novelist. From this meeting and
blending of abodes resulted a drama, and, for Chopin, a final tragedy;
therefore a word in regard to the two distinguished actors.
Chopin's bodily appearance was marked by an entire absence of the
robust; his features indicated delicate and refined feeling; his tastes
were fastidious; his manner smooth and faultless with the last polish.
This much created an impression as of a feminine personality, but the
real, virile man was there, well-hidden beneath his mask. «George
Sand,» as that nom de plume would indicate, claimed for herself almost
every masculine prerogative. With manly daring and physical vitality,
she overleaped convention as but the walls of a prison-pen fit only
for the shutting in of little minds. And yet, before some noble and
deep nature, a softest fire would mount to those dark eyes of hers, and
voice and mien revealed the «Eternal Womanly,» which often outlined and
sometimes portrayed itself upon her most tender, soulful pages. From
trustworthy accounts we conclude that Chopin was at first repelled, not
by any physical lack, for Madame Dudevant had just and ample claims
to comeliness, but rather from his inability to divine at once the
basic affinity which afterwards drew and held him despite external
dissimilarities. Not so with the great novelist to whose feminine
insight much of the analytical, masculine mind was added. She at once
divined Chopin, and whatever was defective in him the glamour of sex
made good; so she desisted not until she had made him her own.
The beauty and symmetry and fragrance of the flower is the complete
expression of a life simple because low in the scale of evolution;
but the beauty and symmetry of the masculine human form, together
with every endowment of the characteristic masculine mind, only half
expresses the rounded whole of the complex human soul, itself sexless
because above sex. What is true of man is equally so of woman. The man
and the woman of genius each recognizes in the other the riches and
worth of that hemisphere of the soul adequately revealed only by that
other. This perception of a mutual need is the prompter of love between
men and women high in the scale of human evolution; it is in fact the
cause of love even in the most unthinking; those whom only the wisdom
of Nature enlightens.
Like Beethoven, who sighed for his «Immortal Beloved,» Chopin himself
had loved and more than once. That half of his being which, because a
man, he failed to realize as an inward belonging, he had projected as
an ideal clothed with the grace and beauty of womankind. That ideal
had looked into his eyes with tender recognition, or a glance almost
of scorn had wholly told his poor unworth. But, favoring or reproving,
that ideal had vanished utterly and forever, and now his heart indeed
was lone save in brief, exalted moments of genius. Then the soul in its
entirety would assert itself, and amidst that fullness he needed no
other company.
Chopin, now twenty-eight years of age, had reached the early maturity
which hastens to the precocious genius into whose brief but brilliant
years are crowded the doings of an ordinary lifetime. In subject
matter, at least, he had from the first shown an originality almost
unimpressed by any great contemporary or predecessor. Conscious of
ability to stand alone, he shunned rather than sought the friendship
of renowned composers and virtuosi. A tone poet most essential to the
romantic movement, he cared not for the Romanticism of Schumann. The
eccentricities of Berlioz repelled him, and, strange in an admirer of
Hummel and Field, he could not or would not condone what he deemed
commonplace in the bulk of Mendelssohn's work. As for Liszt, to whose
interpretation he accorded deserved praise, he had with secret disdain
penetrated to the somewhat small kernel of original and worthy ideas in
that author's early virtuoso pieces.
From this much, and more that might be added, it is evident that
Chopin's glance was chiefly introspective. Moreover, it is evident that
his inner world was not that of other musicians.
What then was the influence of George Sand upon our composer, now at
the zenith of his powers? Evidently that of a projected ideal the image
of the half of his soul life which Goethe calls the Eternal Feminine.
In the searching light of our everyday world, the personality of George
Sand betrays many defects. This of itself forbade a union like that
of the Brownings; and to such a union other objections existed. The
physical ailments of Chopin, which even in youth had menaced, and in a
gradual approach had now seized upon him, were never wholly to loosen
their grasp, so the chronic invalid became at times an exacting and
by no means patient sufferer. On the other hand, George Sand was a
woman of wide outlook and varied interests. Certain chimeras in the
guise of political and social reform were leading the temperamental
novelist far afield; but in these matters the composer shared not her
enthusiasm, neither would he be indoctrinated as she herself had been.
Knowing where his strength lay, he remained faithful to his muse,
his lavish endower. While Chopin sought the smiles of princesses,
and the applause of the fashionable salon, the Sand remained aloof.
Conscious of her superb mental equipment, she no doubt believed that
the brightest of all that gay company could add not a single thought to
her ever-overflowing store. No wonder that as time wore on our musician
more and more failed to fulfill the requirements of her ideal.
The affair with De Musset should have warned Chopin, but what warning,
what philosophy, what asceticism, could offset the fascinations of one
who at will swayed the hearts of her immense public? Besides, Chopin
was not a philosopher save that unconscious one which an analysis of
his deepest tone-poems reveals. Still less was he an ascetic this
highly-developed emotional nature, this virile yet frail man of genius.
Of Chopin it must be admitted that he remained true to his attachment,
true despite indubitable proof of the other's infidelity; true even
till the shutting of the door wherewith eventually she barred her
heart forever from his own; true even then he remained, nursing in
secret the sorrows of a bruised and broken life, while, from this
episode in her own career, but the finale in that of her lover, the
woman, like Faust and Wilhelm Meister, emerged into other and varied
experiences.
But, to repeat our former question, what was the effect of George Sand
on the ten years of productive effort which measured the beginning and
the end of this affaire du cœur? We hold that effect the most important
of everything extraneous on the body of our composer's works during
that rich decade. Nevertheless that effect is not local; the finger
cannot be placed upon it, nor is it determinable as a fixed quantity.
Rather it is nourishment assimilated, chemically changed to blood and
bloom and beauty by a process whereof genius alone has the secret.
Of the work of these memorable years it may well be said that, beneath
their various dedications, the name of George Sand was written in
the warm and ruddy life of the heart of Frederic Chopin. Had the
novelist been another Clara Schumann rendering for the composer those
great fortissimos, and those loud and brilliant passages to which his
delicate physique was unequal, or even had Chopin himself been, like
Liszt, a man of literary tastes and capabilities, how much happier
the outcome! How that mutual happiness, triumphing over the depressing
power of a dread disease--as afterwards in the case of Heinrich
Heine--would have infused a more luminous color into the prevailing
sombreness of his tone poetry! But, thankful for our rich heritage, we
grieve not over what might have been.
V
Because of the superabundance of producers in every department of art
and literature, and because the actual needs of the world are small in
proportion to the total output, a sifting results whereby is preserved
only that most typical of its kind. Thus of a thousand melodies popular
in their hour, one is added to a people's treasury of song. A stirring,
national anthem, or a perfect poem of tender feeling or contagious
flame, may alone preserve the memory of a prolific author. Much of what
the world once deemed great in art, as in all else, has gone to the
limbo of little things. Of the surprising bulk of poems which Byron at
thirty-six left behind him, most of the «Childe Harold,» displaying the
range and fire of his yet undimmed imagination, and the freshness and
amplitude of his characteristic, eloquent description, will live; but
«Lara» and «Cain» and such must mingle with the trodden dust. So in the
domain of music; many old-time authors of supposed masterpieces are
superceded by others of like calibre and claim. Only of him who in his
department creates a new type, or perfects an old one, can anything
approaching longevity be predicted.
To but one popular poet was it given to interpret in a hundred lyrics
the heart of his peasant Scotland. To but one English dramatist to
create for our sympathy Lear, Cordelia, Othello and Desdemona, and
to evoke from his fecund brain the philosophical musings of Hamlet,
the whimsical humor of Falstaff, the gossamer beauties of «Midsummer
Night's Dream,» and the terrible realism of Macbeth and Richard. To
but one epic poet was it given to breathe a quickening breath into the
pale shades of those mighty dead, Hector, Agamemnon, Achilles, and
many an otherwise forgotten hero. To but one musician was it given to
perfect in «The Well-tempered Clavichord» the great organ Fugue, to but
one master of his art to show the attainable in those purely classical
forms, the Symphony and the Sonata.
But what in a summary are the features of Chopin warranting his present
vogue, and assuring his future fame? They are many, and each is an
unimpeachable witness to his worth.
Prior to his day, Bach and Beethoven had explored the known world
of harmony. They knew the geography of its vast continents, the
choreography of its countries, the topography of its mountains and
valleys and plains. They had measured its waterways, had sounded
its seas, had sailed by its limiting shores; and then Ludwig Spohr,
suspecting other lands beyond the uncharted west, had ventured as from
Gibraltar even to the Azores, or the Canaries, the Fortunate Islands of
old. Schumann had gone even farther, but not to the utmost of daring
for this was the deed of Chopin. He, the Columbus of composers, gave to
Harmony a new world. He, and he alone, first dreamed and then beheld
its isles of Paradise, tropic and enticing, embowered and restful, fit
for lone and pensive musing till suddenly the sun is darkened, the
winds make wail, and a dread note of thunder foretells the bursting
storm. Many times a voyager, many times an explorer, he brought
continually, for the world's wonder and delight, the fantastic, the
weird, the exquisite. Ah! his was no haphazard sailing on the ocean of
sound; no rudderless drifting with wind and tide! Every appliance of
the skilled navigator, the quadrant, the sextant, the compass, were
his guides. In day or in night he knew the altitude of the sun or
else of the polar star. He had calculated to a nicety the deflections
of the needle. Though seemingly lost was he on the limitless waves,
latitude and longitude, to the fraction of a degree, were clear to his
never-beclouded mind. He it was who opened the way for all future
discoverers and, inevitably, for rash and turbulent adventurers, even
for Richard Strauss that Cortes, that Pizarro of them all.
An erudite originality, and the passionate abandon of the author of
«Norma,» characterize Chopin the melodist. In the new world by him
discovered, his own before-mentioned world of the ideal, were birds of
rare and differing plume, winged with the delicate greens of half-grown
forest leaves, or breasted with the morn's red kindling ere the sun,
or throated with the orange of the fading eve, or mottled with the
melancholy grey which tells the night. And some there were a purity of
white more spotless than the farthest, feathery cloud; and some whose
tufty blue was borrowed from no sky like ours. Of these creatures of
the composer's realm, each was vocal with the mood whereof his beauty
was the symbol. Amidst the morning wood, one lifted to the sun a brief
yet brilliant song of transport; another's notes were cadenced from
beside the splash of shaded waterfalls when noon was burning all the
fields. Another at the day's down-sinking breathed a tender plaint, or
trembled forth a melancholy, sweet farewell; and when the round and
tropic moon had touched the listening groves to silver, a rarer than
the nightingale would warble from the branching palms.
These all were the teachers that made Chopin a melodist; but he was
more than a melodist, more than the harmonist we have indicated; he
was a great, national tone-poet whose romantic measures characterized
his Poland better than did the lines of her chiefest versifiers. The
individuality of Chopin the composer was distinguishable as that of
Beethoven and Wagner. He was above the mere perfector of types. His
Scherzos, his Preludes, his Ballades, his Fantaisies are original
conceptions. On the rhythm of the Polish dance he reared his dainty
Mazurkas. Graceful and ethereal, they yielded like the slender pine to
every swaying wind. Framed to endure, no blast could overthrow them.
On the same national foundation uprose his Polonaises, an architecture
of his own devising. Fantastic but not grotesque, uniquely and wholly
expressive, those solid structures argued immovability, but the tempest
proved them pliant and yet enduringly based as the deep-rooted giants
of the wood.
The master of the mechanical difficulties of Bach and Clementi, must
encounter others quite different in the Etudes of Chopin. The mind of
such a one follows not swiftly the odd and rapid chromatics swarming
through certain of them. His muscles tire in the midst of extended
and unusual chords filling whole pages. His fingers, trained to
anticipate conventional harmonic successions in the passage work, are
here hindered by the unusual become the usual, the exception become
the universal rule; and yet the musical worth of these intractable
measures, whose like abounds everywhere in Chopin, compels the pianist
of our day to conquer them.
But, more important than the mechanical, there is in Chopin a mental
technique peculiar to himself. It informed his playing with an
ineffable charm which haunted the memory of pupils and listeners, and
yet lives, a tradition of the old Paris days.
Unlike Shakespeare and Beethoven, the Pole was not privileged to sound
the harp of universal life; therefore the universal note is denied
him, and therefore his chief interpreters may not be chosen from the
gifted of every nation. It cannot be denied that for the music of the
vehement, unreasoning passion which in an instant transforms the shaft
of love to the stiletto, the Italian temperament is alone adequate.
It is acknowledged that for the rendition of the semi-barbaric native
rhythms, the wild, lawless onrushings and the tearful, or dreamy, or
voluptuous lingerings of Hungarian music, the blood of the Magyars must
surge from the heart to the finger tips.
These examples prove that the mental technique of our composer, a
matter of phrasing and pedaling and accent, and, most intangible of
requirements, the Chopin rubato, is most easily and completely mastered
by the Slav genius. Of the world's goodly company of virtuosi, only
a few exponents of the Polish musician wholly reveal his invaluable
contributions to art.
In her own eyes the Amazonian Sand towered a genius in every way
superior to the sickly and effeminate-mannered Chopin, but she attained
not to the duty of a great novelist. No permanent types have sprung
from her ambitious and busy pen. Those fretting, fuming, shadow-chasing
Byronic heroes and heroines have lived their mortal days, and
discriminating Time denies them an immortality vouchsafed the works of
the man she abandoned.
Chopin's career as composer ends with the Sand affair. Of what followed
little remains to be told. An unimportant visit to London and Edinburgh
where broken health and spirits were serious obstacles to brilliant
artistic success. A few friendships formed, a few old ones cemented,
then back to Paris which first he entered a sojourner. Yes, back to
Paris, the gay and frivolous and cynical Paris, that dances to the
waiting grave and laughs and scoffs until the sad receiving of the tomb.
And now at last the untimely end. He who had blended the sheen of
stars with the rainbow mist of waterfalls; he who had swung the
forging hammer, and rivalled the delicate, meshy gold of Vulcan; he
who had prisoned the loud thunder, the swift lightning, the angry, the
plaintive, the whispering wind; he who had outridden the ocean's fury,
and slept on the polished breast of mountain lakes; he, the Endymion of
melancholy groves beloved of Luna; he, the portrayer of battles dread
with the doings of conquering foes, was himself to yield, leaving for
our musical heritage the gloom and glory of his works.
Let us draw near, but not to the concert hall, and the applauding
crowd greeting the advent of the young Polish virtuoso. Yes, let us
draw near, but not to the dazzling salon and yonder listening group,
the elite of fashion and culture and fame, gathered around the Erard.
Let us draw nearer than these; nearer than the studio of the composer,
and the wrapt company of the inner circle: Sand and Hiller and Heine
and Meyerbeer and Delacroix and Liszt, who himself has described the
scene. Ah, let us, with hushed hearts and noiseless foot-fall, approach
and enter, for this is the place of parting where human angels neglect
no ministration of love and soothing song as a finished life sinks,
like the master's diminuendo, to waken and swell and rush and thunder,
filled with the vigor of immortal day.
Far from the charm of English vales and meadows; far from the skylark
and the cloud he saw and loved above their freshening green; afar from
all the sweet allurements of his native isle he sleeps, the English
Shelley, where the blue of Italy is bending o'er the ruined olden, and
the risen new whose ancient and eternal name is Rome. And close beside,
where Winter spreads the flowers of northern June, is lying Adonais,
poet wept in tearful poesy, the youthful Keats whom Beauty, in the
guise of Death, drew to her own enamoured breast.
Walled from the covetous human waves, safe from the encroaching human
tide, Père la Chaise, a mass of bloom and verdure, lies asleep while
the Parisian metropolis roars and surges on. Of all the multitudes
here gathered to the silence, one at least is alien for never a branch
is moaning, never a breeze, for Polish liberty; and never a bird is
inspired by such sad, sweet threnody; and never a strip of Polish sky,
clear, or cloud-bedarkened, or heavy with the drops of sorrow, is
bending o'er chiseled marble of a tomb. Amidst the dead of every high
and noble calling, the dead whose deeds enhance the fame of France,
that alien's dust is in the jealous keeping of a nation richer because
of Poland and her greatest bard.
Sixty years have gone since the October day when, within the walls of
the Madelaine, the master's funeral measures dirged his death. Since
that memorable time many pianoforte composers, men of talent and men
of genius, have arisen. These, by their indebtedness to the years of
Chopin's productivity, prove him the one epoch-making composer for
their instrument since Beethoven, and the one probably without a
successor in kind.
The certainty that the principal Sonatas of Beethoven, and the Ballades
and other chief works of Chopin, overtop all else written for the
piano, provokes the question, Which of these composers is foremost in
this realm of music? The question at once lends itself to argument.
Evidently Chopin abounds in technical difficulties unattempted by
Beethoven, and these difficulties are a proof of worth because in
fact the unusual but necessary conveyers of a message new to the
musical world. It must be conceded that Chopin's daring chromaticisms,
transitions and modulations are the inevitable expressions of a genius
novel but not forced. Then again, Chopin wrote for the piano not as he
found it, but with prophetic knowledge of its future possibilities; to
the extent of all this he outrivals Beethoven.
It must not be supposed that harmonic complexity is of itself superior
to broad and bold simplicity. This truth Handel well knew. He, the
master of Fugue, with all contrapuntal devices at command, is renowned
for a Doric beauty the despair of the Byzantine and the Rococo. As a
harmonist, Beethoven felt not the urge of the unusual; the immense
possibilities which he perceived in Bach were enough for his grand
and stately measures. Taking from that unexhausted mine, he cut
and polished; then, brilliant on their every facet, he strewed the
gems along his pages. Because of his many-sided excellence, we hold
Beethoven a harmonist superior to Chopin, himself a delver in the
Bachian mine. The music of Chopin is recognizable almost from the
opening bar, but, as a creator and developer of characteristic themes,
Beethoven is unequalled. While Chopin is one of the most inspired
melodists, Beethoven sings himself more into the soul.
Although a solitaire, Beethoven was really a man of widest, deepest
sympathies. Against his own bosom he felt the heart beat of humanity,
and, love-enlightened, he divined that heart, even its total meaning.
The heaven-reaching heights of joy, and the black profound of woe, and
every intermediate, throbbed contagious into his own breast. Therefore
is he the universal man, interpreter of his own ideal world and
interpreter of nations, while, on his human side, the intense Chopin
is the epitome of Poland. That this universal man was not containable
within the possibilities of the pianoforte, was plainly no fault of
his; nevertheless, that much of the universal which informs the chief
Sonatas of Beethoven, entitles them to supremacy over the greatest of
the other.
As the second of pianoforte composers, what giants Chopin leaves in
his rear! Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Von Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann,
and behind them many of lesser stature, Hummel, Clementi, Moscheles
and such; and, still further back, the great average, the ephemeral
multitude. Of all their pushing of pens, little will remain when, on
some distant to-morrow, the stirred pulse and the suffused eye prove
the tone-poems of the Polish musician an unfading charm, an undimmed
worth, an eternal beauty, in the realms of art.