is not life but the living body, not inspiration but the form in which
it is manifested. And herein we may contend that there is a right as
well as a wrong use of law. Some rules of Music are purely transitory in
their nature, and can therefore only afford an imperfect basis for
judgment even in the generation that accepts them. The prohibitions of
the old counterpoint, for instance, were in many cases merely
conventional limits, determined by the particular characteristics of the
human voice; they are therefore no longer binding on our instrumental
composers. The restrictions of early harmony were merely retrospective
inferences from the actual practice of past compositions: they had no
logical validity, and therefore became obsolete. But the laws which here
present themselves as a part of the artistic code have a double claim on
our acceptance: first, that they are, as a matter of fact, embodied in
the greatest works of the greatest masters; and second, that they draw
their origin from the fundamental attributes of our human nature. For
the essential qualities which underlie the artistic character have
altered very little since the earliest authentic record of its history.
Revolutions have come and gone, fashions have arisen and have passed
away, yet the work that made Athens beautiful is still our type and
climax of perfect achievement. Literature has been shaken by the clash
of contending parties, it has submitted to new dynasties and new
leaders, yet the great principles of its constitution are the same now
as in the time of the _Odyssey_. And Music, though it has grown more
slowly and deliberately than the representative arts, may still be shown
to have sprung from the same source, and to have followed an even more
continuous line of evolution. If, then, we can analyse the conditions
that have made that evolution possible, we are not degrading Art into a
mere ingenious mechanism, but explaining the necessary laws of its life
and progress.
* * * * *
Finally, it must be remembered that if excellence in musical art be
difficult to formulate, it is not, for that reason, difficult to
apprehend. The beauty of a great masterpiece rises from the supreme and
consummate expression of characteristics, which, in a greater or less
degree, are common to all normal humanity. No doubt, in different races,
there are differences of convention, as there are of scale and
instrument and musical language, but convention in itself is always
negative, and its sole force is the establishment of temporary
limitations. Within their widening scope the whole range of the art
gradually extends; within them lie its wonders of purity and sublimity,
its treasures of pathos and humour, its contrasts of wise reticence and
opulent display. And for the proper appreciation of these gifts, there
are no strange or recondite qualities demanded, only receptivity of ear,
only sanity of emotion, only patience that is willing to observe, and
courage that is ready to speak its mind. The rest is a matter of
training and experience: training by which we rouse our faculties to a
higher stage of development, experience by which we learn to equip our
criticism with new facts and new relations. In Music it is essentially
true that 'admiration grows as knowledge grows': it is equally true that
knowledge itself lies open to the attainment of all honest endeavour.
FREDERICK CHOPIN
Like a poet, hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.
I
WARSAW
We are more accustomed in literature than in music to find immortality
conferred on artists whose total quantity of production is slight or
incomplete. Sappho lives in a few lyrics, Villon in a few ballades,
Persius is a great satirist with some six hundred lines of verse,
Merimée a great novelist with a slender handful of short stories. In all
such cases we accept perfection of finish, individuality of note,
concentration of effort, as more than compensating for the narrow limits
within which the writer has thought fit to be confined: and we even
impute it as a virtue that he has not changed the gold of his thought
into the more diffuse silver of a meaner standard. But in music, as a
rule, our judgment is affected by other considerations. For some reason
the composer has generally been more lavish than his brother artists: he
has worked more rapidly, perhaps more continuously, and has gained, in
proportion, a larger abundance to bestow. Six weeks sufficed Mozart for
his three greatest symphonies: Handel wrote the _Messiah_ in less than
a month: Schubert created nine of his songs in a single day: and it is
therefore little wonder if we have learned to expect some opulence of
achievement in our musicians, or even to estimate them, as an innkeeper
discriminates his guests, by the amount of their baggage and the number
of their retinue.
We shall find an interesting commentary on this view if we turn to the
programme of a famous concert, given at Warsaw on February 24, 1818. The
principal work performed was a pianoforte concerto which served to bring
two names, those of its composer and its interpreter, into a forcible
and prominent contrast. The one was a master of established reputation
and acknowledged authority, the Hofkapellmeister at Vienna, the friend
of Beethoven, the musician whose operas were applauded in every capital,
whose symphonies were set in the balance against Haydn's, whose
quartetts were declared by dispassionate judges to be the equal of
Mozart's. The other was planting his first footsteps in a byway of the
art which he was to tread for thirty years with little deviation,
satisfied to pluck a posy of flowers from the hedgerow, and lay it down
as his offering at the journey's end. The one covered the whole field of
composition, and, at the end of his career, could number a list of works
which outmatches the industry of almost all his contemporaries. The
other, cut short by an early death, has left us a few thin volumes,
curiously uniform in style, and restricted, with scarcely an exception,
to the limits of a single instrument. Yet the one is as completely
forgotten as though he had never lived, while the other has passed into
the company of the immortals. To our ears the name of Adalbert Gyrowetz
is of the most forlorn unfamiliarity, it has become 'fantastic,
unsubstantial--like Henry Pimpernel and old John Naps of Greece'; but no
vicissitude of fortune, no changing fashion of art, can ever obliterate
from our memory the image of Frederick Chopin.
It must, however, be added, that Chopin's slenderness of accomplishment
in no way indicated any poverty of invention. His work was not, as is
sometimes said of Gray's, the laborious tillage of a light soil; rather
it was like that Japanese gardening, which intensifies the beauty of a
single blossom by cutting off all the rest. The true reason, indeed, is
to be found in a point of character, '_Il avait l'esprit écorché vif_,'
said the comrade who knew him best, and in these words may be found the
whole explanation, both of his life and of his artistic career.
Delicate, sensitive, fastidious, he would shrink from committing himself
to a decision, lest it should fall short of the highest that he knew.
Rapid and brilliant in improvisation, he would spend weeks in writing
and rewriting a single page. A pianist of rare and exquisite gifts, he
would often feel paralysed by the mere sight of a public audience.
Generous, affectionate, and enthusiastic, he was yet too earnest to be
forbearing, too susceptible to be tolerant, too exacting to show
indulgence, and the same acute criticism with which he visited the
actions of others, he applied in an equal measure to his own.
Hence there is a special danger in estimating him from a British
standpoint. Our bluff, sturdy manhood has little in common with the
keenness and mobility which mark one side of the artistic temperament,
and we have never been very successful at comprehending alien characters
or alien nationalities. True, we have advanced beyond the stage of
unreasoning hostility towards the stranger who presumes to be more
impressionable than ourselves, but for the most part we have only
substituted a half-contemptuous compassion which is equally galling, and
almost equally unintelligent. A past generation looked on Shelley and
wondered that the fires of Heaven delayed their falling; the present age
insults Heine with forgiveness, in consideration of the purgatory of his
later years; and in like manner, when we hear of Chopin, we think, 'Poor
fellow! he was consumptive,' and prepare ourselves to condone the
irregularities of his life by some rough and ready diagnosis of physical
disease. It seldom occurs to us to reflect that the problem may be too
complex for so easy a solution, and that, before it can be solved at
all, it must at least be stated correctly. As a matter of fact, Chopin's
life was singularly blameless, and, until its close, singularly free
from the material conditions of trouble. No doubt there is a deep pathos
in the record of a death which seems to us premature: no doubt the
pathos is intensified by the spectacle of failing strength and
encroaching sickness; but it is an entirely false application of
perspective to let our view of the end obliterate our view of the whole.
And there is otherwise little hardship in the case. The feeble health
was compensated, at least in part, by friendship, by affection, and by
fame such as few musicians have enjoyed in their lifetime. It is not
history to draw fancy pictures of a querulous invalid, a continuous
burden to himself and to all who cared for him; still less to fill page
after page with unsubstantiated rumours of ill-usage and neglect.
Chopin's relation to his friends was neither that of tyrant nor that of
victim, and his career, if, like every other, it was traversed by heavy
clouds, at least had its bursts of sunshine and its long days of genial
warmth.
He was born on 1st March 1809,[16] at the little village of Zelazowa
Wola, near Warsaw. His father, Nicholas Chopin, was a French _émigré_,
possibly with Polish blood in his veins, who, after sundry vicissitudes,
had settled down as tutor in the family of Countess Skarbek, and had
there met and married a Polish lady called Justina Krzyzanowska.
Frederick, the only son, was the third of four children, and so was
privileged to pass his earliest years in the Oriental despotism of a
nursery peopled by admiring sisters.
In 1810 Nicholas Chopin carried off his household to the Capital, where
he had been appointed Professor of French at the new Lyceum. At first
there seems to have been some stress of poverty: salaries were low, life
was unsettled; no one knew what quarter of Europe would next be set
ablaze by the indomitable activity of Napoleon. However, in 1814, the
Congress of Vienna established a kingdom of Poland, shorn, no doubt, of
its border territories, and held in check by the suzerainty of Russia,
but still governed by a Pole as viceroy, and recognising Polish as its
official language. This was far from meeting the wishes of the
'patriotic party,' which looked to France as its ally and to the Emperor
as its protector, but at least it ensured some measure of independence,
and, after the next year, a certain prospect of peace and tranquillity.
As might be expected, the change of political condition produced an
immediate effect on the national temper. Warsaw, which, in 1812, was one
of the most miserable of cities, began in 1815 to recover the signs of
material prosperity. Trade was developed, schools were opened, the great
houses welcomed back their exiles, and the country at large shook off
its dream of disquietude and set its face hopefully to the future. Only
in secret rose an occasional murmur that Russia was an alien power, that
the days of Suvorov had not passed out of memory, that the Viceroy was a
mere puppet in the hands of the Emperor Alexander, and that the new
Commander-in-Chief was a truculent savage who needed all the eloquence
of his Polish wife to keep him from open oppression. Apart from these
scattered voices of discontent, there can be no doubt that the nation
rejoiced at its deliverance from German officialism, and, with
characteristic buoyancy, resumed the business of life, and not a little
of its brilliance.
Naturally, the Chopins bore their part in the general advance.
Even while the fate of Poland was still in the balance, two fresh
appointments had been added to the Professorship at the Lyceum, and the
gradual restoration of the great families opened the way for a private
school, over which no one was so capable of presiding as Count
Skarbek's old tutor. This enlargement of means was the only thing
wanted to make Chopin's childhood a period of almost ideal happiness.
His parents seem to have been altogether worthy of the affection which
he lavished on them: the father kindly, honourable, upright, firm in the
government of his family, and unwearied in the administration of its
resources; the mother bright, active and tender-hearted, full of
folklore and household recipes, sincere in religion, charitable in
conduct, gentle and courteous in speech. Then the house was visited by
all manner of interesting people--poets, professors, politicians,--who
would talk to Nicholas Chopin about his old home in half-Polish
Lorraine, where men still spoke of the good Duke Stanislaus, or would
exchange memories of the war and hopes for the new _régime_. And for the
more important aspects of life there could be no better companions than
the three sisters--Louisa, who knew everything in the lesson-books;
Isabella, who was practical, and could always find things when they were
lost; and Emily, the best of playfellows, who told the most delightful
stories, and had a special talent for making believe. Almost every
birthday there were theatricals, almost every evening there was music
for who would listen--all around was a world of flowers and sunshine, of
pleasant looks and pleasant voices, of 'short task and merry holiday.'
It is a poignant contrast to turn to the four children, less fortunate
but not less gifted, who during these same years were writing their
journals and acting their solitary plays in the bleak parsonage at
Haworth.
Very little can be ascertained about Chopin's musical education. We know
that his pianoforte teacher was a Bohemian called Adalbert Zywny, and
that he learned harmony and counterpoint from Elsner, but we have
scarcely any information as to the extent and value of the lessons. It
is certain that in after life his system of fingering was entirely
original and unorthodox, from which we may conjecture that Zywny never
really taught him to play a scale--and indeed there is some tradition
that the Professor was a violinist who only took to the piano as a
second string, and who allowed the boy to spend most of his time in
improvisation. Elsner was a good-tempered, easy-going old kapellmeister,
who did his pupil the greatest service by teaching him to love Bach, and
then allowed him to go his own way without further supervision. The
works which Chopin published during his student period have little or no
scope for counterpoint, but they show beyond controversy that he and his
master were equally indifferent to what is known as classical structure.
On the other hand, his sense of harmony was always admirable, and there
can be no doubt that he owed much of its development to the wise care,
and still wiser reticence, with which the laws and prohibitions were
explained to him. Again, Liszt is probably right in drawing special
attention to the moral value of Elsner's teaching. With a conscientious
pupil the method of encouragement is the easiest possible way to
inculcate a feeling of responsibility, and the most successful teacher
is he who knows how to train mediocrity and to leave genius a free hand.
It should be added that Chopin's relation to his two masters was always
cordial and affectionate. As late as 1835, we find him docketing a
letter from Zywny, a curious, formal, kindly note, full of good wishes
and fine language, while to Elsner he always looked with a boy's
hero-worship, as to a mentor whose advice was never to be neglected, and
whose praise was the highest of commendations.
We may well understand that, as a pupil, he was best left alone. His
precocity was something phenomenal, even in the decade which saw
Mendelssohn at Weimar and Liszt at Paris: before he was eight years old
he was a pianist of established reputation; before he was nine he played
one of Gyrowetz' pianoforte concertos at a charity concert; at ten he
ventured into the presence of the Grand Duke Constantine, and offered
that awful potentate a military march for use among the troops. Of
course, every one petted and caressed him, and called him the young
Mozart. Countesses and princesses danced to his mazurkas, or sat by the
piano while he improvised: Royalty itself sent down a great glittering
clattering chariot, and galloped him off to play at the Belvidere: from
end to end of the brilliant, light-hearted, pleasure-loving city he
moved at his ease, like the young Prince Charming in a fairy tale, sure
of a welcome, sure of applause, and accepting all that society offered
with a child's careless enjoyment.
An atmosphere so heavy with adulation might well have poisoned a nature
less lovable or less simple-hearted. But its only effect on Chopin was
to increase still further his natural refinement of manner and to
accentuate his intolerance of anything like rudeness or vulgarity. There
does not seem to have been a trace of vanity in his constitution. He
played 'as the linnets sing,' without effort, without premeditation, and
without any apparent idea that his performance was out of the common. At
his _début_, in the charity concert of 1818, the only feature which
struck him as exciting any admiration was his lace collar; the watch
given him two years later by Catalani only appealed to him as a new toy
of unusual splendour: in all the record of his childhood there is not a
single indication of petulance or conceit. We can easily reconstruct his
portrait:--a little, frail, delicate elf of a boy, with fair hair and a
prominent nose, the face redeemed from ugliness by the wonderful brown
eyes and the quick intelligence of expression; a temperament which was
keen, nervous and changeable, a character rapid and alert, bubbling over
with effervescent spirits, playful, affectionate, and sensitive. He was
already an accomplished actor and a born mimic, full of odd sayings
and harmless mischief, clever and imaginative, utterly devoid of
self-consciousness or affectation. His one defect was his want of a
boy's adventurousness, and his disinclination to out-door sports and
exercises. We can hardly imagine his tearing his clothes or getting his
feet wet. But we must remember that this disability is not always to be
regarded as an unpardonable sin, and that, ever since the days of
Euripides, there has been a feud between the poet and the athlete. Had
Chopin been more robust, he would doubtless have taken life with
the greater equanimity--and we should have lost one of the most
characteristic figures in the history of Music.
Unfortunately many of the anecdotes which are current about his boyhood
bear the clear impress of mythology. The utmost we can say of them is,
that they appear to contain some elements of truth which have
been overlaid by enthusiastic biographers until they are almost
unrecognisable. We can well believe for instance, that he once
made an April fool of an irascible landowner by sending him a sham
business-letter in Yiddish; but M. Karasowski, who tells the story,
ruins it by gravely adding that the child played his trick with the
deliberate moral purpose of curing his neighbour's temper; and, worse
still, that the sermon was successful. Again, it is quite possible that
on one insubordinate afternoon, when the pupils had proved too many
for the usher, Chopin appeared on the scene and kept them quiet
by improvising romances; but then we are further told that his
representation of night, on the pianoforte, was so realistic that it
sent all the boys to sleep. No doubt these embellishments are innocuous
enough, though they add nothing which it is of any moment to preserve,
but the uncritical fancy which accepts them as historical, offers but an
ominous prospect for the discussion of the later life. That the record
of Chopin's manhood is still a fruitful theme for controversy is mainly
owing to the fact that it has been treated by writers who, for the most
part, show a lamentable disregard of the value of evidence.
In 1824, Chopin was promoted from his father's preparatory school to the
fourth class of the Warsaw Lyceum. There he worked hard, rose rapidly,
won two or three prizes, and gained the esteem and respect of his
school-fellows by developing a remarkable talent for caricature. It must
have been an agonising moment when the director confiscated a sheet of
paper containing an unflattering portrait of himself, and it says
something for the young scapegrace, that the sketch was returned with no
heavier rebuke than a sardonic comment on the excellence of the
likeness. The first holidays were spent on a friend's estate in
Szafarnia, from which the boy issued to his parents a periodical
journal, after the model of the _Warsaw Courier_, and even got one of
the daughters of the house to give it an amateur imprimatur, in
imitation of the official censorship. The same year witnessed, at
some family festival, the production of a new comedy, written in
collaboration by Frederick Chopin, aged fifteen, and Emily Chopin, aged
eleven. And all this time the dramatist, artist, journalist, and student
of Polish history is writing his harmony exercises, playing his
Kalkbrenner concertos, composing songs, devising variations, and
generally progressing in music as though he had no other occupation to
distract him. Grant that the comedy has no great literary value, and
that the _Ranz des Vaches_ variations are slight and childish, it still
remains a marvel that one small head should have exhibited such restless
and versatile ability. To find a parallel, we must go back to the golden
age of Leonardo and the two Cellini, when all arts lay open and the
common lands of knowledge had not yet been enclosed.
Up to 1825 Nicholas Chopin does not seem to have had any idea of making
his son a professional musician. The first essays had been so many in
number, and so various in impulse, that they might well account for some
feeling of uncertainty, but by the end of 1824 the boy's activity had
begun to take a more settled direction, and the events of the next year
are mainly musical. First, there were two concerts, on March 27 and June
10, at the former of which Chopin was set to improvise on an instrument
with the amazing name of Æolopantaleon, then the Emperor Alexander, who
had come down to Warsaw to open the Parliamentary Session, sent for the
young genius, heard him play, and dismissed him with some august
compliments and a diamond ring; while, finally, this approbation of men
and gods was succeeded by the Horatian climax of publication. The Rondo
in C minor, which was printed this year as Op. 1, is a singular example
of Chopin's strength and weakness in composition. The themes are clear,
pleasant and melodious, contrasted with great skill, and admirably
suited to the pianoforte; but the form is redundant and ill-balanced,
the exposition unduly prolonged, and the subsequent treatment hurried
and inadequate. No doubt, a concert rondo should not be criticised with
the same severity as the rondo movement of a sonata; yet even with all
laxity of concession, we can find passages and even pages, through which
Elsner ought to have drawn his pencil. That Chopin should have written
them is no crime; youth is expected to be extravagant; but his master
might have remembered that an artist who, in the phrase of Cherubini,
'puts too much cloth into his coat,' spoils the result, in addition to
wasting the material.