VI

Fryderyk Szopen--thus Szulc and Karasowski write the name of Poland’s

great composer--has had varying fortunes with his biographers. He

has been much written about, and aged persons who never saw him have

published glib memoirs of him. He has been misunderstood and beslavered

with uncritical praise, and his friends and pupils have in most cases

proved to be his excellent enemies. Chopin to-day enjoys an unhealthy

vogue and the fame of him is apt to prove his undoing. A fellow of

formidable passions, of dramatic vigor, a man of heroic brain, the

woman in his nature and the idolatry of women wove a feminine aureole

about his distinguished head, and so he bids fair to go down to

posterity the very portrait of a hysterical, jaded, morbid invalid.

But Chopin was all this and something more.

Where is the true Chopin to be found? If you have a pretty fancy

for musical psychologizing you will answer that in his music may be

discovered the true Chopin, and in no book, pamphlet or pedantic

exegesis.

If you believe in biographies there is Niecks’--Niecks who combed

creation clean for petty facts and large instances; his two bulky

volumes are at once the delight and despair of all Chopinists.

One summer I gave myself over to Chopin and his weaving musical magic.

I secured various editions. I read Scholtz and the several editors of

the Breitkopf & Hartel edition and enjoyed Theodor Kullak’s remarks

appended to his edition. In Mikuli I found a moiety to praise and

wonder at--there the rubato flourishes like the green bay tree--and

indorsed the sympathetic and sane editing of Karl Klindworth,

which comes nearer to being a definitive edition than any of them.

Von Bülow’s version of the studies is partly amusing and partly

impertinent--while I carefully avoided all French editions. The French

understand Chopin to a limited degree, and they worship in him the

qualities that were almost fatal to his genius.

I never heard a French pianist give an adequate interpretation to

Chopin’s master-works. If the Germans treat him in a dull, clumsy

and brutal manner, the Frenchman irritates you by his flippancy, his

nimble, colorless fingers and the utter absence of poetic divination.

Without Slavic blood in your veins you may not hope to play Chopin, and

all Polish pianists do not understand him.

Here is a list of the books on the subject of Chopin: Frederick

Chopin as a Man and Musician, Frederick Niecks; Chopin and Other

Musical Essays, Henry T. Finck; Frederick Chopin, Franz Liszt; Life

and Letters of Frederick Chopin, Moritz Karasowski; The Works of

Frederic Chopin and their Proper Interpretation, translated from the

Polish of Jean Kleczynski by Alfred Whittingham; Musical Studies,

Franz Hueffer; George Sand, Bertha Thomas; Letters from Majorca,

Charles Wood; Frederick Chopin, Joseph Bennett; Histoire de ma Vie and

Correspondence, George Sand; Frédéric Chopin, La Vie et ses Œuvres,

Mme. A. Audley; Les Trois Romans de Frédéric Chopin, Count Wodinski;

F. Chopin, Essai de Critique Musicale, H. Barbadette; Les Musiciens

Polonais, Albert Sowinski; Frederick François Chopin, by Charles

Willeby, and whilst rummaging through Scribner’s large musical library

I found a tiny book called Chopin, which proved to be extracts from

George Sand’s A Winter in Majorca and familiar material. Then there are

fugitive articles almost innumerable, and I have read with interest

John Van Cleve’s account of the talk he had with Werner Steinbrecher,

once a resident pianist of Cincinnati, and a pupil of Chopin. We have

all met the man who knew the man who shook the hand of Chopin. He is

not always trustworthy, but every stone cast on the Chopin cairn adds

to its stature and the legend grows with the years--grows amazingly.

Then there is M. A. Szulc’s Fryderyk Szopen, which I have never seen,

and if I had, could not read. The fantastic sketches of Elise Polko

must not be forgotten, nor the capital study by Louis Ehlert, the

latter being most discriminating. Consider, too, the passing references

to Chopin in the Liszt, Mendelssohn, Hiller, Heller and Moscheles

letters! That loquacious but interesting gossip, De Lenz, has recorded

his experiences with Chopin, for he bore to him a letter from Liszt.

But use the critical saltcellar in reading De Lenz. His Trois Styles

de Beethoven is neither a veracious nor yet a sound book. De Lenz

dearly loved a pianist. He was a snob musical in a florid state of

culture, and the soul of Thackeray would have hungered to transfix

him on the barb of his undying prose. He was a musical tuft-hunter of

huge proportions and had spasms over Liszt, Karl Tausig and Henselt.

Chopin he handles rather cautiously. The Slavic instinct in Chopin set

tinkling in his brain the little bells of suspicion. He sensed at once

the object of the Russian’s visit; he was almost vitriolic with him

and ironical when he played. So De Lenz never forgave Chopin, he etches

him with an acid touch, and we are all the richer for it. The unvarying

treacle that he pours over the figures of the other three piano artists

obliterates completely their outline. The disagreeable prompted the

truth.

Unlike Frederick Niecks, I have not had the pleasure of visiting

Chopin’s pupils, Madame Dubois, née Camille O’Meara; Madame Rubio, née

Vera de Kologrivof; Mlle. Gavard; Madame Streicher, née Friederike

Müller; Adolph Gutmann, Brinley Richards and Lindsay Sloper. M. Mathias

I knew. Niecks met and talked about Chopin with Liszt, Ferdinand

Hiller, Franchomme, the ’cellist, a most valuable friend; Charles

Valentine Alkan, Stephen Heller, Edouard Wolff, Charles Hallé, G. A.

Osborne, T. Kwiatkowski, who painted, according to Niecks, the best

portrait of Chopin; Prof. A. Chadzko, Leonard Niedzwiecki, Jenny Lind

Goldsmidt, A. J. Hipkins and Dr. and Mrs. Lyschinski. Little wonder

then that Professor Niecks has given us two books stuffed with Chopin

and two books of the greatest value to Chopin students, because of the

material collected and sifted. That Niecks has succeeded in building

up, recreating for us a veracious portrait of his hero, I cannot

truthfully say. He has refined upon Karasowski, but the latter at

least has put the Chopin-loving world forever in his debt. The letters

of Chopin were first published by Karasowski, and they are of the

utmost importance; genuine human documents. Chopin was not a voluble

correspondent. The Liszt story that he would traverse Paris to answer a

dinner invitation may be true of his later years, but the young Chopin

was gay and wrote gay, chatty letters to his parents and friends. What

we lost by the destruction at Warsaw of the Paris correspondence we may

never know. That it would divulge much of the George Sand episode is

doubtful. Chopin, while not a strict Catholic, was a devout believer,

and knowing his mother’s piety he naturally tried to conceal the

Sand affair. He would have agreed with Mr. George Moore, that when a

Roman Catholic abandons his religion the motive is always a woman.

Notwithstanding, the Paris-Warsaw letters might have proved a mine

of gold. The Chopin correspondence extant has done more to expel the

popular phantom born of the vapors in Liszt’s brain than anything

else. They are neither so witty, so cultivated as Mendelssohn’s, nor

so profound, rough and pessimistic as Beethoven’s, nor yet so gay

and naïve as Mozart’s letters, they reveal a young man of exaggerated

sensibility, of good heart, with a fine sense of humor and of common

sense. Culture, in the modern sense, Chopin had not. His was not the

intellectual temperament. Music was for him the eternal solvent; the

threshing out of musical æsthetics, the tedious argumentations, the

polemical side of his art he never relished. He was no propagandist.

He disliked controversy and its breeding of bad manners. Chopin was a

genius, but a gentleman. The combination is rare. External life was

for him a question of good form, and unlike those artists who concern

themselves to the degree of madness with questions of form and diction,

only to let loose the check reins of morals and manners in real life,

Chopin set a high price on outward behavior. He broke with Liszt, as

Niecks hints, because he could not endure Liszt’s free manner of life.

He could forgive Liszt’s impertinent emendations to his ballades and

mazourkas, but he never forgave a breach of courtesy. This is a big

hint for the Chopin hunter.

The something inexplicable to Western imaginations in Chopin’s playing

and music, which Liszt so elaborately explains with his definition of

Zãl, is nothing but the hopeless antinomy of the East and the West. The

touch of the Asiatic in Chopin, tempered by French blood and subjected

to the attrition of Parisian drawing rooms, will never be quite clear

to us. It peeps out in his mazourkas and in the savage splendor of his

F sharp minor polonaise. It lurks in the C sharp minor nocturne and

runs riot in the last C minor study. It is not the febrile rage of the

Gaul nor the Berserker madness of the Teuton and Anglo-Saxon. It is

something infinitely more desperate, more despairing. The pessimism of

the East is in it, also its languorous and scented voluptuousness. His

music, rich, exuberant, exhaling the scent of tuberose and honeysuckle,

is too overpowering if transposed to the violin, voice or orchestra.

It is so perfectly piano music that its very structure, as well as

atmosphere, undergoes a change when taken away from that instrument.

True it is that Chopin did not think so profoundly as Beethoven, but

there are compensating clauses in his music. Its exquisite adaptability

to the medium for which his music was created is no mean achievement,

while the merging of matter and manner is so perfect as sometimes to

put Beethoven in the shade.

The Chopin rubato is a fetish relentlessly worshipped by many amiable

persons who fancy that it is something sweetly and poetically immoral.

It is one of the many superstitions that obstinately clings to the name

of Chopin. To play Bach’s music with more rubato and Chopin’s with less

would be a boon.

Walter Pater has pronounced in his essay, The School of Giorgione, that

music is the archetype of all the arts, the final court of appeal, that

“it is the art of music which most completely realizes this artistic

ideal, this perfect identification of form and matter.” Judged by this

Chopin’s music--some of his music--is perfect. He says wonderful things

in a wonderful way, and in his master eloquence his voice pierces the

mist that hangs so heavily about the base of the Bach and Beethoven

peaks. It is not always a sonorous voice, but it is singularly fine,

sweet and penetrating. Chopin is a dreamer of dreams and not a bard,

but when the sword leaps from the scabbard--O, the charm of its design!

The ring of steel is the warrior’s, the voice is the voice of a man

mad with patriotic passion, the shy, feminine soul is completely

withdrawn. What a Chopin is this! Think of the A flat polonaise, the

ones in C minor, in F sharp minor, and the fantaisie-polonaise,

with its triumphant climacteric tutti! Where have fled the tender,

confiding-morbid voices of the twilight, the opium-haunted twilight? A

man panoplied in shining metallic armor, with closed casque, charges

the enemy and routs it, while the song of triumph mounts deliriously to

his brains. No! no! Chopin is not for the musical Young Person. He can

be very terrible and mordant and he is not often tonic and cheering.

“It is the mistake of much popular criticism,” writes Pater, “to

regard poetry, music and painting--all the various products of art--as

but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed

quantity of imaginative thought supplemented by certain technical

qualities of color in painting, of sound in music, of rhythmical words

in poetry. In this way the sensuous element in art, and with it almost

everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of

indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle--that

the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase

of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of

impressions distinct in kind--is the beginning of all true æsthetic

criticism.”

This especially applies to Chopin. His music may not--despite its

canonic classicism--conform to the standards of the art of Bach

and Beethoven, but apart from its message its very externals are

marvellous. Delicate in linear perspective, logical in architectonic,

its color is its chief charm. Too much has been written of the Polish

element in this music. Chopin is great despite his nationality. His is

not map music, like Grieg’s. It is Polish and something more. He was

first a musician and then a Pole. I suspect that too much patriotism

is read into his music by impressionable writers. The Thaddeus of

Warsaw pose is dead in literature, but it has survived in all its

native pulchritude in the biographies of Chopin. Liszt is to blame for

this in his sweet-caramel book about Chopin, a true Liszt rhapsody,

which George Sand pronounced “un peu exubérante.” Let us once and for

all rid ourselves of the dawdling poseur of Liszt, and on the other

side avoid the neat, prim, rare-roast beef portrait drawn by Joseph

Bennett. Karasowski, in a frantic endeavor to escape Liszt’s Camille

of the keyboard, with his violets, his tears and tuberculosis, created

a bull-necked athlete, who almost played Polish cricket and had

aspirations toward the prize ring.

Chopin’s heroism was emotional, not muscular.

Jean Kleczynski’s book is pedagogic and throws little light on the

tradition of Chopin’s execution. The true Chopin tradition is lost.

If he returned to-day and played in public we would not accept him.

However, he builded better than he knew. His works are for stronger

fingers than his.

Mr. Finck is an ardent worshipper at the shrine, and in the Willeby

book, the latest of the Chopin lives, there is nothing new and there

is much that is misleading, especially the arbitrary and half-baked

judgments. The last étude of opus 25 is pronounced weak! It really

is a masterpiece among masterpieces. Other critical blunders are not

worth haggling over. The greater Chopin, the new Chopin that we Chopin

idolaters believe will endure, is not the Chopin of the valses, of

the nocturnes--interesting as they are--nor of the tricksy, impish

mazourkas. We swear by the F minor fantasy, the barcarolle, the F sharp

minor, the fantaisie-polonaises, including the one in E flat minor.

We think that no more inspired pages have been written than the D

minor, the F minor and the B flat minor preludes, and are speechless

before the F minor ballade and the E flat minor scherzo--the one in

the B flat minor sonata, and the C sharp minor scherzo. These, only to

mention a few, are the quintessence of Chopinism; the rest are popular,

banal and of historical interest only.

The real Chopin life has yet to be written, a life that shall embrace

his moral and physical natures, that will not shirk his marked

abnormalities of vision, of conduct, and will not bow down before that

agreeable fetish of sawdust and molasses called “Frédéric Chopin,”

created by silly sentimentalists and rose-leaf poets. Chopin, with all

his imperfections full blown; Chopin, with his consummate genius for

giving pain as well as taking pains; Chopin, the wonder-worker, is a

fruitful and unexploited subject for the devout biographer.

V