Part 3 (1/2)

WARSAW

We are more accustomed in literature than in music to find immortality conferred on artists whose total quant.i.ty 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, Merimee 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 princ.i.p.al 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 dispa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sed 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 j.a.panese 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 ecorche 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, st.u.r.dy 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 subst.i.tuted a half-contemptuous compa.s.sion which is equally galling, and almost equally unintelligent. A past generation looked on Sh.e.l.ley 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 hards.h.i.+p in the case. The feeble health was compensated, at least in part, by friends.h.i.+p, 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 _emigre_, 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 Professors.h.i.+p 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 _regime_. 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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 cla.s.sical 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-wors.h.i.+p, 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 const.i.tution. 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 _debut_, 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 cla.s.s 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 censors.h.i.+p. 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 aeolopantaleon, 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 G.o.ds 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 pa.s.sages 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.

The only other compositions which can be a.s.signed to this year with any certainty are the two Mazurkas in G and B flat, which appear among the posthumous work in Breitkopf and Hartel's Edition. Indeed, it is pretty certain that Chopin was still attempting to do too many things at once.

By the beginning of 1826 he had shown unmistakable signs of overwork, and in the next holidays he was ordered off to try the whey cure at Bad Reinerz in Prussian Silesia. His experiences of the place are recorded in a letter to his school-fellow Wilhelm Kolberg, and consist mainly of approval of the scenery, criticisms of the visitors, and caricatures of the local band. The only incident, was a concert which he organised for the benefit of two orphans, the death of whose mother had left them without money enough to return home. For the rest he drank his whey, took sedate walks with his mother and sisters, and even succeeded in persuading himself that he was growing 'stout and lazy.'

The journey home was broken by two or three visits, of which the most important was a short stay at Antonin, the country residence of Prince Radziwill. The Prince was an enthusiastic patron of music, an able and meritorious composer, a good singer and violoncellist, and a pleasant cultivated man, who seemed to have been cast by Fate for the part of Maecenas. Apparently he had met Chopin in Warsaw, and shared the interest which all Polish society felt in its new genius. Liszt a.s.serts that he paid for the boy's education, but the statement, which is intrinsically improbable, is categorically denied by Fontana, while the still wilder report that he defrayed the expenses of Chopin's Italian tour, is best answered by the fact that Chopin never set foot inside Italy in his life. However, the tie of hospitality is not likely to have been weakened by the absence of a monetary basis, and the friends.h.i.+p between host and guest was quite as cordial as though they had been debtor and creditor.

Once back in Warsaw, Chopin set himself to prepare for his final examination at the Lyceum, which he pa.s.sed with something less than his usual distinction, in 1827. The cause of this comparative failure is not hard to divine, for although the compositions of the winter are few and unimportant, there can be no doubt that Chopin was devoting himself more and more to music, and allowing other interests to sink into the background. And there was another reason. On April 10, his sister Emily, the closest and dearest of all his companions, died of pulmonary disease. She had accompanied her brother to Reinerz, in the hope of checking a malady which medical skill is almost powerless to cure, she had returned with some alleviation of suffering and some hopes of reprieve--and then came the end. We may readily imagine the effect which her death must have produced on the sensitive, affectionate boy from whom, through all her short life, she had been inseparable. It was his first great sorrow, and he was never of a nature to take his sorrows lightly.

As soon as his work set him free, he tried to find solace in some short, fitful periods of travel, and paid a visit to his G.o.dmother's house in Posen, and a second to the brother of his old head-master, who was occupying some official post at Danzic. All the winter was spent at home, sketching, revising, polis.h.i.+ng, and preparing his compositions for the publisher. By the autumn of the next year he had completed two or three Polonaises,[17] a Nocturne, a Piano Sonata, a brilliant Rondo for two pianos, the first movement of the G minor Trio, and, more important than all, the variations on _La ci darem_, which were published in 1830 as Op. 2. It was this last-named work which evoked Schumann's first critical essay, and introduced the world at large to Florestan and Eusebius. Sixty years have pa.s.sed since the essay was printed, and we are in no mind to question its decision. 'Hats off, gentlemen, a genius,' is the only judgment which sums up that wonderful combination of grace and audacity, of delicacy and vigour, of technical display and poetic invention.