VII
Frédéric Chopin was far less influenced by external events than most composers of the time. We have the legend that the C minor Étude was written to express his emotions upon hearing of the capture of Warsaw by the Russians in 1831. We hear a good deal (perhaps too much) about the national strain in his music. The national dance rhythms enter into his work, and, to some extent, the national musical idiom, though refined out of any real national expressiveness. Beyond this his music would apparently have been the same, whatever the state of the world at large.
Nor are the events of his life of any particular significance. He was born near Warsaw, in Poland, in 1810, the son of a teacher who later became professor of French in the Lyceum of Warsaw. His father had sufficient funds for his education, and the lad received excellent instruction in music—in composition chiefly—at the Warsaw Conservatory. At nine he appeared as a concert pianist, and frequently thereafter. He was a sensitive child, but hardly remarkable in any way. There are child love affairs to be recorded by careful biographers, with fancied influences on his art. In composition he was not precocious, his Opus 1 appearing at the age of eighteen. A visit to Vienna in 1829 decided him in his career of professional pianist, and in 1830 he left Warsaw on a grand concert tour. In 1831 he reached Paris, where he lived most of his life thereafter. His Opus 2 was ‘announced’ to the world by the discerning Schumann, in the famous phrase, ‘Hats off, gentlemen. A genius!’ In 1837, through Liszt’s machinations, he met Madame Dudevant, known to fame by her pen name, George Sand. She was the one great love affair of his life. Their visit to Majorca, which has found a nesting place in literature in George Sand’s Un Hiver à Majorque, was a rather dismal failure. The result was an illness, which his mistress nursed him through, and this began the continued ill health that lasted until his death. After Majorca came more composition and lessons in Paris, with summer visits to George Sand at her country home, and occasional trips to England. Then, in 1849, severe sickness and death.
All that was really important in Chopin’s life happened within himself. No other great composer of the time is so utterly self-contained. Though he lived in an age of frenzied ‘schools’ and propaganda, he calmly worked as pleased him best, choosing what suited his personality and letting the rest go. His music is, perhaps, more consistently personal than that of any other composer of the century. It is remarkable, too, that the chief contemporary musical influences on his work came from second and third-rate men. He was intimate with Liszt, he was friendly with the Schumanns. But from them he borrowed next to nothing. Yet he worshipped Bach and Mozart. Nothing of the romantic Parisian frenzy of the thirties enters into his music; the only influence which the creed of the romanticists had upon him seems to have been the freeing of his mind from traditional obstacles, but it is doubtful whether his mind was not already quite free when he reached Paris. All that he did was peculiarly his; his choice and rejection were accurate in the extreme.
In his piano playing he represented quite another school from that of Liszt. He was gentle where Liszt was frenzied; he was graceful where Liszt was pompous. Or, rather, his playing was of no school, but was simply his own. His imitators exaggerated his characteristics, carrying his rubato to a silly extreme. But no competent witness has testified that Chopin ever erred in taste. The criticism was constantly heard, during his lifetime, that he played too softly, that his tone was insufficient to fill a large hall. It was his style; he did not change because of his critics. He was not, perhaps, a virtuoso of the first rank, but all agree that the things which he did he did supremely well. The supreme grace of his compositions found its best exponent in him. Ornaments, such as the cadenzas of the favorite E flat Nocturne, he played with a liquid quality that no one could imitate. His rubato carried with it a magical sense of personal freedom, but was never too marked—was not a rubato at all, some say, since the left hand kept the rhythm quite even.
As a workman Chopin was conscientious in the extreme. He never allowed a work to go to the engraver until he had put the last possible touch of perfection to it. His posthumous compositions he desired never to have published. His judgment of them was correct; they are in almost every case inferior to the work which he gave to the public. Just where his individuality came from, no one can say; it seems to have been born in him. From Field[81] he borrowed the Nocturne form, or rather name. From Hummel[82] and Cramer[83] he borrowed certain details of pianistic style. From the Italians he caught a certain luxurious grace that is not to be found in French or German music. But none of this explains the genius by which he turned his borrowings into great music.
Emotionally Chopin ranks perhaps as the greatest of composers. In subjective expression and the evocation of mood, apart from specific suggestion by words or ‘program,’ he is supreme. He is by no means merely the dreamy poet which we sometimes carelessly suppose. Nothing can surpass the force and vigor of his Polonaises, or the liveliness of his Mazurkas. In harmony his invention was as inexhaustible as in melody, and later music has borrowed many a progression from him. Indeed, in this respect he was one of the most original of composers. It has been said that in harmony there has been nothing new since Bach save only Chopin, Wagner, and Debussy. But, however radical his progressions may be, they are never awkward. They have that smoothness and that seeming inevitableness which the artist honors with the epithet, ‘perfection.’ Chopin’s genius was wholly for the piano; in the little writing he did for orchestra or other instruments (mostly in connection with piano solo) there is nothing to indicate that music would have been the richer had he departed from his chosen field. In a succeeding chapter more will be said about his music. As to the man himself, it is all in his music. Any biographical detail which we can collect must pale before the Preludes, the Études, and the Polonaises.
An ‘average music-lover,’ about 1845, being questioned as to whom he thought the greatest living composer, would almost undoubtedly have replied, ‘Mendelssohn.’
For Mendelssohn had just the combination of qualities which at the time could most charm people, giving them enough of the new to interest and enough of the old to avoid disconcerting shocks. Our average music-lover would have gone on to say that Mendelssohn had absorbed all that was good in romantic music—the freshness, the pictorial suggestiveness, the freedom from dry traditionalism—and had synthesized it with the power and clearness of the old forms. Mendelssohn was the one of the romantic composers who was instantly understood. His reputation has diminished steadily in the last half century. One does not say this vindictively, for his polished works are as delightful to-day as ever. But historically he cannot rank for a moment with such men as Liszt, Schumann, or Chopin. When we review the field we discover that he added no single new element to musical expression. His forms were the classical ones, only made flexible enough to hold their romantic content. His harmony, though fresh, was always strictly justified by classical tradition. His instrumentation, charming in the extreme, was only a restrained and tasteful use of resources already known and used. In a history of musical development Mendelssohn deserves no more than passing mention.
Of all the great musicians of history none ever received in his youth such a broad and sound academic education. In every way he was one of fortune’s darlings. His life, like that of few other distinguished men of history (Macaulay alone comes readily to mind), was little short of ideal. He was born in 1809 in Hamburg, son of a rich Jewish banker. Early in his life the family formally embraced Christianity, which removed from the musician the disabilities he would otherwise have suffered in public life. His family life during his youthful years in Berlin was that which has always been traditionally Jewish—affectionate, simple, vigorous, and inspiring—and his education the best that money could secure. His father cultivated his talents with greatest care, but he was never allowed to become a spoiled child or to develop without continual kindly criticism. He became a pianist of almost the first rank, and was precocious in composition, steadily developing technical finish and individuality. At the age of 17, under the inspiration of the reading of Shakespeare with his sister Fanny, he wrote the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ overture, as finished and delightful a work as there is in all musical literature. At twenty he was given money to travel and look about the world for his future occupation. As a conductor (chiefly of his own works) and, to a lesser extent, as a pianist he steadily became more famous, until, in 1835, he was invited to become conductor of the concerts of the Gewandhaus Orchestra at Leipzig. In this position he rapidly became the most noted and perhaps the most immediately influential musician in Europe. From 1840 to 1843 he was connected with Berlin, where Frederick William IV had commissioned him to organize a musical academy, but in 1843 he did better by organizing the famous Conservatory at Leipzig, of which he was made director, with Schumann and Moscheles on the teaching staff. In 1847, after his tenth visit to England, he heard of the death of his beloved sister Fanny, and shortly afterward died. All Europe felt his death as a peculiarly personal loss.
What we feel in the man, beyond all else, is poise—one of the best of human qualities but not the most productive in art. He knew and loved the classical musicians—Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven—indeed, the ‘resurrection’ of Bach dates from his performance of the Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1828. He also felt, in a delicate way, the romantic spirit of the age, and gave the most charming poetical pictures in his overtures. All that he did he did with a polish that recalls Mozart. His self-criticism was not profound, but was always balanced. In his personal character he seems almost disconcertingly perfect; we find ourselves wishing that he had committed a few real sins so as to become more human. His appreciation of other musicians was generous but limited; he never fully understood the value of Schumann, and his early meeting with Berlioz, though impeccably polite, was quite mystifying. His ability as an organizer and director was marked. His work in Leipzig made that city, next to Paris, the musical centre of Europe. Though his culture was broad he was scarcely affected by external literary or political currents, except to refine certain aspects of them for use in his music.