The Romantic Composers

by Daniel Gregory Mason

But it is time to pass to some other phases of the extraordinary sensibility and unerring taste of Chopin, thus evidenced by his originality in technique, as they showed themselves in his everyday life and in the more intellectual aspects of his art. The chief events of his short career may be very summarily recounted. Born in Zelazowa-Wola, a small village in Poland, in 1809, he studied music in Warsaw, and at twenty-two established himself as a pianist and teacher in Paris, where he passed most of his life. In 1837 ill health, which soon developed into the pulmonary disease of which he died, compelled him to seek a warmer climate, and he passed the winter in the island of Majorca with George Sand, the eminent novelist, and her children. Thus began a connection which lasted for ten years, and which has given rise to endless discussion. The true inner history of this love-affair will probably never be known, as the evidence is fragmentary and distorted by prejudice. It is obvious, however, that neither the composer nor the novelist (whose real name was Madame Dudevant, but who had obtained a divorce from her husband before she met Chopin) was sufficiently unselfish to sustain permanently such a relation; nor were their temperaments fundamentally congenial. They separated in 1847. By this time Chopin's consumption was far advanced, and after two more years of extreme feebleness, complicated by poverty, he died at Paris, October 17, 1849.

In physique Chopin was slender and of middle height, fragile even before disease had wasted him, but supple and elastic; his hands and feet were small, his gestures varied and full of grace; with his pale, almost sallow, complexion, his long, fine, chestnut-brown hair, parted at one side, his high aquiline nose, limpid yet bright eyes, and sweet half-melancholy smile, he impressed Moscheles as "exactly like his music, tender and schwärmerisch."[25] Liszt says that the timbre of his voice was subdued, and that his movements had such a distinction and his manners such an impress of good society that one treated him unconsciously like a prince. In the matter of dress he was as fussy as a woman, sparing no pains (to the friends who served him in these affairs) to secure just the distinguished mean between the insignificant and the ostentatious. "I forgot," he writes from Nohant, George Sand's country estate, to his friend Fontana, "to ask you to order for me a hat from my Duport, in your street, Chaussée d'Antin. Let him give the hat of this year's shape, not too much exaggerated, for I do not know how you are dressing yourself just now.... Call at my tailor's, on the Boulevards, and order him to make me at once a pair of gray trousers—something respectable, not striped, but plain and elastic. Also a quiet black velvet waistcoat, but with very little and no loud pattern, something very quiet but very elegant. Should he not have the best velvet of this kind, let him make a quiet, fine silk waistcoat, but not too much open."

Another letter of the same time amply proves the truth of his biographer's statement that he had the "coquetterie des appartements." "Select wall-paper," he directs, "such as I had formerly, dove-color, only bright and glossy, for the two rooms, also dark green with not too broad stripes. For the anteroom something else, but still respectable. If there are any nicer and more fashionable papers that are to your liking, take them. I prefer the plain, unpretending, and neat ones to the shopkeeper's staring colors. Therefore pearl-color pleases me, for it is neither too loud nor does it look vulgar." In his later years, as health waned, the habit of luxury grew upon him. Near the end, just before leaving London for home, he writes another of his willing servitors, this time his friend Grzymala: "Please see that the sheets and pillows are quite dry, and cause fir-nuts to be bought; Madame Étienne is not to spare anything, so that I may warm myself when I arrive. I have written to D—— that he is to provide carpets and curtains. I shall pay the paper-hanger at once after my arrival. Tell Pleyel to send me a piano on Thursday; let it be closed and a nosegay of violets be bought, so that there may be a nice fragrance in the salon. I should like to find a little poesy in my rooms and in my bedroom, where in all probability I shall lie down for a long time."

The same fastidiousness is discernible in his musical and intellectual tastes. Liszt says that he ranked Mozart above all other masters, "because Mozart condescended more rarely than any other composer to cross the steps which separate refinement from vulgarity." "Yet," adds Liszt, "his sybaritism of purity, his apprehension of what was commonplace, were such that even in 'Don Giovanni' he discovered passages the presence of which we have heard him regret." Next to Mozart came Bach, whose works were the only music he carried with him to Majorca, and whose exquisitely lucid style exercised an important formative influence on his own. His pupil Mikuli says it was difficult to tell which of the two composers he loved better. Beethoven he accepted only with reservations. "Certain parts of Beethoven's works," says Liszt, "seemed to him too rudely fashioned. Their structure was too athletic to please him; their wraths seemed to him too violent." Mendelssohn he considered "common"; of Schumann's "Carnaval" he remarked that it was not music; Meyerbeer and Berlioz he heartily disliked, though for different reasons; Liszt, according to Niecks, he often found "guilty of making concessions to bad taste for the sake of success," a sin which he "viewed with the greatest indignation." On the other hand, he liked the music of Bellini and Rossini, on account of its southern suavity and grace.

Chopin took slight interest in philosophy and literature, and detested argument, whether political or religious. "Of universality" says Niecks, "there was not a trace in him;" and the composer Stephen Heller, himself a man of marked cultivation, pronounced him "uneducated." What little we do learn of his reading, however, is most characteristic. His friend Gavard, who read to him, in his last illness, out of Voltaire's "Dictionnaire Philosophique," remarks: "He valued very highly the finished form of that clear and concise language, and that so sure judgment on questions of taste. Thus, for instance, I remember that the article on taste was one of the last I read to him." The graphologist will supplement these bits of evidence with the testimony of his handwriting, inimitably neat and small. His manuscripts are marvels of penmanship: the notes like pin-points, the slurs mere filaments of spider's web, the stems painstakingly vertical, even the erasures ornamental latticework, so that the whole is as much a drawing as a writing.

The least pleasing of all the manifestations of Chopin's exquisiteness is seen in his social habits. Here his refinement, his shrinking aversion to all that was crude, ugly, or grotesque, his sybaritic love of ease and elegance, made of him an ultra-aristocrat, a précieux,—one is often tempted to say, in good round English, a "snob." Dazzled by the brilliance and poisoned by the perfume of those salons to which his talent gave him access, his taste, so unerring in matters of art, failed to distinguish between the genuine aristocracy of mind and the spurious aristocracy of wealth and fashion. It is at once pathetic and exasperating to see such a genius, of whom an honest, simple man like Delacroix could say, "he was the most true artist I have met," anxiously striving to be borne aloft by that haute volée which was so immeasurably beneath him, limiting his society to that small section of humankind which proudly styled itself "le monde," and dedicating his leisure and his compositions, not to brother artists, but to the baronesses, countesses, and princesses who gave him their half-patronizing homage.[26] In his letters one too frequently comes upon passages like this, from Vienna: I have pleased the nobility here exceedingly. As a proof I may mention the visit which Count Dietrichstein paid me on the stage," or this from Paris, on his first arrival: "I move in the highest society—among ambassadors, princes, and ministers."

There is in the "Lettres Parisiennes" of Madame de Girardin a description of a soirée at Madame de Courbonne's, which brings this whole nauseous atmosphere with painful vividness under our very nostrils. "It was for passionate admirers," writes Madame de Girardin, "the torment of Tantalus to see Chopin going about a whole evening in a salon, and not to hear him. The mistress of the house took pity on us; she was indiscreet, and Chopin played, sang his most delicious songs; we set to these joyous or sad airs the words which came into our heads; we followed with our thoughts his melodious caprices. There were some twenty of us, sincere amateurs, true believers, and not a note was lost, not an intention was misunderstood; it was not a concert, it was intimate, serious music such as we love; he was not a virtuoso who comes and plays the air agreed up and then disappears; he was a beautiful talent, monopolized, worried, tormented, without consideration and scruples, whom one dared to ask for the most beloved airs.... Madame So-and-so said, 'Please, play this pretty nocturne dedicated to Mdlle. Stirling.'—The nocturne which I called the dangerous one.—He smiled, and played the fatal nocturne. 'I,' said another lady, 'should like to hear once played by you this mazurka, so sad and so charming.' He smiled again, and played the delicious mazurka. The most profoundly artful among the ladies sought expedients to attain their ends: 'I am practising the grand sonata which commences [sic] with this beautiful funeral march,' and 'I should like to know the movement in which the finale ought to be played.' He smiled a little at the stratagem, and played the finale of the grand sonata."

Decidedly, there is too sickly a flavor of the boudoir about the salons in which "this beautiful talent ... whom one dared to ask for the most beloved airs" deigned to spend his time. We cannot wonder that in such a hothouse atmosphere the ugly weeds of his character throve almost as well as the delicate flowers, that under such long-continued coddling he grew vain, captious, pettily egotistical. It is distressing to note how much he is willing to ask of his friends Fontana and Grzymala, in the way of laborious and disagreeable commissions—errands to tailors, landlords, paper-hangers, and furniture-makers, and bickerings with publishers—and how he is content to repay them with a few perfunctory protestations of regard, nicely proportioned, in each case, to the magnitude of the favor exacted. Nor does he hesitate to speak slightingly, behind their backs, of such associates as Pleyel the publisher, Leo the banker, and even his fellow-countryman Matuszynski, at the same time that he is addressing them directly in the most cordial and even affectionate language. In short, it is impossible to deny that he was exacting, ungenerous, and disingenuous in his relations with comrades and friends.

In the more casual relations the same shortcomings revealed themselves in a malicious wit which was quite devoid of the magnanimity and exuberance of humor. His description of Thalberg, his rival as a virtuoso, is a little masterpiece of irony: "He is younger than I, pleases the ladies very much, makes potpourris on 'Masaniello,' plays the forte and piano with the pedal but not with the hand, takes tenths as easily as I do octaves, and wears studs with diamonds." When Liszt, who in the consciousness of his splendor was inclined to patronize, volunteered to write a review of one of his concerts, he said, "He will give me a little kingdom in his empire." To a wealthy Philistine who invited him to dinner, and as soon as the coffee was removed requested him to play, he responded sweetly, "Ah, but I have eaten so little!" Obviously Liszt is right in describing him as "a fine connoisseur in raillery and an ingenious mocker."