Frederick Chopin, as a Man and Musician — Complete

by Frederick Niecks

As the winter advanced, sadness more and more paralysed my
efforts at gaiety and cheerfulness. The state of our invalid
grew always worse; the wind wailed in the ravines, the rain
beat against our windows, the voice of the thunder penetrated
through our thick walls and mingled its mournful sounds with
the laughter and sports of the children. The eagles and
vultures, emboldened by the fog, came to devour our poor
sparrows, even on the pomegranate tree which shaded my window.
The raging sea kept the ships in the harbours; we felt
ourselves prisoners, far from all enlightened help and from
all efficacious sympathy. Death seemed to hover over our heads
to seize one of us, and we were alone in contending with him
for his prey.

If George Sand's serenity and gaiety succumbed to these influences, we may easily imagine how much more they oppressed Chopin, of whom she tells us that—

The mournful cry of the famished eagle and the gloomy
desolation of the yew trees covered with snow saddened him
much longer and more keenly than the perfume of the orange
trees, the gracefulness of the vines, and the Moorish song of
the labourers gladdened him.

The above-quoted letters have already given us some hints of how the prisoners of Valdemosa passed their time. In the morning there were first the day's provisions to be procured and the rooms to be tidied—which latter business could not be entrusted to Maria Antonia without the sacrifice of their night's rest. [FOOTNOTE: George Sand's share of the household work was not so great as she wished to make the readers of Un Hiver a Majorque believe, for it consisted, as we gather from her letters, only in giving a helping hand to her maid, who had undertaken to cook and clean up, but found that her strength fell short of the requirements.] Then George Sand would teach her children for some hours. These lessons over, the young ones ran about and amused themselves for the rest of the day, while their mother sat down to her literary studies and labours. In the evening they either strolled together through the moonlit cloisters or read in their cell, half of the night being generally devoted by the novelist to writing. George Sand says in the "Histoire de ma Vie" that she wrote a good deal and read beautiful philosophical and historical works when she was not nursing her friend. The latter, however, took up much of her time, and prevented her from getting out much, for he did not like to be left alone, nor, indeed, could he safely be left long alone. Sometimes she and her children would set out on an expedition of discovery, and satisfy their curiosity and pleasantly while away an hour or two in examining the various parts of the vast aggregation of buildings; or the whole party would sit round the stove and laugh over the rehearsal of the morning's transactions with the villagers. Once they witnessed even a ball in this sanctuary. It was on Shrove-Tuesday, after dark, that their attention was roused by a strange, crackling noise. On going to the door of their cell they could see nothing, but they heard the noise approaching. After a little there appeared at the opposite end of the cloister a faint glimmer of white light, then the red glare of torches, and at last a crew the sight of which made their flesh creep and their hair stand on end—he-devils with birds' heads, horses' tails, and tinsel of all colours; she-devils or abducted shepherdesses in white and pink dresses; and at the head of them Lucifer himself, horned and, except the blood-red face, all black. The strange noise, however, turned out to be the rattling of castanets, and the terrible-looking figures a merry company of rich farmers and well-to-do villagers who were going to have a dance in Maria Antonia's cell. The orchestra, which consisted of a large and a small guitar, a kind of high-pitched violin, and from three to four pairs of castanets, began to play indigenous jotas and fandangos which, George Sand tells us, resemble those of Spain, but have an even bolder form and more original rhythm. The critical spectators thought that the dancing of the Majorcans was not any gayer than their singing, which was not gay at all, and that their boleros had "la gravite des ancetres, et point de ces graces profanes qu'on admire en Andalousie." Much of the music of these islanders was rather interesting than pleasing to their visitors. The clicking of the castanets with which they accompany their festal processions, and which, unlike the broken and measured rhythm of the Spaniards, consists of a continuous roll like that of a drum "battant aux champs," is from time to time suddenly interrupted in order to sing in unison a coplita on a phrase which always recommences but never finishes. George Sand shares the opinion of M. Tastu that the principal Majorcan rhythms and favourite fioriture are Arabic in type and origin.

Of quite another nature was the music that might be heard in those winter months in one of the cells of the monastery of Valdemosa. "With what poesy did his music fill this sanctuary, even in the midst of his most grievous troubles!" exclaims George Sand. I like to picture to myself the vaulted cell, in which Pleyel's piano sounded so magnificently, illumined by a lamp, the rich traceries of the Gothic chair shadowed on the wall, George Sand absorbed in her studies, her children at play, and Chopin pouring out his soul in music.

It would be a mistake to think that those months which the friends spent in Majorca were for them a time of unintermittent or even largely-predominating wretchedness. Indeed, George Sand herself admits that, in spite of the wildness of the country and the pilfering habits of the people, their existence might have been an agreeable one in this romantic solitude had it not been for the sad spectacle of her companion's sufferings and certain days of serious anxiety about his life. And now I must quote a. long but very important passage from the "Histoire de ma Vie":—

The poor great artist was a detestable patient. What I had
feared, but unfortunately not enough, happened. He became
completely demoralised. Bearing pain courageously enough, he
could not overcome the disquietude of his imagination. The
monastery was for him full of terrors and phantoms, even when
he was well. He did not say so, and I had to guess it. On
returning from my nocturnal explorations in the ruins with my
children, I found him at ten o'clock at night before his
piano, his face pale, his eyes wild, and his hair almost
standing on end. It was some moments before he could
recognise us.
He then made an attempt to laugh, and played to us sublime
things he had just composed, or rather, to be more accurate,
terrible or heartrending ideas which had taken possession of
him, as it were without his knowledge, in that hour of
solitude, sadness, and terror.
It was there that he composed the most beautiful of those
short pages he modestly entitled "Preludes." They are
masterpieces. Several present to the mind visions of deceased
monks and the sounds of the funeral chants which beset his
imagination; others are melancholy and sweet—they occurred
to him in the hours of sunshine and of health, with the noise
of the children's laughter under the window, the distant
sound of guitars, the warbling of the birds among the humid
foliage, and the sight of the pale little full-blown roses on
the snow.
Others again are of a mournful sadness, and, while charming
the ear, rend the heart. There is one of them which occurred
to him on a dismal rainy evening which produces a terrible
mental depression. We had left him well that day, Maurice and
I, and had gone to Palma to buy things we required for our
encampment. The rain had come on, the torrents had
overflowed, we had travelled three leagues in six hours to
return in the midst of the inundation, and we arrived in the
dead of night, without boots, abandoned by our driver, having
passed through unheard-of dangers. We made haste,
anticipating the anxiety of our invalid. It had been indeed
great, but it had become as it were congealed into a kind of
calm despair, and he played his wonderful prelude weeping. On
seeing us enter he rose, uttering a great cry, then he said
to us, with a wild look and in a strange tone: "Ah! I knew
well that you were dead!"
When he had come to himself again, and saw the state in which
we were, he was ill at the retrospective spectacle of our
dangers; but he confessed to me afterwards that while waiting
for our return he had seen all this in a dream and that, no
longer distinguishing this dream from reality, he had grown
calm and been almost lulled to sleep while playing the piano,
believing that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in
a lake; heavy and ice-cold drops of water fell at regular
intervals upon his breast, and when I drew his attention to
those drops of water which were actually falling at regular
intervals upon the roof, he denied having heard them. He was
even vexed at what I translated by the term imitative
harmony. He protested with all his might, and he was right,
against the puerility of these imitations for the ear. His
genius was full of mysterious harmonies of nature, translated
by sublime equivalents into his musical thought, and not by a
servile repetition of external sounds. His composition of
this evening was indeed full of the drops of rain which
resounded on the sonorous tiles of the monastery, but they
were transformed in his imagination and his music into tears
falling from heaven on his heart.

Although George Sand cannot be acquitted of the charge of exaggerating the weak points in her lover's character, what she says about his being a detestable patient seems to have a good foundation in fact. Gutmann, who nursed him often, told me that his master was very irritable and difficult to manage in sickness. On the other hand, Gutmann contradicted George Sand's remarks about the Preludes, saying that Chopin composed them before starting on his journey. When I mentioned to him that Fontana had made a statement irreconcilable with his, and suggested that Chopin might have composed some of the Preludes in Majorca, Gutmann maintained firmly that every one of them was composed previously, and that he himself had copied them. Now with Chopin's letters to Fontana before us we must come to the conclusion that Gutmann was either under a false impression or confirmed a rash statement by a bold assertion, unless we prefer to assume that Chopin's labours on the Preludes in Majorca were confined to selecting, [FOOTNOTE: Internal evidence suggests that the Preludes consist (to a great extent at least) of pickings from the composer's portfolios, of pieces, sketches, and memoranda written at various times and kept to be utilised when occasion might offer.] filing, and polishing. My opinion—which not only has probability but also the low opus number (28) and the letters in its favour—is that most of the Preludes, if not all, were finished or sketched before Chopin went to the south, and that a few, if any, were composed and the whole revised at Palma and Valdemosa. Chopin cannot have composed many in Majorca, because a few days after his arrival there he wrote: from Palma (Nov. 15, 1838) to Fontana that he would send the Preludes soon; and it was only his illness that prevented him from doing so. There is one statement in George Sand's above-quoted narrative which it is difficult to reconcile with other statements in "Un Hiver a Majorque" and in her and Chopin's letters. In the just-mentioned book (p. 177) she says that the journey in question was made for the purpose of rescuing the piano from the hands of the custom-house officers; and in a letter of January 15, 1839, to her friend Madame Marliani (quoted on p. 31), which does not contain a word about adventures on a stormy night, [They are first mentioned in the letter of January 20, 1839, quoted on p. 32.] she writes that the piano is still in the clutches of the custom-house officers. From this, I think, we may conclude that it must have taken place after January 15. But, then, how could Chopin have composed on that occasion a Prelude included in a work the manuscript of which he sent away on the lath? Still, this does not quite settle the question. Is it not possible that Chopin may have afterwards substituted the new Prelude for one of those already forwarded to France? To this our answer must be that it is possible, but that the letters do not give any support to such an assumption. Another and stronger objection would be the uncertainty as to the correctness of the date of the letter. Seeing that so many of Chopin's letters have been published with wrong dates, why not also that of January 12? Unfortunately, we cannot in this case prove or disprove the point by internal evidence. There is, however, one factor we must be especially careful not to forget in our calculations—namely, George Sand's habitual unconscientious inaccuracy; but the nature of her narrative will indeed be a sufficient warning to the reader, for nobody can read it without at once perceiving that it is not a plain, unvarnished recital of facts.

It would be interesting to know which were the compositions that Chopin produced at Valdemosa. As to the Prelude particularly referred to by George Sand, it is generally and reasonably believed to be No. 6 (in B minor). [FOOTNOTE: Liszt, who tells the story differently, brings in the F sharp minor Prelude. (See Liszt's Chopin, new edition, pp. 273 and 274.)] The only compositions besides the Preludes which Chopin mentions in his letters from Majorca are the Ballade, Op, 38, the Scherzo, Op. 39, and the two Polonaises, Op. 40. The peevish, fretful, and fiercely-scornful Scherzo and the despairingly-melancholy second Polonaise (in C minor) are quite in keeping with the moods one imagines the composer to have been in at the time. Nor is there anything discrepant in the Ballade. But if the sadly-ailing composer really created, and not merely elaborated and finished, in Majorca the superlatively-healthy, vigorously-martial, brilliantly-chivalrous Polonaise in A major, we have here a remarkable instance of the mind's ascendency over the body, of its independence of it. This piece, however, may have been conceived under happier circumstances, just as the gloomy Sonata, Op. 35 (the one in B flat minor, with the funeral march), and the two Nocturnes, Op. 37—the one (in G minor) plaintive, longing, and prayerful; the other (in G major) sunny and perfume-laden—may have had their origin in the days of Chopin's sojourn in the Balearic island. A letter of Chopin's, written from Nohant in the summer of 1839, leaves, as regards the Nocturnes, scarcely room for such a conjecture. On the other hand, we learn from the same letter that he composed at Palma the sad, yearning Mazurka in E minor (No. 2 of Op. 41).

As soon as fair weather set in and the steamer resumed its weekly courses to Barcelona, George Sand and her party hastened to leave the island. The delightful prospects of spring could not detain them.