Frederick Chopin, as a Man and Musician — Complete

by Frederick Niecks

The battle fought in the pages of the Musical World in 1841 illustrates the then state of matters in England. Hostilities commenced on October 28 with a criticism of the Mazurkas, Op. 41. Of its unparalleled nature the reader shall judge himself:—

Monsieur Frederic Chopin has, by some means or other which we
cannot divine, obtained an enormous reputation, a reputation
but too often refused to composers of ten times his genius. M.
Chopin is by no means a putter down of commonplaces; but he
is, what by many would be esteemed worse, a dealer in the most
absurd and hyperbolical extravagances. It is a striking satire
on the capability for thought possessed by the musical
profession, that so very crude and limited a writer should be
esteemed, as he is very generally, a profound classical
musician. M. Chopin does not want ideas, but they never extend
beyond eight or sixteen bars at the utmost, and then he is
invariably in nubibus... the works of the composer give us
invariably the idea of an enthusiastic school-boy, whose parts
are by no means on a par with his enthusiasm, who WILL be
original whether he CAN or not. There is a clumsiness about
his harmonies in the midst of their affected strangeness, a
sickliness about his melodies despite their evidently FORCED
unlikeness to familiar phrases, an utter ignorance of design
everywhere apparent in his lengthened works...The entire works
of Chopin present a motley surface of ranting hyperbole and
excruciating cacophony. When he is not THUS singular, he is no
better than Strauss or any other waltz compounder... such as
admire Chopin, and they are legion, will admire these
Mazurkas, which are supereminently Chopin-ical; that do NOT
we.

Wessel and Stapleton, the publishers, protested against this shameful criticism, defending Chopin and adducing the opinions of numerous musicians in support of their own. But the valorous editor "ventures to assure the distinguished critics and the publishers that there will be no difficulty in pointing out a hundred palpable faults, and an infinitude of meretricious uglinesses, such as, to real taste and judgment, are intolerable." Three more letters appeared in the following numbers—two for (Amateur and Professor) and one against (Inquirer) Chopin; the editor continuing to insist with as much violence as stupidity that he was right. It is pleasant to turn from this senseless opposition to the friends and admirers of the master. Of them we learn something in Davison's Essay on the Works of F. Chopin, from which I must quote a few passages:—

This Concerto [the E minor] has been made known to the
amateurs of music in England by the artist-like performance of
Messrs. W. H. Holmes, F. B. Jewson, H. B. Richards, R.
Barnett, and other distinguished members of the Royal Academy,
where it is a stock piece...The Concerto [in F minor] has been
made widely known of late by the clever performance of that
true little prodigy Demoiselle Sophie Bohrer....These charming
bagatelles [the Mazurkas] have been made widely known in
England through the instrumentality of Mr. Moscheles, Mr.
Cipriani Potter, Mr. Kiallmark, Madame de Belleville-Oury, Mr.
Henry Field (of Bath), Mr. Werner, and other eminent pianists,
who enthusiastically admire and universally recommend them to
their pupils...To hear one of those eloquent streams of pure
loveliness [the nocturnes] delivered by such pianists as
Edouard Pirkhert, William Holmes, or Henry Field, a pleasure
we frequently enjoyed, is the very transcendency of delight.
[FOOTNOTE: Information about the above-named pianists may be
found in the musical biographical dictionaries, with three
exceptions-namely, Kiallmark, Werner, and Pirkhert. George
Frederick Kiallmark (b. November 7, 1804; d. December 13,
1887), a son of the violinist and composer George Kiallmark,
was for many years a leading professor in London. He is said
to have had a thorough appreciation and understanding of
Chopin's genius, and even in his last years played much of
that master's music. He took especial delight in playing
Chopin's Nocturnes, no Sunday ever passed without his family
hearing him play two or three of them.—Louis Werner (whose
real name was Levi) was the son of a wealthy and esteemed
Jewish family living at Clapham. He studied music in London
under Moscheles, and, though not an eminent pianist, was a
good teacher. His amiability assured him a warm welcome in
society.—Eduard Pirkhert died at Vienna, aged 63, on February
28, 1881. To Mr. Ernst Pauer, who is never appealed to in
vain, I am indebted for the following data as well as for the
subject—matter of my notice on Werner: "Eduard Pirkhert, born
at Graz in 1817, was a pupil of Anton Halm and Carl Czerny. He
was a shy and enormously diligent artist, who, however, on
account of his nervousness, played, like Henselt, rarely in
public. His execution was extraordinary and his tone
beautiful. In 1855 he became professor at the Vienna
Conservatorium." Mr. Pauer never heard him play Chopin.]

After this historical excursus let us take up again the record of our hero's doings and sufferings in London.

Chopin seems to have gone to a great many parties of various kinds, but he could not always be prevailed upon to give the company a taste of his artistic quality. Brinley Richards saw him at an evening party at the house of the politician Milner Gibson, where he did not play, although he was asked to do so. According to Mr. Hueffer, [FOOTNOTE: Chopin in Fortnightly Review of September, 1877, reprinted in Musical Studies (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1880).] he attended, likewise without playing, an evening party (May 6) at the house of the historian Grote. Sometimes ill-health prevented him from fulfilling his engagements; this, for instance, was the case on the occasion of a dinner which Macready is said to have given in his honour, and to which Thackeray, Mrs. Procter, Berlioz, and Julius Benedict were invited. On the other hand, Chopin was heard at the Countess of Blessington's (Gore House, Kensington) and the Duchess of Sutherland's (Stafford House). On the latter occasion Benedict played with him a duet of Mozart's. More than thirty years after, Sir Julius had still a clear recollection of "the great pains Chopin insisted should be taken in rehearsing it, to make the rendering of it at the concert as perfect as possible." John Ella heard Chopin play at Benedict's. Of another of Chopin's private performances in the spring of 1848 we read in the Supplement du Dictionnaire de la Conversation, where Fiorentino writes:

We were at most ten or twelve in a homely, comfortable little
salon, equally propitious to conversation and contemplation.
Chopin took the place of Madame Viardot at the piano, and
plunged us into ineffable raptures. I do not know what he
played to us; I do not know how long our ecstasy lasted: we
were no longer on earth; he had transported us into unknown
regions, into a sphere of flame and azure, where the soul,
freed from all corporeal bonds, floats towards the infinite.
This was, alas! the song of the swan.

The sequel will show that the concluding sentence is no more than a flourish of the pen. Whether Chopin played at Court, as he says in a letter to Gutmann he expected to do, I have not ascertained. Nor have I been able to get any information about a dinner which, Karasowski relates, some forty countrymen of Chopin's got up in his honour when they heard of his arrival in London. According to this authority the pianist-composer rose when the proceedings were drawing to an end, and many speeches extolling him as a musician and patriot had been made, and spoke, if not these words, to this effect: "My dear countrymen! The proofs of your attachment and love which you have just given me have truly moved me. I wish to thank you, but lack the talent of expressing my feelings in words; I invite you therefore to accompany me to my lodgings and to receive there my thanks at the piano." The proposal was received with enthusiasm, and Chopin played to his delighted and insatiable auditors till two o'clock in the morning. What a crush, these forty or more people in Chopin's lodgings! However, that is no business of mine.

[FOOTNOTE: After reading the above, Mr. Hipkins remarked: "I fancy this dinner resembled the dinner which will go down to posterity as given by the Hungarians of London to Liszt in 1886, which was really a private dinner given by Mrs. Bretherton to fifteen people, of whom her children and mine were four. NO Hungarians.">[

The documents—letters and newspaper advertisements and notices—bearing on this period of Chopin's life are so plentiful that they tell the story without the help of many additions and explanatory notes. This is satisfactory, for one grain of fact is more precious than a bushel of guesses and hearsays.