At Louis Viardot’s Chopin met Thalberg, and that great master of the arpeggio and also of one of the finest singing touches ever heard on a keyboard, received with haughty humility the Polish pianist’s compliments, not quite believing in their sincerity. Perhaps he was right, for Chopin made mock of his mechanical style when his back was turned; his imitation of the Moïse fantasy being astoundingly funny, according to Mathias.
“What a jury of pianists,” he cries, “in the old days of the Salle Erard! Doehler, Dreyschock, Leopold de Meyer, Zimmerman, Thalberg, Kalkbrenner—how they all curiously examined the Polish black swan, with his original style and extraordinary technique!” A row over Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s Adelaïde is mentioned.
And Chopin, pianist? He played as he composed—in an absolutely unapproachable manner. He would doubtless be shocked to hear his music in the hands of some modern Sandow of the keyboard, torn into unmelodic splinters, yet every splinter exhaling a melodic sound under the furious fingers of the misguided pianist. Mathias examines his rubato and settles the much debated question, although Liszt’s happy illustration of the unshaken tree with the shimmering leaves, still holds good. Chopin admired Weber. Their natures were alike aristocratic. Once after Mathias had played the noble, chivalrous sonata in A flat Chopin exclaimed:
“Un ange passait dans le ciel.”
Mathias first knew Chopin in 1840 in the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, 38. The house no longer stands, having been demolished by the cutting of the rue Lafayette. Later he moved to the rue Tronchet, number 5. The house is still there. He occupied the rez-de-chaussée. The first piece Mathias brought him was by Kalkbrenner and called Une Pensée de Bellini. Chopin regarded it without horror, then gave the boy the Moscheles studies and the A minor concerto of Hummel. His pupil, Fontana, gave lessons when the master was sick. One day Chopin was ill but received his visitors lying on a couch. Mathias noticed the Carneval of Schumann. It was the first edition, and Chopin on being asked what he thought of the music answered in icy accents as if the work were painful even to know. He could not speak well of music where want of form shocked his classical instincts, so he said as little as possible. And poor old Robert Schumann down in Leipsic pouring out inky rhapsodies over Chopin!
Mathias tells us that Chopin was a simple man—“Je ne veux pas dire simple esprit”—was no critic, was without literary pretensions and not of the intellectual fibre of Liszt or Berlioz. When the aide-de-camp of King Louis Philippe asked him why he did not compose an opera he answered in that small, slightly stifled voice of his: “Ah, M. Le Comte, let me compose piano music; it’s all I know how to do.”
Bach, Hummel and Field, Mathias says, were his strongest musical influences. You may well imagine his horror if forced to listen to the Ring. A tender-souled creature yet with the fire of a hero in his veins! More masculine, heroic music—free from Liszt’s and Wagner’s grandiloquence of accent—than the F sharp minor polonaise, some of the ballades, preludes and études, has yet to be written.
V
In the city of Boston, January 19, 1809, a son was born to David and Elizabeth Poe. On March 1, 1809, in the little village of Zelazowa-Wola, twenty-eight miles from Warsaw, in Poland, a son was born to Nicholas and Justina Chopin. The American is known to the world as Edgar Allan Poe, the poet; the Pole as Frederic François Chopin, the composer. October 7, 1849, Edgar Poe died neglected in Washington Hospital at Baltimore, and October 17, 1849, Frederic Chopin expired in Paris surrounded by loving friends. Poe and Chopin never knew of each other’s existence yet—a curious coincidence—two supremely melancholy artists of the beautiful lived and died almost synchronously.
It would be a strained parallel to compare Chopin and Poe at many points yet the chronological events referred to, are not the only comparisons that might be made without the fear or flavor of affectation. There are parallels in the soul-lives as well as in the earth-lives of these two men—Poe and Chopin seem ever youthful—that may be drawn without extravagance. True, the roots of Chopin’s culture were more richly nurtured than Poe’s, but the latter, like a spiritual air plant, derived his sustenance none know how. Of Poe’s forbears we may hardly form any adequate conception; his learning was not profound, despite his copious quotations from almost forgotten and recondite authors; yet his lines to Helen were written in boyhood. The poet in his case was indeed born, not made. Chopin, we know, had careful training from the faithful Elsner; but who could have taught him to write his opus 2, the variations over which Schumann rhapsodized, or even that gem, his E flat nocturne—now, alas! somewhat stale from conservatory usage?