Frederic Chopin is as Robert Schumann declared, “the proudest poetic spirit of his time.”
VI
Fryderyk Szopen—thus Szulc and Karasowski write the name of Poland’s great composer—has had varying fortunes with his biographers. He has been much written about, and aged persons who never saw him have published glib memoirs of him. He has been misunderstood and beslavered with uncritical praise, and his friends and pupils have in most cases proved to be his excellent enemies. Chopin to-day enjoys an unhealthy vogue and the fame of him is apt to prove his undoing. A fellow of formidable passions, of dramatic vigor, a man of heroic brain, the woman in his nature and the idolatry of women wove a feminine aureole about his distinguished head, and so he bids fair to go down to posterity the very portrait of a hysterical, jaded, morbid invalid.
But Chopin was all this and something more.
Where is the true Chopin to be found? If you have a pretty fancy for musical psychologizing you will answer that in his music may be discovered the true Chopin, and in no book, pamphlet or pedantic exegesis.
If you believe in biographies there is Niecks’—Niecks who combed creation clean for petty facts and large instances; his two bulky volumes are at once the delight and despair of all Chopinists.
One summer I gave myself over to Chopin and his weaving musical magic. I secured various editions. I read Scholtz and the several editors of the Breitkopf & Hartel edition and enjoyed Theodor Kullak’s remarks appended to his edition. In Mikuli I found a moiety to praise and wonder at—there the rubato flourishes like the green bay tree—and indorsed the sympathetic and sane editing of Karl Klindworth, which comes nearer to being a definitive edition than any of them. Von Bülow’s version of the studies is partly amusing and partly impertinent—while I carefully avoided all French editions. The French understand Chopin to a limited degree, and they worship in him the qualities that were almost fatal to his genius.
I never heard a French pianist give an adequate interpretation to Chopin’s master-works. If the Germans treat him in a dull, clumsy and brutal manner, the Frenchman irritates you by his flippancy, his nimble, colorless fingers and the utter absence of poetic divination. Without Slavic blood in your veins you may not hope to play Chopin, and all Polish pianists do not understand him.
Here is a list of the books on the subject of Chopin: Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician, Frederick Niecks; Chopin and Other Musical Essays, Henry T. Finck; Frederick Chopin, Franz Liszt; Life and Letters of Frederick Chopin, Moritz Karasowski; The Works of Frederic Chopin and their Proper Interpretation, translated from the Polish of Jean Kleczynski by Alfred Whittingham; Musical Studies, Franz Hueffer; George Sand, Bertha Thomas; Letters from Majorca, Charles Wood; Frederick Chopin, Joseph Bennett; Histoire de ma Vie and Correspondence, George Sand; Frédéric Chopin, La Vie et ses Œuvres, Mme. A. Audley; Les Trois Romans de Frédéric Chopin, Count Wodinski; F. Chopin, Essai de Critique Musicale, H. Barbadette; Les Musiciens Polonais, Albert Sowinski; Frederick François Chopin, by Charles Willeby, and whilst rummaging through Scribner’s large musical library I found a tiny book called Chopin, which proved to be extracts from George Sand’s A Winter in Majorca and familiar material. Then there are fugitive articles almost innumerable, and I have read with interest John Van Cleve’s account of the talk he had with Werner Steinbrecher, once a resident pianist of Cincinnati, and a pupil of Chopin. We have all met the man who knew the man who shook the hand of Chopin. He is not always trustworthy, but every stone cast on the Chopin cairn adds to its stature and the legend grows with the years—grows amazingly.
Then there is M. A. Szulc’s Fryderyk Szopen, which I have never seen, and if I had, could not read. The fantastic sketches of Elise Polko must not be forgotten, nor the capital study by Louis Ehlert, the latter being most discriminating. Consider, too, the passing references to Chopin in the Liszt, Mendelssohn, Hiller, Heller and Moscheles letters! That loquacious but interesting gossip, De Lenz, has recorded his experiences with Chopin, for he bore to him a letter from Liszt. But use the critical saltcellar in reading De Lenz. His Trois Styles de Beethoven is neither a veracious nor yet a sound book. De Lenz dearly loved a pianist. He was a snob musical in a florid state of culture, and the soul of Thackeray would have hungered to transfix him on the barb of his undying prose. He was a musical tuft-hunter of huge proportions and had spasms over Liszt, Karl Tausig and Henselt. Chopin he handles rather cautiously. The Slavic instinct in Chopin set tinkling in his brain the little bells of suspicion. He sensed at once the object of the Russian’s visit; he was almost vitriolic with him and ironical when he played. So De Lenz never forgave Chopin, he etches him with an acid touch, and we are all the richer for it. The unvarying treacle that he pours over the figures of the other three piano artists obliterates completely their outline. The disagreeable prompted the truth.