Chopin.
Anonymous Lithograph, after portrait by Ary Scheffer (1795-1858).
Chopin gave recitals but rarely. In his youth—who was ever, as a youth, without visions of a virtuoso-life?—he sometimes did so; but even then with little enthusiasm. If he was heard in Paris, it was at very select matinées at the Pleyel salon, to which only with difficulty was admission to be obtained. The exiled aristocracy of Poland, the world of Parisian art and letters, and ladies, sat around and listened. Réunions intimes, concerts de fashion, as Liszt called them, were the purest piano-recitals ever given. The artist knew his audience; and in that small circle there was free play for the isolated poesy which sounded from the instrument. A delicate genius had won back for the piano its reserved nobility. There was here no fracas pianistique, no noisy circus-scene before a many-headed, unknown, indeterminate public; but courtly culture without the court. When in 1834 Chopin gave a great recital in the Italian Opera, he was undeceived by the want of response which he found, and necessarily found, in those great halls, which only dissipated his dainty playing. He said to Liszt, “I am not fitted for public playing. The public frightens me, its breath chokes me, I am paralysed by its inquisitive gaze, and affrighted at these strange faces; but you, you are meant for it. If you can’t win the love of the public, you can astonish it and deafen it.”
Chopin once said of himself that he was in this world like the E string of a violin on a contrabass. His finely-strung nature sought retirement, and fate had given him precisely that longing for rest and harmony which of necessity made the contrabass of this world excessively painful to him. He ran restlessly from one abode to another, till he found in the Place de Vendôme the best for dying in; he became more and more retiring, called for peaceful pearl-gray carpets, and gave full play to all his decorative emotions, which are the external proof of a harmonic soul. The art of his life was driven into isolation, into inclusion in the sacred recesses of his musical poems; and he knew well how so to level his life to the external observer, that the biographers—apart from his one great passion—had never so uneventful a life to record. The well-known description of an evening with the master, which Liszt gives in his fanciful but yet so true biography of Chopin, is so rich in character that reality itself could hardly have done it better. A melting twilight in the room, the dark corners seeming to produce themselves into infinity, the furniture covered with white hangings, no candle except by the piano and by the fireside. We distinguish Heine, Meyerbeer, the tenor Nourrit, Hiller Delacroix, the unemotional Minkiewicz, the gray-haired Niemcewicz, and George Sand with propped arm leaning back in a chair. The people stand round Chopin in the twilight, and hardly know whence these magic tones come. [The English reader will recall the exquisite description of Chopin’s playing in Crawford’s romance “With the Immortals.”]
We can easily see why Chopin could never compose duets. Not only did he devote himself exclusively to the piano—he wrote nothing in which the piano does not bear a part—but he broke with the custom of writing duets for one or two pianos. A single Rondo for two pianos, of the year 1828, was found among his remains. How he smiled once at Czerny, who “had composed another overture for eight pianos and sixteen persons, and was very happy over it.” Chopin opened to the two hands a wider world than Czerny could give to thirty-two. And further, he selects and rejects with great care before publishing. He prints nothing which does not absolutely satisfy his mind both as a whole and in its details.
Between his youth in Poland—which was soon closed to him on political grounds—and his last journey through England and Scotland, his stay in France stretches like a peaceful background of exclusively artistic activity. A thousand anecdotes cluster round him, but only a few of them have stood the test of criticism and comparison. In his “Life of Chopin”—and there are few musical biographies equally good—Niecks has collected everything that is told, and all the arguments against the authenticity of the various tales. Even upon that famous scene, in which the Countess Potocka sings the dying Chopin to his eternal slumber, the traditions are contradictory. There are few letters to help us. Chopin was too reserved to write them. It was said that he would rather go right through Paris to decline an invitation by word of mouth than write his excuse. And of the few letters he actually did write, the best appear to have been burnt in the sack of Warsaw. Nevertheless there is a certain charm in being thus obliged, as it were, to see him in shadow.
George Sand, in man’s dress.
Lithograph by Cecilia Brandt.
A sweet tie bound him to his native country. The fundamental characteristic of the Poles, who united the merits of the Gaul and of the Slav, that character of modesty and resignation, of sadness and of reminiscence, flowed all the purer into the works of the artist. It was easy to see that almost every one of Chopin’s compositions, even if it was not a Mazurka, sprang from the rhythm and sentiment of the Mazur (Magyar) music; but it had been all steeped in the spirit of the Parisian life. A milieu of his own was here, of a charming and cultivated kind, of which there are but few; the milieu of fair Polish ladies, who in Paris lived for their aspirations and their temperaments. As Liszt said, the French alone saw in the daughters of Poland a yet unknown ideal: the other nations had not the slightest suspicion that there was anything worthy of admiration in these elusive sylphs of the dance, who smiled so happily of an evening, and in the morning lay sobbing at the foot of the altar; in these apparently distracted travellers, who, if they journeyed through Switzerland, drew the curtains of their carriages lest the sight of the mountain-landscape should erase the memory of the limitless horizon of their own native plains. Is not this a paraphrase of Chopin’s music?