That enigmatical daemon, whom fate had allowed to grow up within the walls of Paris—George Sand—was Chopin’s one grand passion. This was his one overmastering emotion—but its influence never faded. The beginning and the end of their association were varied a hundredfold. His love for her seems to have begun in hate and to have ended in it; hers began in dreaming, and ended with emotion; and, as she carried through the episode in actual life with bel esprit, so she clothed it poetically with the same. Who can reproach a Don Juan nature with wickedness? George Sand must have been wicked to play her vampire-part to the end. But there was nothing petty about the style in which she played it.
The Powers were cruel who brought these two persons together. Now in Paris, now at George Sand’s country place at Nohant, now in travel, Fate compelled them to play this fearful comedy, in which, at bottom, neither truly knew or comprehended the other. The woman remained a bel esprit, and the artist remained a dreamer. And in the midst of the comedy stands the ridiculous idyll of Majorca, in which these two persons live near each other, in a prison of their souls. The man delicate and pining, with agile limbs, slight hands, slight feet, silky-brown hair, transparent complexion, finely-curved nose, quiet smile, voice muffled “like a creeper whose calyx rocks on the delicate stem, dressed in wonderful colours, but of such airy texture that it tears at the slightest motion.” The woman, with an ideal Greek countenance on a somewhat thick-set body; a face that might seem to have come down from earlier ages, as Heine describes it, but softened by a surprising gentleness—Musset’s “femme à l’œil sombre.” They sit in the midst of the cypresses, oranges, and myrtles in the deserted monastery of Valdemosa with its chapels, churches, carved statues, and moss-grown stonework. In the evening the populace come out and dance ghostlike boleros with castanets, or at other times the wind howls as if possessed and the rain falls without intermission. Eating is impossible; ships cannot come through the storm. A Pleyel piano, brought there with difficulty, stands in the deserted halls, and Chopin sits at it and shivers. He longs for home; and she is soon compelled to recognise that nothing increased his chest-complaint so much as this winter in Majorca, which she had aided him in planning.
This winter in Majorca was that of 1838 and 1839. It has long been believed that it gave rise to Chopin’s Preludes. Some have even fancied they recognised in the dropping motives of some of them, especially the E minor, the B minor, and the D flat major, the effect of the constant rain of Majorca. The truth is that a large part of the Preludes were written, or half written, before this, and that only the last touches were given to them in Majorca. Nay, it is even possible that the mighty and fiery A major Polonaise was conceived and finished under the gloomy sky of Majorca. Dates are difficult to obtain, and also of very little importance. Chopin writes his works so entirely from the heart that they have very little dependence on the moment of their composition. The single case of an impulse of this kind would seem to be the news of the sack of Warsaw, upon which he is said to have written the stormy C minor Étude. Poetic influences, also, Polish or French, move him only as it were on the circumference. He is a delicately emotional nature, but far from a literary one.
Chopin’s habit of conceiving his pieces as great wholes is precisely what renders an analysis of his works impossible. Chopin, with all the charms we know so well, with all his wide embracing harmonies, his spirited voice-outlines, is but one, and one whole: and this single Chopin takes now one, now another, isolated form, in which, from the original motives, ever fresh creations are fused together. In every piece he is entirely present. There are, it is true, a few weaker pieces of his youth; and Fontana has published a large stock from his remains (these are numbered from Op. 66 on)—a thing to which he would have objected; he hated this stirring of dead bones. But these pieces have now vanished even from the practising repertoire of the following generations. Certain lines can always be drawn over his general work. We see him, at first, plainly dominated by his only true forerunner, Hummel, for whom he felt a passionate admiration, and whose method of execution he has only further enlarged; so that in Chopin’s daintiest colourations a keen observer can detect the relics of the old “manieren” and ornamental flourishes. The E flat major Rondo, the Concert-Polonaise, and, above all, the two Concertos in E minor and F minor, show clearly the influence of Hummel, notably in their jerky insertion of étude-like murmuring motives, their simply broken accompaniment to the cantilena, their brilliant effects in the high registers, their easy drawing-room phrases, and their surprisingly Mozart-like charm in melodic line. But the concertos, the most fairy-like in the whole range of that class of literature, already point to regions so far out of the reach of Hummel that they cannot be exhaustively summed up under that category. Scarcely to be separated chronologically from them are the pure commencements of the genuine art of Chopin, which is clearly visible in the first Mazurkas, and stretches far into the forties. Even those remarkable spirited variations in B flat minor, dated 1833, on an operatic theme of Herold, in which Chopin seemed to make a concession to fashion, are not removed a hair’s breadth from the distinction of his best style. In 1840, a year so fruitful for Schumann also, appeared Op. 35 to 50. Chopin was thirty-one, the age at which Schubert died. At last a certain later style has been marked off; restrained, contrapuntal, and yet unfettered. His most brightly-coloured examples he gave in the wildly poetical Barcarolle, the spiritual B major Nocturne, and the full-bodied Fantasia-Polonaise.
Chopin’s work shows but few departures from his regular lines. Of these we may mention the beautiful pasticcio of the F minor Fantasia, which should be played with a sort of extempore laxity; the Barcarolle; the Tarantelle; the Bolero; and the refined Berceuse, in which, over the uniform accompaniment, a splendid succession of motives ascends or descends; which form an epitome of Chopin’s “manieren,” as the Goldberg Variations were of Bach’s, the Diabelli of Beethoven’s, or the C sharp minor of Schumann’s. Apart from these his pieces fall into symmetrical groups, each of which has its own pronounced character.
His sonatas remain most strange to us; they are sonatas in the strict sense as little as the other sonatas by the Romantics. Chopin cares so little for form that he avoids the recurrence to the first theme. The whole falls into fragments: the B flat minor has its wild first theme and its dainty second; the capricious Scherzo, the Funeral March, which, alas! has become so popular (it was introduced into the Sonata only by an afterthought), and the spirited unisono storm of the last Presto, right on to the fortissimo concluding bar. But from the B minor Sonata, the sultry Largo, and the last movement, a kind of giant boating-piece, strike us as most remarkable.
Chopin finds his true form in the Ballades and Scherzi. This is the extempore form, which even in the Impromptus has for long not been so unfettered. The dividing lines of the sections are drawn from free invention, and the thought is constrained by no scheme. An artistic order introduces the rhythm of the arrangement with which the moment would have been obliged to dispense. It is naturalism lifted into the sphere of discrete art.
The improvised form is shown in the Preludes still more purely, but with less pretension. They are a succession of musical aphorisms, from the sketch to the finished piece, running through the gamut of all forms.
In these Ballades, Scherzi and Preludes, we reach again one of those solitary peaks of piano literature in which improvisatorial invention and artistic construction meet again in a higher unity.
The Études crown the efforts of this period, to bring technique and tune into the friendly relation peculiar to them. While we admire their mechanical value in point of polyrhythmical effects, wide stretches, double trills, independence of the left hand, airy piano-effects, freedom of the wrist, and quickness of finger-change, we praise their poetry, the grace of the C major or the magic of the A flat major, the solemnity of the C sharp minor, or the intoxication of the G flat major, the Titanic force of the C minor, or the melancholy of the E flat minor.