Young Ignace Paderewski was only four years old on the night the Russian soldiers took his father to prison for a year. Jan Paderewski had been accused of plotting the overthrow of his Imperial Majesty, Alexander II, Emperor of all the Russias.
What Jan Paderewski had actually done was to allow firearms to be stored in his basement until such time as they might be useful. But besides getting him arrested and imprisoned, they had actually accomplished very little. The revolution of 1863 and 1864 was just one more in a succession of uprisings by which the Polish people struck back at their oppressors. None of these unhappy revolts had ever won back the country’s lost freedom, but they kept alive the fierce pride of the Polish people, a pride that the rulers of three nations had tried for nearly a hundred years to extinguish.
“Where are you taking my father?”
Poland, as a nation, no longer existed. The ancient Catholic kingdom had been swallowed up by three hungry neighbors: Germany, Austria, and Russia. It had not, therefore, been swallowed whole, but in pieces. Three times—in 1772, in 1793, in 1795—the three royal butchers had met over a map of Poland and thought up new ways of dividing the country to their mutual satisfaction. To their distaste they found the Polish people did not agree with their selfish plans.
Ignace Jan Paderewski was born in the Russian third of Poland, on November 6, 1860. His mother died when he was a baby, so his father’s imprisonment was a doubly cruel blow. The boy and his older sister, Antonina, were very close. Like all Polish children, they had been brought up on heroic tales of their country’s former glory, and their childhood games always centered around the melancholy struggle for freedom. The boy, dressed in a Polish uniform of red and white paper, would charge madly about the house on a hobby horse, smiting his country’s enemies with a wooden sword. By the time he was six or seven these games had taken on a reality for him that no one suspected. Young as he was, he determined that when he grew up he would fight for his country, not with a wooden sword but with whatever weapons God would give him. Gradually he took it into his head that only by becoming someone special could he ever hope to help his people and his country to freedom.
Soon after Jan Paderewski’s release from prison, he moved his family to the little town of Sudylkow, where the boy grew up. By the time he was three, Ignace’s family realized that he had an unusual talent for music. His father, determined to give every possible advantage to his children, brought a music teacher to the house to give them piano lessons. The teacher was a violinist at heart and he could not do much for the children except teach them the names of the notes and set them to playing dreadful duets, arranged from popular operatic arias.
As a student Ignace was rather lazy, but he had a natural gift for languages and a great love for reading the history of his country. When he was ten years old, his sympathetic tutor gave him a book that described the great battle of Grünwald in which the Poles had defeated the greedy German Knights of the Cross and driven them from Poland. As the boy read the stirring account over and over, he was struck by an inspiration. The battle had been fought in 1410. This meant that its five hundredth anniversary was only forty years away—in 1910. “When I grow up,” young Ignace promised himself, “I’m going to be rich and famous enough to build a great monument in honor of the anniversary of the battle of Grünwald!”
It was one of those odd fancies that overtake sensitive children. He kept it to himself to avoid unnecessary laughter at his expense.
It seemed obvious to Ignace’s father that his son was clearly headed for a career in music. The boy played the piano constantly, although he much preferred to improvise his own melodies rather than practice anyone else’s. The music notebook that his proud father had given him was already half filled with random compositions. But how, Jan Paderewski wondered, could the poor boy possibly get the musical training he needed in Sudylkow? When word came to town that a railroad was soon to be built, connecting Sudylkow with Warsaw, the father took it as a sign from heaven. In Warsaw there was a famous conservatory of music. Jan Paderewski swore that his boy would have a chance to study there, no matter how much penny-pinching would have to be done at home in order to finance the venture. In 1872, when Ignace was twelve years old, he and his father set out on the very first train that ran to Warsaw.