At any rate we have Chopin’s ideas perfectly expressed, almost without a blemish, thanks to the piano. It is by the nature and quality of these ideas that he must be judged. In beauty of melody, in wealth of harmony, in variety, force, and delicacy of rhythm, he has not been excelled. As to the quality of emotion back of these ideas, it has been said that it is perfervid, sickly or effeminate; but such a statement would hardly be borne out by the facts that his music remains fresh in expressiveness and that it is generally acceptable. Delicate most of it is, and it is all marked by a perhaps unique fineness of taste. This, however, rarely if ever belittles the genuine and lasting emotion which it modifies. Chopin’s character was undoubtedly one that wins the love and sympathy of some men, and wholly antagonizes others. The last years of his life he was weak and ailing and he was never robust. Still it cannot be fairly said that his physical weakness has affected his music. It should be remembered that Beethoven and Schumann were sick men, the one sick in body, the other sick in mind. The wonder is but greater when we think that such works as the Ballade in F minor and the Barcarolle were written by a man so feeble that he had always to be carried up flights of stairs.
Several points in Chopin’s character are more than usually interesting in connection with his music. To begin with he was half Polish in blood and wholly Polish in sympathies. It was his ambition to be for Poland in music what the poet Uhland had been for Germany in literature.[36] This does not by any means signify that many of the startling originalities in his music are due to racial influences. Only in the Polonaises and in the Mazurkas, both national dances of Poland, does Chopin make use of Polish forms. Even in the Polonaises there is more of universal than of national spirit, though in the Mazurkas, rhythms, melodies, and harmonies have for the most part a distinctly Polish stamp. Elsewhere in his music there are but rarely suggestions of a tonality not common to the music of Western Europe, or of melodies more Slavic than Latin or Teutonic.
It is in spirit that his music hints of another race, by its passionate intensity, by its glowing color, and perhaps most of all by its restraint. This may seem strange when we think of the almost barbaric abandon of other Slavic composers. But Liszt in his book on Chopin speaks at length of the peculiar reserve, not to say secretiveness, of the Polish people in general and of Chopin in particular. He is emphatic in his statement that only Poles came near the inner nature of this musician; that others felt themselves delicately but surely held at a distance. So in no small measure the meaning of his music, its true beauty, eludes the player. There is a secret in it which perhaps no player has the skill fully to reveal. It is not often explicit; it is nearly always suggestive. We need not think that only a Pole can penetrate the mystery. Perhaps only Poles can play the Polonaises and the Mazurkas with full sympathy; but the Preludes, the Ballades and Études and Scherzos, to speak of but a few of his works, are music for the whole world. That they elude the efforts of most players is due to no peculiar tricks of rhythm or of melody; but to the quality of secretiveness which has somehow been transfused from the composer into his music. Even in the most splendid of his compositions, as in the most intimate, there is a touch of personal aristocracy, of reserve.
He was by nature the most selective of all musicians. In matters of music he accepted only what was pleasing to his fine taste. Therefore the music of Beethoven seemed to him often rough and noisy; that of Schubert a mixture of sublime and commonplace; for that of Schumann he seems to have had little or no appreciation. This has often been held to signalize a fault in his musical understanding; and those who so regard it have been pleased to take his love of Italian opera, particularly of Bellini, as further proof of their point. One must not forget, however, that a group of some of the greatest singers the world has ever known were engaged at the Italian opera in Paris, among them Malibran-Garcia, Pasta, Rubini, Lablache; and that such performances as they gave must have been distinguished by consummate artistry. Chopin often advised his pupils to hear great singers, that they might give to their playing something of the grace of song. At the Italian opera there was perfect singing; and there, very likely more than elsewhere, Chopin’s exquisite, artistic nature found satisfaction.
His delight in the music of Hummel, like his pleasure in that of Field, is easy to understand. In neither is there distortion of line, nor harshness. More than any other music of that time it was intimately suited to the piano. As delicate, fluent sound it must even today be granted excellent; and for Chopin no fury or power of emotion could justify sound that was unpleasant. His understanding of and love for the piano were so perfect and exacting that one can easily imagine him more willing to forgive triviality of emotion, for the sake of a delicate expression, than to tolerate a harsh or clumsy treatment of the instrument, for the sake of any emotional stress whatsoever.
But neither the Italian opera nor the music of Hummel and Field was the favorite music of Chopin. The two composers whose works he accepted unqualifiedly were Sebastian Bach and Mozart. Here he found a rich emotion and a flawless beauty of style. Here there was no distortion, no struggle of ideas, no harshness. Here was for him perfection of form and, what is perhaps rarest in any art, a just proportion between form and content, an unblemished union of all the elements which make music not only great but wholly beautiful.
As a player he aimed first and always for beauty of tone and fineness of shading. He was not often successful before a large public. This was due in part to the weakness of his body, but probably more to the nature of his temperament. On account of the first he was unable to ‘thunder,’ and therefore, in his own words, to overwhelm his audience if he could not win them. But on account of his extremely sensitive nature a large audience, full of strange faces, was frightful to him. He shrank from displaying his art before a crowd. This was no doubt bitter to him. The triumphant general fame of a Liszt or a Thalberg was denied him. Yet in many respects he was the most remarkable pianist the world has been privileged to enjoy. Among friends in his rooms his playing had more than an earthly charm. It seems to have been distinguished not only by rare delicacy of touch, but by a skill with the pedal, with both the sustaining pedal and the soft pedal. He was master of blending his harmonies in a way that raised those who heard him at his best into a veritable ecstasy. Under his fingers the piano seemed to breathe out a music that floated in air. Though he was not, as we have implied, a powerful player, he was capable of flashes of extraordinary vigor; but it was less by sharp contrasts and extremes that he got his effects, than by infinite nuances. And he was above all else a poet of sound, a man of swift fancies, of infinite moods and changes.
Chopin spent the years of his boyhood and youth in Warsaw. In the summer of 1829 he spent some weeks in Vienna, and played there twice in public. In the list of those who were present at these concerts—which, by the way, were wholly successful—one reads the names of men and women who had known Beethoven and Schubert, even friends of Mozart. He went again to Vienna in the fall of 1830 and remained there, more or less idling, until uncertain political conditions and an outbreak of cholera drove him in July, 1831, to seek Paris. Here he arrived about the end of September, and here with few exceptions he lived the rest of his life.
He found himself at once in the midst of a society made up of people who were enthusiasts, and were in favor of, or actually apostles of, some radical reform in society or in the arts. Thus at their gatherings there was a great deal of animated and even polemical conversation. It was largely self-conscious. Each talker felt himself the oracle of a new doctrine. But Chopin was silent at most of these reunions. He talked little or not at all about himself and his work. His conduct seems an advocacy of conservatism; but as a matter of fact his music proves him to have been one of the great innovators in the art.