Born in Poland 200 years ago, at the age of 20 Chopin left his native land never to return. The son of an expatriate Frenchman who had emigrated to Poland in his youth, Chopin himself became an expatriate, settling, aptly, in the land of his father’s birth. Upon his departure from Warsaw, his friends presented him with a liver cup of Polish soil, a memento he kept with him until his death. In September 1837, he arrived in Paris, his home for the rest of his life. There he lived a life of comfort, even luxury, supporting himself on the proceeds from the sale of his compositions and the handsome fees he charged for lessons, mostly to charming and more or less talented young ladies of fashion.
Typically Chopin gave only one public concert a year, at the Salle Pleyel, which accommodated an audience of three hundred; he preferred the more intimate venues of his own and his friends’ residences. It is estimated that he gave no more than thirty public performances during the course of his career. Nevertheless, his music reached a wide audience, and his reputation drew about him a circle of admirers that is astounding and included musicians, painters, poets, and novelists. He counted among his friends Liszt, Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Bellini, Alkan, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Heine, Delacroix, the Princes Adam and Alexander Czartoryski, and, of course, George Sand.
With this last relationship, that with George Sand, we move from history to myth, the subject of novels, plays, films—one wouldn’t be surprised to one day find it given an operatic treatment. Delacroix painted a portrait of the pair, Sand sitting beside Chopin as he played the piano. Their increasingly stormy liaison came to an end after eight years, in 1846. Delacroix’s double portrait was also divided, and Chopin today hangs in the Louvre—alone, while the Sand portrait is now in Copenhagen.
The remaining years of Chopin’s life were plagued by the pulmonary tuberculosis which caused his death and by financial pressures. The end came on October 17, 1849, at his apartment on the Place Vendôme. His many friends—though not Sand—continued to visit through his final illness. At his request, Delfina Potocka sang for him and the cellist Auguste Franchomme performed the cello sonata the composer had written for him. On October 30, to the strains of his funeral march, Chopin’s body was borne into the Church of Madeleine where the Mozart Requiem Mass was sung, and the organist played transcriptions of Chopin’s E minor and B minor preludes and improvised variations on a theme from another of the preludes. The mourners proceeded to the Pere Lachaise cemetery. Franchomme, Delacroix, Pleyel, and Prince Alexander Czartorski, representing Poland, and Meyerbeer, representing Music, led the procession. At the grave, the bowl of Polish soil was mingled with the Parisian earth. There he remains, memorialized with a simple, elegant monument, adorned with his profile and surmounted by a grieving female figure. And his music thrives to this day, not a day passes in Pere Lachaise without visitors, in whose memories this genius survives, bringing fresh flowers to honor him.
Here are gathered thoughts on Chopin and his music from artists whom participated in Close Encounters With Music’s 2009-2010 season, and others.
To me, Chopin represents the ultimate “poet of the piano,” a composer who achieved the rarest and most precious possible blend of beauty, lyricism, magic, mysticism, structure, and ingenuity. From his daring harmonic progressions to his angelic lyrical sensibilities, Chopin’s music expresses the gamut of human emotion, making him, thus, a true ambassador for the romantic spirit within all of us. I have always felt a very close kinship with his music; even as a child I found myself transported by it into other more beautiful and palpable worlds than the one we live in. The first emotion that rises up within me when I think of Chopin is love; his music is the sound of love embodied. —Adam Neiman
He was dying all his life. —Hector Berlioz
On the centenary of Chopin’s birth (1910), Claude Debussy was one of a number of musicians asked by a music journal to share his personal views on Chopin. I do not know whether Debussy’s response was published, but my husband and I own the original letter. In describing his ‘admiration for his master,’ Debussy wrote, ‘I have loved Chopin from the tie I began loving music, and this love has continued throughout my life.’My first exposure to Chopin was dancing to his F Major Mazurka at age 6. Like Debussy, my love for Chopin began at that moment and was one of the main reasons that I decided to become a pianist, not a ballerina. Indeed, the dance rhythms of Chopin’s mazurkas, waltzes, polonaises, and krakowiaks are truly infectious, and Chopin’s wonderful melodies often surpassed arias heard in ‘bel canto’ operas. Let us also never forget that Chopin left his native Poland on the eve of the November Uprising, a revolt against Russian rule there, at age nineteen, never to return, and the longing and heartbreak of exile were always a driving force behind his inspired compositions. Chopin remains one of the greatest composers for the piano, and his music demands both supreme virtuosity as well as the most refined sensitivity. A pianist’s greatest challenge in playing Chopin is to produce a glorious singing line. Robert Schumann’s first review of Chopin remains true to this day: ‘Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!’ —Lydia Artymiw
Chopin’s works are cannon buried in flowers. —Robert Schumann
For musicians, courage is perhaps the most important attribute to reach the pinnacle of success. That was the case with Monteverdi, Beethoven, Debussy, Bartók, Rachmaninoff, and Stravinsky, to name just a few. Chopin’s life was one of making the right and courageous decisions. At home, he chose to follow his deeply poetic attributes and not surrender to the hugely popular appeal of Hummel. It was his courage to travel all the way to Paris and then to prevail over the overpowering pressures of the most famous and popular pianists in that city, Herz and Kalkbrenner. It was courageous to keep writing shorter works for the piano while so many were infatuated with larger works, from Berlioz’ enormous symphony to the many operas in vogue at that time. He never deviated from a style and technique that he had fully developed by the age of 18. He did not compromise and did not follow the exhibitionist culture that every pianist and composer was trying to emulate; history has forgotten them, but today we celebrate the few survivors, the ones who had the courage of their own convictions: Schumann and Chopin. —Walter Ponce
Monteverdi, Beethoven, Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg. These are some of the names that come up when we consider the very few composers who have changed the actual language of music. Chopin very much belongs in their company. Even though he wrote almost exclusively for solo piano, his harmonic, melodic, formal and textural innovations created a new paradigm for future composers of the instrument. And because the piano itself played such a fundamental role in the history and literature of Western music, especially in the 19th century, this linguistic shift had repercussions in every other category, whether orchestra, opera or chamber. This is why we continue to celebrate the music of this sublime genius. —James Tocco
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed. —Oscar Wilde
It must be possible to have the music of a people in our blood. Or maybe more likely it comes via parental osmosis, perhaps through the tones and rhythms of how our parents speak and sing to us and just how they live. We didn’t have ‘classical music’ in our home, and I didn’t know what a concert was. There was only my Polish heritage, including that everyone in the family was from Poland. And somehow, when I would hear the music of Chopin—always in some stray fashion, like in a popular song or cartoon, and thus never even the real thing—it would resonate like no other. It motivated me to become a serious pianist, and it has not stopped resonating. — Dr. Mark Cannon
Only one man knew…how to compose quasi-improvised music, or at least what seems a such. That is Chopin. He is a charming personality, strange, unique, inimitable. —Georges Bizet
She had learned in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long sinuous phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by reaching out and exploring far outside and away from the direction in which they started, far beyond the point which one might have expected their notes to reach, and which divert themselves in those fantastic bypaths only to return more deliberately—with a more premediated reprise, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl that reverberates to the point of exquisite agony—to clutch at one’s heart. —Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
He is the truest artist I have ever met. —Eugène Delacroix
This music, tender and tempestuous, tranquil and passionate, heart-wrenching, potent, overwhelming: this music which eludes metrical discipline, rejects the fetters of rhythmic rule, and refuses submission to the metronome as if it were the yoke of some hated government: the music bids us hear, know, and realize that our nation, our land, the whole of Poland lives, feels, and moves in Tempo Rubato.” —Ignace Jan Paderewski
[Of Chopin’s Music:] it is the only enthusiasm of my youth which remains. — Franz Liszt
It was Chopin who properly set romantic pianism on its rails and gave it the impetus that still shows no signs of deceleration…About his piano playing there was no disagreement. What an artist he must have been! Heller spoke of Chopin’s slim hands—how they would ‘suddenly expand and cover a third of the keyboard. It was like the opening of the mouth of a serpent about to swallow a rabbit whole.’ (Over a hundred year later, Alfred Cortot was to write a prose poem on Chopin’s hands: ‘…with a skin through the pores of which everything ignoble has evaporated.’) —Harold C. Schonberg, The Great Pianists
We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole
Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger tips.
“So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul
Should be resurrected only among friends
Some two or three, who will not touch the bloomThat is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.” — T.S. Eliot, Portrait of a Lady
