Chopin. Adam Zamoyski
of her mother, the beautiful twenty-four-year-old Princess Rozalia Lubomirska, who was pushed into a tumbril and sent to the guillotine in Paris during the Terror.
Chopin could not afford to keep up the spacious apartment on his own, so he sublet it to an English family, thereby making a profit, and moved up one floor in the same building. The new apartment was no garret, as Chopin hastened to assure his parents: his room was large, with three windows and handsome mirrors. It contained only a bed, a large table and the piano. It was also quiet, and suited his more subdued mood. ‘How happy I am in this room!’ he wrote to them. ‘Before me I see a roof, beneath me I see pygmies whom I tower above. I am at my happiest when, having played long on Graf’s wonderful piano, I go to bed clutching your letters, and then dream only of you…’13
He was unexpectedly joined by his friend Romuald Hube, who had returned from Italy (the trip on which Chopin had hoped to accompany him) and was stuck in Vienna, having tried and failed to cross the Polish frontier. Hube moved in with him, but the two led independent lives, he studying and arranging the notes he had made on his tour, Chopin ‘always practising on the piano, usually reworking phrases, and sometimes improvising’, in Hube’s words.14
Life was pleasant, if a little uneventful. He was woken every morning by ‘an insufferably stupid servant’ with the morning coffee.15 This was often drunk cold, since his first action on getting out of bed was to sit down at the piano and play, sometimes for an hour or more. His German teacher would call at nine o’clock, followed by other visitors such as Nidecki and Hummel’s son, an artist. At midday Chopin would at last shed his dressing gown and get dressed to go out. After a walk on the Glacis (once part of the city fortifications, now a favoured promenade) with one or other of his friends, he would either go to lunch at someone’s house or accompany friends to one of the eating houses frequented by students, and thence to one of the more fashionable coffee houses. The afternoon, or what was left of it, was spent paying calls, and at dusk he would come home to dress for the evening. There was usually a dinner, soirée or concert of some description for him to attend, but he was always back at his lodgings not later than midnight to ‘play, weep, read, ponder, laugh, go to bed, put out the candle, and dream of home’.16
Christmas brought with it a sense of loneliness as well as the unpleasant realisation that after a whole month in Vienna he had achieved nothing. Musical success seemed more remote than ever, and his letters home reflect his listlessness. Those to Jan Matuszyński, the only others that survive from this period, are heavy with introspection and self-pity. The passage describing his visit to St Stephen’s Cathedral on Christmas Eve is typical:
I went in. There was still nobody about…I stood at the foot of a gothic pillar, in the darkest corner. I cannot describe the magnificence, the sheer dimensions of those great vaults. It was quiet – only now and again the steps of a sacristan lighting lamps somewhere in the depths of this temple would break into my reverie. Tombs behind me, tombs beneath me…I only needed a tomb over my head…A gloomy harmony haunted me…I felt more vividly than ever my complete isolation… 17
The letter meanders on, evoking romantic visions of Chopin walking alone through the busy streets of Vienna, wrapped in his cloak and his loneliness, or returning home to ‘weep out an adagio’ on his piano, and dwelling on his general dissatisfaction with everything. ‘Were it not for my father, to whom I should be a burden, I would return immediately,’ he writes. ‘I curse the day I left…I am bored to death by all the dinners, soirées, balls and concerts which fill my life; it is so melancholy, vacant and dreary…I cannot do what I please, but instead have to dress up, pull on my stockings and brush my hair; in the drawing rooms I have to affect serenity, but when I come home I thunder away on my piano.’18 The somewhat ingenuous affectation is undermined by a puppy-like vitality: the bouts of self-pity, in which the theme of suicide crops up more than once, are followed by humorous anecdotes which he cannot resist telling.
Chopin was genuinely anxious about events in Poland, lonely without his family around him and frustrated by his lack of success, so he felt sorry for himself. Since he was twenty years old, he naturally called on images of love, death and alienation to explain his predicament. Another reason for these sombre outpourings was that Jan Matuszyński, his messenger to Konstancja, was supposed to read her passages from Chopin’s letters, as well as pass on notes for her. This presumably accounts for much of the lyricism and for lines such as: ‘while I still have life in me…until my very death…nay, even after my death, my ashes will strew themselves at her feet…’ and exclamations like, ‘I have not enjoyed a single moment since I arrived in Vienna!’19
The gap left by Tytus had been filled by ‘wonderful Doctor Malfatti’, who took an avuncular interest in the young pianist. He looked after Chopin’s health, and even managed to ‘fatten him up’. His door was always open to the young man, and he would have Polish dishes served at dinner in order to make him feel at home. Various other Polish households in the city vied with each other to care for Chopin, who now affected great contempt for ‘damned Prussians’ (which was supposed to denote all Germanic people). His hankering after things Polish cast a prejudice over everything Viennese. ‘Everything makes me sigh and long for home, for those delicious moments I failed to value fully,’ he writes elsewhere. ‘The people here are nothing to me; they are kind, but not out of kindness, only out of habit; everything they do is flat, mediocre, too ordered.’20
Chopin’s disenchantment with Vienna was not limited to the social or emotional aspects, nor indeed was it solely the result of his lack of success. He had come as a pilgrim to the city of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, expecting to find musical excellence. Old musicians such as Hummel shook their heads and told him Vienna was no longer what it had been, and he could only agree.
The giants of the moment were Johann Strauss the elder, Joseph Lanner and Czerny. ‘Here they call waltzes works, and Strauss and Lanner who play dance-music are called Kapellmeisters!’ Chopin wrote to Elsner indignantly.21 ‘Amongst the many amusements in Vienna, the favourite is the soirée at certain inns where Strauss or Lanner play waltzes during dinner,’ he explained to his family. ‘They are frantically applauded after each waltz, and if they play a potpourri of airs from opera, dances and songs, the audience gets completely carried away.’22
This was not a context in which Chopin would sparkle. Although Haslinger appreciated his talent and Mechetti thought his work brilliant, neither could afford to publish works which would not sell. Chopin’s were too difficult and too cerebral for the Viennese ladies to play, while his lack of patronage did not encourage other musicians to play them. His success on his previous visit had not made a lasting impact, since his concerts had taken place during the off season, and he was now outshone by a new star that had appeared on the scene – Sigismund Thalberg.
Thalberg enjoyed high patronage, being the natural son of Count Dictrichstein, the Emperor’s director of music. He had a strong, controlled and monumental style of playing. It was said of him that if he were dragged from his bed in the middle of the night and ordered to play, there would not be a note out of place, so impeccable was his technique. Chopin liked neither Thalberg nor his playing, nor his competition, judging by the bitterness lurking behind his words. ‘He plays remarkably, but not to my taste,’ he wrote to Matuszyński. ‘He’s younger than me, and the ladies like him. He plays potpourris of airs from the Mute [Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici], gives pianos with the pedal and not the hand, takes tenths like I take octaves, wears diamond shirt-studs…’23
Chopin’s hopes of giving a concert of his