Chopin. Adam Zamoyski

       THREE Musical Genius

      ‘I go to bed at nine; all tea parties, soirées and balls have gone by the board,’ a despondent Chopin wrote to Jan Białobłocki as he began his studies at the Conservatoire in the autumn of 1826. He was beset by a succession of minor ailments, such as toothache, neuralgia and digestive problems. ‘I drink emetic water on Dr Malcz’s orders and stuff myself with oat gruel like a horse.’¹ It was hardly a propitious start to his hard-won musical studies.

      The Warsaw Conservatoire, founded in 1821, offered entrants a number of courses to choose from. The one selected by Chopin consisted of three years of musical theory and counterpoint, the last of which was to be devoted to practical work such as writing masses and oratorios to Polish and Latin texts, vocal compositions of various types, works for orchestra, and chamber music. But he seems to have created his own curriculum from the start. When he joined the Conservatoire in September 1826, he took six lessons a week in counterpoint from Elsner and spent the rest of the time working on his own. Elsner was an enlightened teacher, who saw his role as that of adviser. ‘When teaching composition, one should never provide recipes, particularly with pupils of obvious ability,’ he explained; ‘if they wish to rise above themselves, they must find their own, so that they may have the means of discovering that which has not been discovered yet.’² But Chopin found even this relaxed discipline taxing.

      In accordance with the compromise reached with his father, he was also attending lectures at the University. Although the original idea had been that he should take a course in general subjects, he soon narrowed this down. The only course he seems to have followed seriously was that on Polish Literature given by the poet Kazimierz Brodziński, whose lectures covered a range of subjects, from aesthetics to folklore, which he was busily recording.³

      Chopin had been born into a society that was in the process of reinventing itself: the old Poland embodied in the Commonwealth had failed and been dismembered at the end of the eighteenth century, and patriots bent on the re-establishment of a Polish state were aware that they must create a new synthesis of nationhood on which to build it. This involved, amongst other things, cultural redefinition based on a reassessment of the past and the integration of the mass of common people into the national project. Wittingly or not, Chopin was, through his music, doing just that, by distilling the essence of the old chivalric ideals on the one hand and reaching into the soul of popular culture on the other to create a new national idiom immediately recognisable to all. In this, he virtually epitomised the zeitgeist of his generation. Yet in certain fundamental ways he stood apart from his peers.

      Given the accent placed in the Chopin household on education, and particularly on literature – his sisters Ludwika and Emilia had published poems and even a jointly written novel for children – Chopin could hardly fail to be aware that his generation was making literary history. Yet he failed to show any deep understanding of contemporary Polish writers. He did set to music some of the poems of the leading Romantic Adam Mickiewicz, as well as works by his friend the much lesser poet Stefan Witwicki, but he was far too down-to-earth in his approach to life to catch the spirit of exaltation that nourished the Romantic movement. He saw himself as a craftsman, focused exclusively on achieving greater skill and deeper knowledge in his chosen craft of music.

      And even in this chosen craft, Chopin remained remarkably aloof from contemporary trends. His reverence for Bach continued undiminished – more than a decade later, he could still play all the Preludes and Fugues from memory, explaining: ‘That is something one never forgets!’⁴ As he learnt more about the theory of music, he developed a greater respect for Haydn, whom he valued for his ‘experience’, and for Mozart, who became his God. The only fashionable music Chopin was enthusiastic about was that of the Italian school. Elsner, who disliked it, steered him towards the music of Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles and the Irishman John Field – hardly exponents of the Romantic movement.⁵

      Chopin’s attitude to the world was far removed from that of the typical Romantic. As he entered his eighteenth year he had his first close experience of death, when his fourteen-year-old sister Emilia died of consumption before his eyes. He was profoundly shaken. Where most of his peers would have poured out their grief and indulged their emotions, he did not wallow in his pain – he locked it away in a compartment of his mind where he could revisit it privately.

      Soon after Emilia’s death the family moved house, to an apartment in one of the wings of the Krasiński Palace, just across the road from the Lycée. Nicolas Chopin had acquired a third job, teaching at the advanced military school of artillery and engineering, presided over by the revered General Józef Sowiński, who had lost a leg fighting for Napoleon at the battle of Borodino in 1812, and who became a friend of the family. Nicolas had saved enough to be able to do without boarders, which was fortunate as the other two Chopin girls were growing into young ladies, and the presence of young men in the home might have presented a hazard. The new apartment contained a drawing room with a fine view over the most handsome street in Warsaw, and, being so close to his previous home, the move did not affect Chopin’s way of life. On the other hand, it was quieter, and the family now enjoyed greater privacy. Chopin had his own ‘refuge’, a small room at the top of a rickety staircase which accommodated his piano.

      This was just as well; that year of 1827 was also something of a landmark in Chopin’s musical development, for it was now that he made his first attempts at writing for orchestra. The most interesting of these are the set of Variations for Piano and Orchestra on the theme of the La ci darem la mano duet from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which, as the Gazette Musicale de Paris asserted more than seven years later, ‘announce the superiority of Chopin’s nature with as much precision as felicity’.⁶

      Chopin’s ability to write for the orchestra has often been questioned, and unfavourably compared with Beethoven’s magnificent interweaving of piano and orchestra. But to do this is to miss the point. Chopin used the orchestra essentially as an accompaniment to the piano, which it was meant to support rather than overshadow or outshine, and it is the piano that he used to develop his musical ideas.

      He was growing increasingly sure of himself and the direction in which he was moving, and he was further encouraged by Hummel, who arrived in Warsaw to give a couple of concerts in April 1828, and who appears to have been impressed by Chopin. This first mark of recognition from an eminent musical personage was probably what prompted him to send copies of the Variations and his first Piano Sonata to publishers in Leipzig and Vienna.⁷

      Chopin was now working on a new Rondo for two pianos, and this absorbed all his attention that summer, spent in a fine country house at Sanniki with his friends the Pruszak family. He was back in Warsaw at the end of August, just in time to see Rossini’s Barber of Seville and his latest opera, Otello, but the production was so bad that he longed to strangle the whole cast. His joy was all the greater when, a few days later, the chance of visiting a