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Frédéric Chopin: Life of an innovator He knew how to divine the greatest mysteries of art with astonishing ease – he could gather the flowers of the field without disturbing the dew or lightest pollen. And he knew how to fashion them into stars, meteors, as it were comets, lighting up the sky of Europe, through the ideal of art. In the crystal of his own harmony he gathered the tears of the Polish people strewn over the fields, and placed them as the diamond of beauty in the diadem of humanity. Cyprian Kamil Norwid

Half French, half Polish, Chopin was born in Z·elazowa Wola on 1 March 1810. Between 1816 and 1821 he studied in Warsaw with Wojciech Z·ywny, and then with the Silesian composer and piano teacher Józef Elsner. ‘I go […] for strict counterpoint, six hours a week; I hear [anyone] on subjects in any way touching on music’. Against a background of concert giving, opera going, playing the organ at church, and spells of travelling, he completed his training at the Conservatoire between 1826 and 1829, with Elsner remarking on his ‘amazing capabilities [and] musical genius’. He left Warsaw in 1830, a few weeks before the November Uprising, arriving in Paris 11 months later following unsuccessful and stressful spells in Vienna and Stuttgart. ‘The winds have driven me [...] Paris is everything that you could wish [...] I know of no place where pianists are more numerous’. In Louis-Philippe’s metropolis he befriended Bellini, heard John Field and Kalkbrenner, and performed with Liszt and Berlioz. He became a leading voice of the Polish émigré community and set up a lucrative teaching practice. Polish journalist and satirist Antoni Orlowski remarked that Chopin was ‘healthy and strong, he enchants all the French ladies, and arouses jealousy in Frenchmen. He is fashionable [...] Only sometimes he longs for his homeland.’ ‘I have got into the highest society; I sit with ambassadors, princes, ministers.’ Visiting Germany in 1834, Chopin received a generous welcome from the Mendelssohn circle; Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck especially took him to heart, with Schumann

writing, ‘Chopin was here [...] he plays just as he composes, in a unique manner.’ In November 1836 the writer George Sand – wife, mistress, older woman, cigarsmoking free thinker – entered his life. The liaison – embracing, obsessive, finally sour, she ‘violently sensual’, he ‘her evil genius, her moral vampire, her cross’ (according to Mickiewicz) – took him through his years of worsening health. Some even claimed that it was this relationship that damaged his health irreparably. The winter of 1838–9 was spent in Majorca, and the seven summers of 1839 and 1841–6 en famille at her late18th-century ‘gentleman’s residence’ in Nohant between the Paris Basin and Massif Central. In April 1848, following their break-up the previous July, Chopin went to England and Scotland, acquiring a new entourage of students and admirers, and playing for Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the Duke of Wellington. His morale was low, however. ‘I feel alone, alone, alone, although surrounded by people’; ‘Where has my art gone to? Where have I wasted my heart? I barely remember how people sing back home. This world seems to pass me by.’ He gave his last concert in ‘hellish’ London, on 16 November 1848, at a ‘brilliant’ charity ball in aid of Polish veterans of the November Uprising, his contribution going unreported. Back in Paris, his tuberculosis at an advanced stage, unable to compose and kept company by old faithfuls and his sister Ludwika, he died on 17 October 1849, at around two o’clock in the morning. He was 39. If that autocratic, mighty monarch of the North knew what a dangerous enemy he has in the works of Chopin […] he would prohibit this music. The compositions of Chopin are cannons concealed among flowers. Robert Schumann

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Chopin bewitched an epoch. To Balzac he was an ‘angel’, to Sand ‘divine’, to Liszt a ‘God’; private person, rarefied artist, musician of the profoundest vision, the most refined sounds, master of the concentrated and the encapsulated. The essential Chopin is the poet of preludes, nocturnes, polonaises, mazurkas, waltzes, scherzos and studies. The profound Chopin is the philosopher of the ballade, fantasia and sonata. The public Chopin is the virtuoso of piano and orchestra. The fashionable Chopin is the ‘piano player’ of variation and rondo. The essential decided his life – the fashionable prefaced it. For many, his cutting-edge modernism was shocking. J.W. Davison, for example, wrote these words in The Musical World in late 1841: Monsieur Frédéric Chopin has, by some reason or other which we cannot divine, obtained an enormous reputation but too often refused to composers of ten times his genius. Mr Chopin is by no means a putter-down of commonplaces; but he is, what by many would be esteemed worse, a dealer in the most absurd and hyperbolical extravagances […] The works of this author invariably give us the idea of an enthusiastic schoolboy whose parts are by no means on a par with his enthusiasm, who will be original, whether he can or not. There is a clumsiness about his harmonies in the midst of their affected strangeness, a sickliness about his melodies […] an utter ignorance of design […] The entire works of Chopin present a motley surface of ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony […] Mr Liszt is reported to have said that there was ‘an aristocracy of mediocrity in England, at the head of which is Sterndale Bennett.’ He might, with a vast deal more of truth, have asserted that there is an aristocracy of hyperbole and nonsense in Paris, of which himself and his philosophic friend Chopin are at the summit […] There is no excuse at present for Chopin’s delinquencies; he is entrammelled in the enthralling bonds of that arch-enchantress Georges [sic] Sand, celebrated equally for the number and excellence of her romances and her lovers; none the less we wonder how she […] can be content to wanton away her dreamlike existence with an artistic nonentity like Chopin.

To later minds, however, Chopin’s music was history-defining: Chopin’s chromaticism marks a stage of the greatest [evolutionary] importance […] He is the forerunner of Liszt and Wagner, and hence of the modern atonalists, the first composer seriously to undermine the solid system of diatonic tonalism created by the Viennese classical masters. Gerald Abraham, 1939 A 20th-century composer forced by a freak of nature to wander through the 19th. Alan Walker, 1966 Chopin’s music was conceived not ‘by chance’ but with a conscious awareness of the overall organisation – structure before ‘picturesque externals’. John Rink, 1992

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Chopin: the composer and pianist Forget you’re being listened to, and always listen to yourself Chopin

Chopin may have lived into the photographic age (the gaunt Bisson portrait, c.1849), but he died well before the first sound reproduction mediums. His few writings, the scores he marked, changed or elaborated for his students, and the testimony of his contemporaries, colleagues and critics are the closest we have to a blueprint – if not the sound-world – of his values and priorities. Undated sketches for a piano Méthode (formerly owned by Cortot, now in the Piermont Morgan Library, New York) tell us what mattered to him. (1) ‘A certain positioning of the hand in relation to the keys to obtain with ease the most beautiful quality of sound’; (2) ‘No one will notice the inequality of sound in a very fast scale, as long as the notes are played in equal time – the goal isn’t to learn to play everything with an equal sound. A well-formed technique [is] one that can control and vary a beautiful sound quality’. (3) ‘Just as we need to use the conformation of the fingers, we need no less to use the rest of the hand, the wrist, the forearm and the arm. One cannot try to play everything from the wrist, as Kalkbrenner claims’. Publicly Chopin strongly resisted the idea of stories or extramusical impulses behind his work: in contrast to Liszt, Henselt and Schumann, he revealed practically nothing to appease Romantic curiosity. Privately, however, the Méthode acknowledges that music to him was clearly more than a set of abstract parameters, that it was a medium through which could be expressed the narrative of the senses and the unspoken. (4) ‘Thought expressed through sounds.’ (5) ‘The expression of our perceptions through sounds.’ (6) ‘The manifestation of our feelings through sounds.’ (7) ‘The indefinite (indeterminate) language of men is sound.’ (8) ‘Word is born of sound – sound before word.’ Thought, perception, feeling. Sound

as the carrier, the voice; the barometer of a man’s emotions, his calm and angst, his loves, despairs and spiritual state. Chopin made his living mainly as a teacher, secondarily as a composer, never as a pianist. Acquiring the Preludes Op.28, the London publisher Wessel paid £15 for the British and Irish rights (1 August 1839); for the Barcarolle, Polonaise-Fantasy and Nocturnes Op.62, £30 (13 August 1846). In modern equivalency, this would be around £950 and £1,950 respectively. An uncompromising work like the Piano Sonata No.2, which includes the famous ‘Funeral March’ movement, sold in the marketplace for six shillings (£19); the popular Nocturnes Op.9, commercially captioned Murmures de la Seine (unsanctioned by their author) for two-and-six (£9). Giving lessons, a regular timetabled activity, was a securer lifestyle, yielding high dividends. In Paris, where he was in greater demand than Kalkbrenner and Liszt, he charged between 20 and 30 gold francs an hour (£65–95). In London’s fashionable Piccadilly, across the park from Buckingham Palace (1848), he commanded a guinea a lesson (£75). In his majestic study of Chopin as pianist and teacher (1970/79), Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger notes that ‘unlike Clementi, Hummel, Kalkbrenner or Czerny, Chopin did not create a school or institute a set tradition. It was not in his nature to impose his personality on pupils, in the way that the Liszt of Weimar did. Too much of an aristocrat and poet to become a leader, Chopin was content to suggest and imply, winning devotion without any attempt to convince.’ He points out further that of all his students – drawn largely from the wealthy ‘ladies of the Faubourg-St-Germain or of the Slavonic aristocracy exiled in Paris’ – the three arguably most promising all died young. As for the men who studied with him, less than a dozen making the profession, only two progressed to significantly greater things. The Polish/Armenian Karol Mikuli (1819–97) was later a pupil of Liszt, and also taught Moriz Rosenthal, Raoul Koczalski and Aleksander Michałowski, himself responsible for nearly a thousand students. Chopin also instructed the Franco-German/Polish musician Georges Mathias

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(1826–1910) at the Paris Conservatoire, who later taught Teresa Carreño, Isidor Philipp and Raoul Pugno, as well as the critic James Huneker. With their disciples and descendants (several of whom left either early recordings or ‘expression’ piano rolls) casting their influence eastward to Russia and westward to America, they were the slender bridge linking Chopin first-hand with the 20th century. Chopin speaks little and seldom about his art; but when he does, it is with a wonderful clarity, a soundness of judgement and of intent that could annihilate quite a few heresies were he to speak his mind openly [...] only at the piano does he really open his heart. George Sand For Chopin, singing [bel canto, vocal declamation] constituted the alpha and omega of music [...] Hence [his] art of transforming the piano into a leading tenor or a prima donna and creating the impression of human breathing. Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger Under his fingers each musical phrase sounded like a song, and with such clarity that each note took the meaning of a syllable, each bar that of a word, each phrase that of a thought. It was declamation without pathos; but both simple and noble. Karol Mikuli Music ought to be song [...] the great Italian school of singing Wilhelm von Lenz He loved to find in piano playing what we understand by portamento in singing [or string playing] Maurycy Karasowski His playing was always noble and beautiful, his tones always sang, whether in full forte or in the softest piano. Friederike Müller née Streicher, dedicatee of the Allegro de concert Op.46 8

In keeping time Chopin was inexorable [...] the metronome never left his piano Mikuli Rubato, ‘stolen, broken time’: Chopin [...] often required simultaneously that the left hand, playing the accompaniment, should maintain strict time, while the melodic line should enjoy freedom of expression with fluctuations of speed. This is quite feasible: you can be early, you can be late, the two hands are not in phase; then you make a compensation which reestablishes the ensemble. Georges Mathias The left hand is the choir master: it musn’t relent or bend. It’s a clock. Do with the right hand what you want and can. Chopin He has discovered how to give the piano a soul. [...] Listening to him, one feels as though suspended somewhere between heaven and earth – as he expresses his thoughts. [...] It’s a desecration, I find, to play his compositions; nobody understands them. He himself plays them sometimes far from in strict time, following his inspiration, and then it’s beautiful. Countess Elizavieta Cheriemietieff Touch before virtuosity, sensitivity before strength: As many different sounds as there are fingers Chopin, Méthode His playing is shot through with a thousand nuances of movement of which he alone holds the secret, impossible to convey by instructions. Hector Berlioz [Chopin’s] piano is so like a soft breath that he needs no vigorous forte to bring about the desired contrasts Ignaz Moscheles

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Integrated, discrete use of the pedals: He would use the soft [una corda] pedal alone for those light murmurings which seem to create a transparent vapour round the arabesques that embellish the melody and envelop it like fine lace. Antoine François Marmontel Chopin never played his own compositions twice alike, but varied each according to the mood of the moment, a mood that charmed by its very waywardness; his playing resembled nothing so much as the tender delicate tints seen in mother-o’-pearl, and rendered apparently without the least effort. Alfred James Hipkins, Broadwood’s technical adviser and Chopin’s London tuner, 1848 What in the hands of others was elegant embellishment, in his hands became a colourful wreath of flowers; what in others was technical dexterity seemed in his playing like the flight of a swallow. [...] All material considerations vanished – it was like the light of a wonderful meteor, bewitching us all the more with its unfathomable mystery. Ferdinand Hiller, one of the 1830s Parisian coterie made up of Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz and Franchomme He offered art, not artifice, and gave it a dignified setting, not a grotesque one. Sophie Leo, wife of Chopin’s financial adviser, Auguste, to whom the Op.53 Polonaise was dedicated Under the flexible and responsive fingers of Chopin’s pale and frail hand the piano became the voice of an archangel, an orchestra, an army, a raging ocean, a creation of the universe, the end of the world. Solange Clésinger née Dudevant-Sand Chopin’s most beautiful finished compositions are merely reflections and echoes of his improvisations Julian Fontana

Chopin: the teacher and his legacy Other ‘Chopin’ teachers and grail-promisers of the period claimed their mandate from having known or heard Chopin, or from association with his circle. Firstly, there was Franz Liszt (1811–86) – three of whose students, Sauer, Joseffy and Rosenthal, were, James Methuen-Campbell believes, ‘probably the most convincing and natural’ Chopinists of the many to pass through the Weimar stable. Two others – Hans Bronsart von Schellendorff and Carl Tausig – taught Karl-Heinrich Barth, responsible for the early Berlin training of Arthur Rubinstein, quintessential Chopin voice of the 20th century. Secondly, there was Theodor Leschetizky (1830–1915) – a Pole who, like Liszt, studied with Beethoven’s student Czerny and was to produce among the most renowned of early-20th-century Chopin players: Alexander Brailowsky, Anna Essipova (like Tausig a generation before, one of the first to specialise in the all-Chopin recital, playing the complete Études and Preludes at a sitting), Ignaz Friedman, Mark Hambourg, Benno Moiseiwitsch and Ignacy Jan Paderewski. Lastly, there was Natalia Janotha (1856–1932) – ‘Probably the last of the great artists who knew how to unite the sovereign and the Bohemian in one and the same person’ (Friedman). Pianist to the Berlin Court, subsequently resident in London, she worked with Clara Schumann and Brahms, but, more relevantly, enjoyed fruitful contact in Kraków with Princess Marcelina Czartoryska, Chopin’s deeply admired pupil and friend. Czartoryska ‘handed her tradition on’ to Janotha, bequeathing her manuscript of Chopin’s Méthode. Janotha also associated with Paderewski and Michałowski. Chopin’s immediate neighbours at 9 Place d’Orléans in Paris (where he lived from October 1842 to June 1849) – Pierre-Joseph-Guillaume Zimmermann (1785–1853) and Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813–88) – together with Antoine François Marmontel (1816–98, original owner of Delacroix’s 1838 portrait in the Louvre) constituted a further informed group. Their first generation students, a galaxy of brilliant minds,

Chopin, the Raphael of the pianoforte Heinrich Heine 10

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included Debussy (whose playing and command of nuance and rubato was said to have shared much in common with Chopin’s); Louis Diémer (who taught Robert Casadesus, Alfred Cortot, Yves Nat, Édouard Risler and Zygmunt Stojowski); Marguerite Long (teacher of a long line of latter-day Chopin masters); Joaquín Malats (who briefly instructed José Iturbi); and Francis Planté (who, along with Vladimir de Pachmann, was the only pianist born within Chopin’s lifetime to leave a legacy of electric 78rpm recordings – seven of the Études, recorded for French Columbia at his home in the Pyrenees, 4 July 1928). In Imperial Russia Chopin had no direct influence, his Russian students coming mainly from a high society ‘amateur’ background (his assistant, Vera Rubio née de Kologrivoff, remained in Paris to teach). But the Slavonic cut and step of his music – what the poet Józef Bohdan Zaleski called ‘the tears of the dumkas’, coupled with the Latin bel canto element – spoke naturally to Russian (and Russian Jewish) sensibilities. The Petersburg and Muscovite ‘schools’ pioneered by Field and Henselt (leading to Dubuque, Villoing and Zverev, influential teachers of the late Tsarist period whose heirs were to prepare the ground for the early Soviets and post-Revolution émigrés) placed Chopin with Beethoven, Schumann and Liszt at the cardinal points of their shrine immortalising the piano. They held his music sacrosanct. Almost. Anton Rubinstein (1829–94), who as a boy had played for Chopin, famously recast the Funeral March of the Piano Sonata Op.35 with a fortissimo diminuendo (rather than piano crescendo) da capo: the work programmatically describes the arrival and departure of the cortège, the lowered bass tones creating an ‘impression of vast funeral bells’ (Thomas Rajna, 1988). In his epochal Victor recording, Rachmaninov, who as a child had played for Rubinstein, was to thunderously replicate the audacity; likewise Raoul Pugno, second generation Chopin pupil, in his G&T recording (Paris, November 1903). Busoni (1866–1924), an admirer of Rubinstein, used to do the same thing, learnt maybe during his brief Moscow sojourn, 1890–91.

In 1872 Rubinstein toured across post-Civil War America, ‘the first truly great European pianist’ to appear in the New World. Later generations of Russians emigrated there subsequently to teach, stamp their traditions and leave a Russified Chopin trail. Among them Josef Lhévinne (1874–1944) at the Juilliard School; his wife, Rosina (1880–1976), from Kiev – who taught Van Cliburn and Garrick Ohlsson – and Sascha Gorodnitzki (1904–86). From the Russian/Austrian-annexed Baltic countries came the Lithuanian Isabelle Vengerova (1877–1956), pupil of Goldenweiser in Moscow and Leschetizky in Vienna, who taught Bernstein, Gary Graffman and Leonard Pennario. And the mercurial Pole Josef Hofmann (1876–1957) – pupil of Moszkowski and Anton Rubinstein, dedicatee of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, first director of the Curtis Institute – who took Cherkassky under his wing. According to his students, Chopin, a demanding taskmaster, confined himself to tried-and-tested repertory: principally, Clementi, Cramer and Moscheles studies; Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier; selected Beethoven concertos and sonatas; Field’s concertos and nocturnes; Hummel’s concertos and sonatas; Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No.1; various Schubert dances and duets; and Weber’s F minor Konzertstück, sonatas (especially the Piano Sonata No.2) and Invitation to the Dance. Schumann’s music he neither played nor apparently liked, and was correspondingly cool towards his criticism: ‘I could die of laughing at this German’s imagination [misplaced fantasy],’ he wrote of the celebrated 1831 review of his Variations on ‘Là ci darem la mano’ Op.2. He taught or at least annotated most of his own works, in which respect the collections of Jane Stirling and Camille Dubois née O’Meara (Chopin’s assistant, high-priestess of his aesthetic) in the Bibliothèque nationale de France are significantly instructive; similarly, among others, those of Chopin’s eldest sister, Ludwika Je¸ drzejewicz, in Warsaw. Of ‘Mistress O’Meara’, Paderewski recollected (1939): ‘There were some salons in Paris where music was considered almost a religion Several ladies of the highest society played the piano themselves and rather well […]

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They were pupils of a Madame Dubois, and Madame Dubois was the last pupil of Chopin [sic]. She must have been in her youth extremely beautiful, because when I was introduced to her for the first time, she was already a very old lady [she died in 1907] but of exceptionally attractive features and wonderfully beautiful expression. I heard from her certain interesting remarks as they were made by the great Master himself, and I cannot deny that I derived some benefit from them, even at second hand.’ Concerts are never real music; you have to give up the idea of hearing in them the most beautiful things of art. Chopin Expression and conception, position of the hand, touch, pedalling, nothing escaped the sharpness of his hearing and his vision; he gave every detail the keenest attention. Maria Alexandrovna von Harder You must sing if you wish to play Chopin

Chopin and his pianos Chopin instinctively preferred Pleyel’s instruments, renowed for their ‘silvery and slightly veiled sonority and [...] lightness of touch’ (Liszt). In London he had Érard, Pleyel and Broadwood grands placed at his disposal. ‘When I feel out of sorts I play on an Érard piano where I find a ready-made tone. But when I feel in good form and strong enough to find my own individual sound, then I need a Pleyel.’ Pianistically speaking [...] Chopin [...] is Mozart’s heir and Debussy’s precursor. The only musical genius of the 19th century whose pianism does not emulate the orchestra of his era, he lies at the heart of a tradition of vocal inspiration, with its prime emphasis on refinement of touch. Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger

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The arms should be the slaves of the fingers [...] You should, so to speak, mould the keyboard with a velvet hand and feel the key rather than striking it! [...] Start with the B major scale first [physically the easiest] and work through [the series] one by one to C major [the hardest], moving back one finger each time. Chopin, Méthode Carry one sound to the next, but only at the last moment; don’t ever, ever, exaggerate. Mme Courty