Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician

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Dearest friend [Cherissime],--Here is what Onslow has written
to me. I wished to call on you and tell you, but I feel very
feeble and am going to lie down. I love you always more, if
this is possible [je vous aime toujours plus si c'est
possible].

CHOPIN.

[FOOTNOTE: To the above, unfortunately undated, note, which
was published for the first time in the Menestrel of February
15, 1885, and reprinted in "Un nid d'autographes," lettres
incites recueillies et annotees par Oscar Comettant (Paris: E.
Dentu), is appended the following P.S.:--"Do not forget,
please, friend Herbeault. Till to-morrow, then; I expect you
both."

La Mara's Musikerbriefe (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Hartel)
contains likewise a friendly letter of Chopin to Camille
Pleyel. It runs thus:

"Dearest friend,--I received the other day your piano, and
give you my best thanks. It arrived in good tune, and is
exactly at concert-pitch. As yet I have not played much on it,
for the weather is at present so fine that I am almost always
in the open air. I wish you as pleasant weather for your
holidays. Write me a few words (if you find that you have not
sufficiently exercised your pen in the course of the day). May
you all remain well--and lay me at the feet of your mother and
sister.--Your devoted, "F. CHOPIN."

The date given by La Mara is "Monday [May 20, 1842], Nohant,
near La Chatre, Indre." This, however, cannot be right, for
the 20th of May in 1842 was a Friday.]

And, again, how atrociously he reviles in the same letters the
banker Leo, who lends him money, often takes charge of his
manuscripts, procures payment for them, and in whose house he has
been for years a frequent visitor. Mr. Ch. Halle informed me that
Chopin was on particularly good terms with the Leos. From
Moscheles' diary we learn that the writer made Chopin's
acquaintance at the banker's house. Stephen Heller told me that
he met Chopin several times at Leo's, and that the Polish
composer visited there often, and continued to go there when he
had given up going to many other houses. And from the same
informant I learned also that Madame Leo as well as her husband
took a kindly interest in Chopin, showing this, for instance, by
providing him with linen. And yet Leo, this man who does him all
sorts of services, and whose smiling guest he is before and
after, is spoken of by Chopin as if he were the most "despicable
wretch imaginable"; and this for no other reason than that
everything has not been done exactly as he wished it to be done.
Unless we assume these revilings to be no more than explosions of
momentary ill-humour, we must find Chopin convicted of duplicity
and ingratitude. In the letters to Fontana there are also certain
remarks about Matuszynski which I do not like. Nor can they be
wholly explained away by saying that they are in part fun and in
part indirect flattery of his correspondent. It would rather seem
that Chopin's undoubtedly real love for Matuszynski was not
unmixed with a certain kind of contempt. And here I must tell the
reader that while Poles have so high an opinion of their nation
in comparison with other nations, and of their countrymen with
other countrymen, they have generally a very mean opinion of each
other. Indeed, I never met with a Pole who did not look down with
a self-satisfied smile of pity on any of his fellow-countrymen,
even on his best friend. It seems that their feeling of
individual superiority is as great as that of their national
superiority. Liszt's observations (see Vol. I., p. 259) and those
of other writers (Polish as well as non-Polish) confirm mine,
which else might rightly be supposed to be based on too limited
an experience. To return to Matuszynski, he may have been too
ready to advise and censure his friend, and not practical enough
to be actively helpful. After reading the letters addressed to
them one comes to the conclusion that Fontana's and Franchomme's
serviceableness and readiness to serve went for something in his
appreciation of them as friends. At any rate, he did not hesitate
to exploiter them most unconscionably. Taking a general view of
the letters written by him during the last twelve years of his
life, one is struck by the absence of generous judgments and the
extreme rareness of sympathetic sentiments concerning third
persons. As this was not the case in his earlier letters, ill-
health and disappointments suggest themselves naturally as causes
of these faults of character and temper. To these principal
causes have, however, to be added his nationality, his originally
delicate constitution, and his cultivation of salon manners and
tastes. His extreme sensitiveness, fastidiousness, and
irritability may be easily understood to derive from one or the
other of these conditions.

George Sand's Ma Vie throws a good deal of light on Chopin's
character; let us collect a few rays from it:--

He [Chopin] was modest on principle and gentle [doux] by
habit, but he was imperious by instinct, and full of a
legitimate pride that did not know itself.

He was certainly not made to live long in this world, this
extreme type of an artist. He was devoured by the dream of an
ideal which no practical philosophic or compassionate
tolerance combated. He would never compound with human nature.
He accepted nothing of reality. This was his vice and his
virtue, his grandeur and his misery. Implacable to the least
blemish, he had an immense enthusiasm for the least light, his
excited imagination doing its utmost to see in it a sun.

He was the same in friendship [as in love], becoming
enthusiastic at first sight, getting disgusted, and correcting
himself [se reprenant] incessantly, living on infatuations
full of charms for those who were the object of them, and on
secret discontents which poisoned his dearest affections.

Chopin accorded to me, I may say honoured me with, a kind of
friendship which was an exception in his life. He was always
the same to me.

The friendship of Chopin was never a refuge for me in sadness.
He had enough of his own ills to bear.

We never addressed a reproach to each other, except once,
which, alas! was the first and the last time.

But if Chopin was with me devotion, kind attention, grace,
obligingness, and deference in person, he had not for all that
abjured the asperities of his character towards those who were
about me. With them the inequality of his soul, in turn
generous and fantastic, gave itself full course, passing
always from infatuation to aversion, and vice versa.

Chopin when angry was alarming, and as, with me, he always
restrained himself, he seemed almost to choke and die.

The following extracts from Liszt's book partly corroborate,
partly supplement, the foregoing evidence:--

His imagination was ardent, his feelings rose to violence,--
his physical organisation was feeble and sickly! Who can sound
the sufferings proceeding from this contrast? They must have
been poignant, but he never let them be seen.

The delicacy of his constitution and of his heart, in imposing
upon him the feminine martyrdom of for ever unavowed tortures,
gave to his destiny some of the traits of feminine destinies.

He did not exercise a decisive influence on any existence. His
passion never encroached upon any of his desires; he neither
pressed close nor bore down [n'a etreint ni masse] any mind by
the domination of his own.

However rarely, there were nevertheless instances when we
surprised him profoundly moved. We have seen him turn pale
[palir et blemir] to such a degree as to assume green and
cadaverous tints. But in his intensest emotions he remained
concentrated. He was then, as usually, chary of words about
what he felt; a minute's reflection [recueillement] always hid
the secret of his first impression...This constant control
over the violence of his character reminded one of the
melancholy superiority of certain women who seek their
strength in reticence and isolation, knowing the uselessness
of the explosions of their anger, and having a too jealous
care of the mystery of their passion to betray it
gratuitously.

Chopin, however, did not always control his temper. Heller
remembers seeing him more than once in a passion, and hearing him
speak very harshly to Nowakowski. The following story, which Lenz
relates in "Die grossen Pianoforte-Virtuosen unserer Zeit," is
also to the point.

On one occasion Meyerbeer, whom I had not yet seen, entered
Chopin's room when I was getting a lesson. Meyerbeer was not
announced, he was king. I was playing the Mazurka in C (Op.
33), printed on one page which contains so many hundreds--I
called it the epitaph of the idea [Grabschrift des Begriffs],
so full of distress and sadness is the composition, the
wearied flight of an eagle.

Meyerbeer had taken a seat, Chopin made me go on.

"This is two-four time," said Meyerbeer. Chopin denied this,
made me repeat the piece, and beat time aloud with the pencil
on the piano--his eyes were glowing.

"Two crotchets," repeated Meyerbeer, calmly.

Only once I saw Chopin angry, it was at this moment. It was
beautiful to see how a light red coloured his pale cheeks.

"These are three crotchets," he said with a loud voice, he who
spoke always so low

"Give it me," replied Meyerbeer, "for a ballet in my opera
("L'Africaine," at that time kept a secret), I shall show it
you then."

"These are three crotchets," Chopin almost shouted, and played
it himself. He played the mazurka several times, counted
aloud, stamped time with his foot, was beside himself. But all
was of no use, Meyerbeer insisted on TWO crotchets. They
parted very angrily. I found it anything but agreeable to have
been a witness of this angry scene. Chopin disappeared into
his cabinet without taking leave of me. The whole thing lasted
but a few minutes.

Exhibitions of temper like this were no doubt rare, indeed,
hardly ever occurred except in his intercourse with familiars
and, more especially, fellow-countrymen--sometimes also with
pupils. In passing I may remark that Chopin's Polish vocabulary
was much less choice than his French one. As a rule, Chopin's
manners were very refined and aristocratic, Mr. Halle thinks they
were too much so. For this refinement resulted in a uniform
amiability which left you quite in the dark as to the real nature
of the man. Many people who made advances to Chopin found like M.
Marmontel--I have this from his own mouth--that he had a
temperament sauvage and was difficult to get at. And all who came
near him learned soon from experience that, as Liszt told Lenz,
he was ombrageux. But while Chopin would treat outsiders with a
chilly politeness, he charmed those who were admitted into his
circle both by amiability and wit. "Usually," says Liszt, "he was
lively, his caustic mind unearthed quickly the ridiculous far
below the surface where it strikes all eyes." And again, "the
playfulness of Chopin attacked only the superior keys of the
mind, fond of witticism as he was, recoiling from vulgar
joviality, gross laughter, common merriment, as from those
animals more abject than venomous, the sight of which causes the
most nauseous aversion to certain sensitive and delicate
natures." Liszt calls Chopin "a fine connoisseur in raillery and
an ingenious mocker." The testimony of other acquaintances of
Chopin and that of his letters does not allow us to accept as
holding good generally Mr. Halle's experience, who, mentioning
also the Polish artist's wit, said to me that he never heard him
utter a sarcasm or use a cutting expression.

Fondness of society is a characteristic trait in Chopin's mental
constitution. Indeed, Hiller told me that his friend could not be
without company. For reading, on the other hand, he did not much
care. Alkan related to me that Chopin did not even read George
Sand's works--which is difficult to believe--and that Pierre
Leroux, who liked Chopin and always brought him his books, might
have found them any time afterwards uncut on the pianist's table,
which is not so difficult to believe, as philosophy and Chopin
are contraries. According to what I learned from Hiller, Chopin
took an interest in literature but read very little. To Heller it
seemed that Chopin had no taste for literature, indeed, he made
on him the impression of an uneducated man. Heller, I must tell
the reader parenthetically, was both a great reader and an
earnest thinker, over whom good books had even the power of
making him neglect and forget mistress Musica without regret and
with little compunction. But to return to Chopin. Franchomme
excused his friend by saying that teaching and the claims of
society left him no time for reading. But if Chopin neglected
French literature--not to speak of other ancient and modern
literatures--he paid some attention to that of his native
country; at any rate, new publications of Polish books were
generally to be found on his table. The reader will also remember
that Chopin, in his letters to Fontana, alludes twice to books of
poetry--one by Mickiewicz which was sent him to Majorca, the
other by Witwicki which he had lost sight of.

Indeed, anything Polish had an especial charm and value for
Chopin. Absence from his native country so far from diminishing
increased his love for it. The words with which he is reported to
have received the pianist Mortier de Fontaine, who came to Paris
in 1833 and called on him with letters of introduction, are
characteristic in this respect: "It is enough that you have
breathed the air of Warsaw to find a friend and adviser in me."
There is, no doubt, some exaggeration in Liszt's statement that
whoever came to Chopin from Poland, whether with or without
letters of introduction, was sure of a hearty welcome, of being
received with open arms. On the other hand, we may fully believe
the same authority when he says that Chopin often accorded to
persons of his own country what he would not accord to anyone
else--namely, the right of disturbing his habits; that he would
sacrifice his time, money, and comfort to people who were perhaps
unknown to him the day before, showing them the sights of the
capital, having them to dine with him, and taking them in the
evening to some theatre. We have already seen that his most
intimate friends were Poles, and this was so in the aristocratic
as well as in the conventionally less-elevated circles. However
pleasant his relations with the Rothschilds may have been--
indeed, Franchomme told me that his friend loved the house of
Rothschild and that this house loved him, and that more
especially Madame Nathaniel Rothschild preserved a touching
remembrance of him [FOOTNOTE: Chopin dedicated to Madame la
Baronne C. Rothschild the Waltz, Op. 64, No. 2 (Parisian
Edition), and the Ballade, Op. 52.]--they can have been but of
small significance in comparison with the almost passionate
attachment he had to Prince Alexander Czartoryski and his wife
the Princess Marcelline. And if we were to compare his friendship
for any non-Polish gentleman or lady with that which he felt for
the Countess Delphine Potocka, to whom he dedicated two of his
happiest inspirations in two very different genres (the F minor
Concerto, Op. 21, and the D flat major Waltz, Op. 64, No. I), the
result would be again in favour of his compatriot.
There were, indeed, some who thought that he felt more than
friendship for this lady; this, however, he energetically denied.

[FOOTNOTE: Of this lady Kwiatkowski said that she took as much
trouble and pride in giving choice musical entertainments as
other people did in giving choice dinners. In Sowinski's
Musiciens polonais we read that she had a beautiful soprano voice
and occupied the first place among the amateur ladies of Paris.
"A great friend of the illustrious Chopin, she gave formerly
splendid concerts at her house with the old company of the
Italians, which one shall see no more in Paris. To cite the names
of Rubini, Lablache, Tamburini, Malibran, Grisi, Persiani, is to
give the highest idea of Italian singing. The Countess Potocka
sang herself according to the method of the Italian masters."]

But although Chopin was more devoted and more happy in his Polish
friendships, he had beloved as well as loving friends of all
nationalities--Germans, English, and even Russians. That as a
good Pole he hated the Russians as a nation may be taken for
granted. Of his feelings and opinions with regard to his English
friends and the English in general, information will be
forthcoming in a subsequent chapter. The Germans Chopin disliked
thoroughly, partly, no doubt, from political reasons, partly
perhaps on account of their inelegance and social awkwardness.
Still, of this nation were some of his best friends, among them
Hiller, Gutmann, Albrecht, and the Hanoverian ambassador Baron
von Stockhausen.

[FOOTNOTE: Gutmann, in speaking to me of his master's dislike,
positively ascribed it to the second of the above causes. In
connection with this we must, however, not forget that the
Germans of to-day differ from the Germans of fifty years ago as
much socially as politically. Nor have the social characters of
their neighbours, the French and the English, remained the same.]

Liszt has given a glowing description of an improvised soiree at
Chopin's lodgings in the Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin--that is, in
the years before the winter in Majorca. At this soiree, we are
told, were present Liszt himself, Heine, Meyerbeer, Nourrit,
Hiller, Delacroix, Niemcewicz, Mickiewicz, George Sand, and the
Comtesse d'Agoult. Of course, this is a poetic licence: these men
and women cannot have been at one and the same time in Chopin's
salon. Indeed, Hiller informed me that he knew nothing of this
party, and that, moreover, as long as he was in Paris (up to
1836) there were hardly ever more numerous gatherings at his
friend's lodgings than of two or three. Liszt's group, however,
brings vividly before us one section of Chopin's social
surroundings: it shows us what a poetic atmosphere he was
breathing, amidst what a galaxy of celebrities he was moving. A
glimpse of the real life our artist lived in the early Paris
years this extravagant effort of a luxuriant imagination does not
afford. Such glimpses we got in his letters to Hiller and
Franchomme, where we also met with many friends and acquaintances
with less high-sounding names, some of whom Chopin subsequently
lost by removal or death. In addition to the friends who were
then mentioned, I may name here the Polish poet Stephen Witwicki,
the friend of his youth as well as of his manhood, to whom in
1842 he dedicated his Op. 41, three mazurkas, and several of
whose poems he set to music; and the Polish painter Kwiatkowski,
an acquaintance of a later time, who drew and painted many
portraits of the composer, and more than one of whose pictures
was inspired by compositions of his friend. I have not been able
to ascertain what Chopin's sentiments were with regard to
Kwiatkowski, but the latter must have been a frequent visitor,
for after relating to me that the composer was fond of playing in
the dusk, he remarked that he heard him play thus almost all his
works immediately after they were composed.

As we have seen in the chapters treating of Chopin's first years
in Paris, there was then a goodly sprinkling of musicians among
his associates--I use the word "associates" advisedly, for many
of them could not truly be called friends. When he was once
firmly settled, artistically and socially, not a few of these
early acquaintances lapsed. How much this was due to the force of
circumstances, how much to the choice of Chopin, is difficult to
determine. But we may be sure that his distaste to the
Bohemianism, the free and easy style that obtains among a
considerable portion of the artistic tribe, had at least as much
to do with the result as pressure of engagements. Of the
musicians of whom we heard so much in the first years after his
coming to Paris, he remained in close connection only with one-
namely, with Franchomme. Osborne soon disappeared from his
circle. Chopin's intercourse with Berlioz was in after years so
rare that some of their common friends did not even know of its
existence. The loosening of this connection was probably brought
about by the departure of Hiller in 1836 and the quarrel with
Liszt some time after, which broke two links between the
sensitive Pole and the fiery Frenchman. The ageing Baillot and
Cherubini died in 1842. Kalkbrenner died but a short time before
Chopin, but the sympathy existing between them was not strong
enough to prevent their drifting apart. Other artists to whom the
new-comer had paid due homage may have been neglected, forgotten,
or lost sight of when success was attained and the blandishments
of the salons were lavished upon him. Strange to say, with all
his love for what belonged to and came from Poland, he kept
compatriot musicians at a distance. Fontana was an exception, but
him he cherished, no doubt, as a friend of his youth in spite of
his profession, or, if as a musician at all, chiefly because of
his handiness as a copyist. For Sowinski, who was already settled
in Paris when Chopin arrived there, and who assisted him at his
first concert, he did not care. Consequently they had afterwards
less and less intercourse, which, indeed, in the end may have
ceased altogether. An undated letter given by Count Wodziriski in
"Les trois Romans de Frederic Chopin," no doubt originally
written in Polish, brings the master's feelings towards his
compatriot, and also his irritability, most vividly before the
reader.

Here he is! He has just come in to see me--a tall strong
individual who wears moustaches; he sits down at the piano and
improvises, without knowing exactly what. He knocks, strikes,
and crosses his hands, without reason; he demolishes in five
minutes a poor helpless key; he has enormous fingers, made
rather to handle reins and whip somewhere on the confines of
Ukraine. Here you have the portrait of S...who has no other
merit than that of having small moustaches and a good heart.
If I ever thought of imagining what stupidity and charlatanism
in art are, I have now the clearest perception of them. I run
through my room with my ears reddening; I have a mad desire to
throw the door wide open; but one has to spare him, to show
one's self almost affectionate. No, you cannot imagine what it
is: here one sees only his neckties; one does him the honour
of taking him seriously....There remains, therefore, nothing
but to bear him. What exasperates me is his collection of
little songs, compositions in the most vulgar style, without
the least knowledge of the most elementary rules of harmony
and poetry, concluding with quadrille ritornelli, and which he
calls Recueil de Chants Polonais. You know how I wished to
understand, and how I have in part succeeded in understanding,
our national music. Therefore you will judge what pleasure I
experience when, laying hold of a motive of mine here and
there, without taking account of the fact that all the beauty
of a melody depends on the accompaniment, he reproduces it
with the taste of a frequenter of suburban taverns
(guinguettes) and public-houses (cabarets). And one cannot say
anything to him, for he comprehends nothing beyond what he has
taken from you.

Edouard Wolff came to Paris in 1835, provided with a letter of
introduction from Chopin's master Zywny; [FOOTNOTE: See Vol. I.,
p. 31.] but, notwithstanding this favourable opening of their
acquaintanceship, he was only for some time on visiting terms
with his more distinguished compatriot. Wolff himself told me
that Chopin would never hear one of his compositions. From any
other informant I would not have accepted this statement as
probable, still less as true. [FOOTNOTE: Wolff dedicated in 1841
his Grand Allegro de Concert pour piano still, Op. 59, a son ami
Chopin; but the latter never repaid him the compliment.] These
remarks about Wolff remind me of another piece of information I
got from this pianist-composer a few months before his death--
namely, that Chopin hated all Jews, Meyerbeer and Halevy among
the rest. What Pole does not hate the Jews? That Chopin was not
enamoured of them we have seen in his letters. But that he hated
Meyerbeer is a more than doubtful statement. Franchomme said to
me that Meyerbeer was not a great friend of Chopin's; but that
the latter, though he did not like his music, liked him as a man.
If Lenz reports accurately, Meyerbeer's feelings towards Chopin
were, no doubt, warmer than Chopin's towards Meyerbeer. When
after the scene about the rhythm of a mazurka Chopin had left the
room, Lenz introduced himself to Meyerbeer as a friend of the
Counts Wielhorski, of St. Petersburg. On coming to the door,
where a coupe was waiting, the composer offered to drive him
home, and when they were seated said:--