Chopin - Adam Zamoyski

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people. He could transform not only his expression, but his very appearance, and was barely recognisable when imitating one of the Lycée masters or some public figure. Many years later, the celebrated French actor Pierre Bocage was to say that Chopin had wasted his talents by becoming a musician.

      But while he neglected no opportunity for fun, Chopin also worked hard, and at the end of the academic year in July 1824 he collected the fourth-form prize jointly with Jan Matuszyński. The real prize, however, was an invitation to go and stay in the country with his classmate Dominik Dziewanowski.

      Apart from the occasional short visit the Chopin family had made to the Skarbeks at Żelazowa Wola, this was Chopin’s first real taste of the country. The Dziewanowski estate, Szafarnia, lay not far from Żelazowa Wola, on the flat Mazovian plain, west and slightly north of Warsaw, the only part of the Polish countryside with which Chopin was ever to become familiar. The estates in that area were not rich, and the country houses reflected this. The house at Szafarnia has not survived, but it probably conformed to the general pattern of timber or rendered brick manor houses: long and low, classical in style, with a colonnaded portico. These houses were often elegant, occasionally even grandiose in their conception, but the execution was sometimes rustic. The same went for life inside them, with the accent on comfort: there would be a piano in a fine drawing room, but there might be geese wandering about the back porch.

      Chopin’s holiday in Szafarnia had undoubtedly been dictated, at least in part, by concern for his health, which was far from good; it is possible that he had contracted tuberculosis, which was widespread. He was armed with pills and put on a strict diet: six or seven cups of acorn coffee per day, various tisanes, plenty of food, a little sweet wine, very ripe fruit, but, much to his chagrin, no bread.

      This did not mar his enjoyment, and his letters home are full of the excitement caused by the novelty of his experiences. The books he had brought from Warsaw were hardly opened, and although he played the piano a great deal, he wrote little during his stay. Most of his time was spent out of doors, running about with his friend Dominik, going for drives through the surrounding countryside, visiting their friend Jan Białobłocki, whose parents’ estate lay not far away, and even riding. ‘Don’t ask whether I ride well or not,’ he wrote to a friend in Warsaw, ‘but I do ride; that is to say the horse goes slowly where it wants, and I sit on it in terror, like an ape on the back of a bear; I haven’t fallen off yet, because the horse hasn’t bothered to throw me.’2 This was hardly surprising, since it was being led about on a rein by Dominik’s aunt Miss Ludwika Dziewanowska.

      Chopin wrote most of his letters home in the form and under the heading of the Szafarnia Courier, a pastiche on the Warsaw Courier, using the same layout of Home News, Foreign News and Society News. The customary censor’s stamp was in this case applied by Miss Ludwika. The Szafarnia Courier is full of schoolboy wit, with detailed news of how many flies settled on his nose, arch descriptions of battles between farmyard animals, Homeric accounts of quarrels between servants and notes on the misdemeanours of the domestic cat. There is also a great deal on the comings and goings of the Jewish traders who were a ubiquitous part of country life, and whom Chopin treats with predictable mockery. But the Szafarnia Courier also gives some idea of his wry, hyperbolic sense of humour and of his tendency to ridicule himself, the Pichon of the entries:

      On 26th Inst. Monsieur Pichon visited the village of Golub. Amongst other sights and wonders of this exotic place, he saw a pig (imported) which for some time totally absorbed the attention of this distinguished voyageur.3

       Monsieur Pichon is suffering great discomfort on account of the mosquitoes, of which he has encountered fabulous quantities at Szafarnia. They bite him all over, except, mercifully, on the nose, which would otherwise become even bigger than it is. 4

      On 1st Inst. Monsieur Pichon was just playing ‘the Jew’ [a newly composed Mazurka on a Jewish dance theme], when Monsieur Dziewanowski, who had business with one of his Jewish tenants, asked the latter to pronounce judgement on the young Jewish virtuoso’s playing. Moses came up to the window, inserted his exalted aquiline nose into the room and listened, after which he declared that if Mons. Pichon were to go and play at a Jewish wedding, he would earn at least ten thalers. Such a declaration encouraged Mons. Pichon to study this kind of music with diligence, and who knows whether one day he may not give himself over entirely to this branch of the arts.5

      The fourteen-year-old boy found everything about life in the country new and interesting, but what fascinated him more than anything else were the unfamiliar sounds. The only popular music he had heard before was Warsaw street musicians’ renderings of folk songs and dances. As he listened to peasant girls singing their songs of love or sorrow, to the old women chanting in the fields, and to the drinking songs issuing from village taverns, a whole new world of music opened up before him. When he returned to Warsaw in September, it was with his head full of these new harmonies.

      He had by now achieved such mastery of the keyboard that the Polonaises he turned out were far superior in technical terms to their Ogiński model. With the A flat major Polonaise, written in 1821 and dedicated to Żywny, he had moved on to writing in the so-called ‘brilliant’ style; it is a sparkling bravura piece designed to show off the virtuosity of the performer rather than to plumb the depths of musical expression. At the same time, he continued to seek the key to a deeper understanding of the language of music, following his own instinct and taking advantage of every opportunity to expand his knowledge.

      He was profoundly affected by the new Italian music, represented most notably by the operas of Spontini and Rossini, now fashionable in Warsaw. It was being promoted by the conductor and composer Karol Kurpiński, himself the author of several operas in a similar style. Chopin was struck by the melodic brilliance and the ‘singing’ quality produced by the Italian composers, and strove to bring some of these into his own playing.

      In his fourteenth year he began writing waltzes and Mazurkas (the Gallicised name of the mazur, the principal dance of the peasants of Mazovia) as well as Polonaises, often for more than one instrument. Lack of evidence precludes any serious analysis of his output, and the main source of information on the compositions of this period is the album of Countess Izabela Grabowska, which was fortunately described by a musicologist before it was lost in the war. The Countess was a cousin of Fryderyk Skarbek and an enthusiastic violinist, and as she lived not far from the Chopin apartment, the young composer spent a good deal of time with her.

      Most of the music in the album was written, possibly in collaboration with the Countess, around 1824. The book contained a large number of compositions for the piano, and quite a few for piano and violin. The musicologist who examined it thought many of these unremarkable and imitative of Hummel, and noted a lack of experience and a certain untidiness in the way the harmonies were developed. But he was also astonished by the number of passages which showed originality and seemed to announce Chopin’s mature work.6

      Chopin expanded his education and experience by taking part in a variety of musical events, most of them of an amateur nature. Documentary evidence is scarce, but we do know that he was closely involved in a series of musical performances put on by a friend of Nicolas Chopin, Józef Jawurek, the director of music of the Warsaw Evangelical church, which had a fine neo-classical rotunda with good acoustics. In 1824 and 1825 Chopin took part, along with his sister Ludwika and Jan Białobłocki, in performances of Haydn’s Creation and works by Elsner, and it is highly likely that he was involved in other similar events.7

      In April 1825 the capital prepared for an official visit from Tsar Alexander, and it was Chopin who was singled out by the Warsaw instrument-maker Brunner and the inventor Professor Hoffmann to show off their latest invention, the eolomelodicon, at a public concert. It was a sort of miniature organ, and Chopin played part of a Moscheles piano concerto and an improvisation of his own on it at a

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