Chopin - Adam Zamoyski

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colleague of Nicolas Chopin, Professor Feliks Jarocki, had been invited to take part in a congress of naturalists and physicians organised in Berlin by Alexander von Humboldt. Since all his expenses were being paid, he offered to take young Chopin with him. The boy was overjoyed at the prospect of hearing renowned orchestras and choirs, and the chance to meet composers such as Gasparo Spontini who made up the city’s musical establishment. He had one acquaintance in Berlin who he felt sure would help him gain admittance to this charmed world: Prince Antoni Radziwiłł, a Polish aristocrat married to one of the Prussian royal princesses and the King’s Lieutenant in what was then the Duchy of Posen, the part of Poland ruled by Prussia. He was a distinguished amateur musician, and had met Chopin on one of his visits to Warsaw.

      Berlin turned out to be something of a disappointment. After five days in a mail coach, the two travellers arrived in mid-September. Chopin’s first impressions were unfavourable: he found the streets formal and empty, and thought the women ugly. He had to dine at the hotel with Jarocki and the other visiting scientists, whom he found uninteresting and slightly ridiculous. Prince Radziwiłł was absent, and on the one occasion when Chopin did find himself in the same room with Spontini, Zelter and Mendelssohn he was too shy to introduce himself. He visited the local piano-makers, but there were no instruments in stock for him to try. He saw operas by Spontini, Onslow, Cimarosa and Weber, but was disappointed by the productions and the standard of the singing. The only thing that ‘came close to the ideal I have of great music’ was Handel’s Ode on St Cecilia’s Day, which he heard at the Singakademie.8 It was the first time he had been struck by Handel’s work, and his respect for that composer was to grow steadily. Years later, when Mendelssohn showed him a new edition of Handel’s work, Chopin would experience ‘a truly child-like joy’.9

      The congress ended with a banquet during which the venerable professors dropped their inhibitions. They stuffed themselves in a way Chopin found hard to believe, and drank a good deal as well, with much clinking of glasses. When Zelter and his choir intoned a ceremonial cantata they all joined in, waving their arms and bawling their heads off. Chopin was quite happy to climb into a coach bound for Warsaw the next day. But, disappointing as it had been, the Berlin trip only whetted his appetite for foreign travel, and as he began his final year at the Conservatoire he dreamt of going further afield.

      Chopin was now almost nineteen years old. He had grown into an interesting-looking young man, physically somewhat puny, but with a refined countenance and manner. This, as well as his sociability and his musical gift, meant that he was much sought after. He hated missing out on any gathering, and the consequent round of tea parties, dinners, soirées and balls exhausted him. ‘You know how awful it is when all you want to do is go to bed, and suddenly everyone wants you to start improvising,’ he complained, somewhat disingenuously, to a friend; he always complied, and, having sat down at the piano, would improvise for hours.10

      This was the year devoted to practical exercises, but Elsner did not demand any of the regulation masses or oratorios from Chopin. The best-known compositions from this period are the Rondo on Cracovian Themes (op.14), also known as the Krakowiak, and the Fantasia on Polish Airs (op.13), both for piano and orchestra. Although some years later a Parisian critic was to hail the Fantasia as a landmark in musical history, it is hard to see it as one now.11 These pieces are notable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the intricacy and beauty of the piano parts. But they belong in the tradition of the brilliant style, in which surface decoration is more important than underlying structure. A greater degree of daring and originality obtains here than in any of Chopin’s previous or indeed later writing for orchestra, and there are passages in which the latter assumes an active role and ceases to be merely an accompaniment for the piano. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of these and other works from the same period is the way in which Chopin handles the folk element in them.

      Following his exposure to authentic folk music in 1824, Chopin had started collecting country tunes and using them in pieces for the piano. This was accepted practice, and many musicians either transcribed folk songs for various instruments or wrote variations on them. But Chopin was less interested in the tunes themselves than in the structure and essential character of this kind of music. The difference between what most musicians did with folk music and what he was attempting could be likened to the difference between using ready-made phrases of a foreign language, and learning the language and constructing one’s own phrases. By 1828 he had mastered the folk idiom so far that he could write original Mazurkas, often using elements of melodies he had heard in the country, but more often creating his own. This process eventually led him to create what was in effect an entirely new mode of musical expression through the melodic language of a people. An analogous treatment of the Polonaise form evolved with time into a pure expression of the historic, courtly ethos which had inspired the dance. He was no longer writing a country dance or a court dance; he was writing poems in the musical language of Mazovia, or alternatively in that of the vanished world of the Polish noble past.

      At the same time, Chopin did apply himself to a work in the grand style – a concerto for piano and orchestra. This was probably meant to fall within the category of his practical work for Elsner, but it may also have been prompted by the need to have a substantial composition to show off – pianists were expected to demonstrate their virtuosity through their own works, not by interpreting others’. This was all the more important as Chopin was now planning a tour abroad. In April 1829, Nicolas Chopin petitioned the Minister of Education for the requisite funds. The move was not without precedent, as an older Conservatoire colleague of Chopin’s, the pianist Tomasz Nidecki, had been given a foreign travel grant a couple of years before. Nicolas reminded the Minister that his son had ‘had the honour of being heard by the late Tsar’, and that His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke ‘had often been most graciously pleased to allow him to give evidence of his growing talent in His Most Serene presence’.12

      The Minister, Count Grabowski, endorsed the petition and recommended a handsome grant for three years, during which the young man was to visit Germany, France and Italy, but his superior, the Minister of the Interior, turned it down, with the observation, scrawled in the margin, that ‘Public funds cannot be frittered away on this kind of artist’.13

      The disappointment caused by the failure of this petition was soon forgotten in the excitement created by the arrival, a few weeks later, of the legendary violinist Niccolò Paganini. Chopin went to most of the ten concerts he gave in Warsaw, and was bowled over by the virtuosity of his playing. Paganini was the first musician to elevate his instrument from its traditional role within the orchestra or quartet, and Chopin can hardly have failed to draw parallels with what he was doing himself regarding the piano.

      Returning home after one of the concerts, Chopin composed a set of variations entitled Souvenir de Paganini. More important, he now set to work on a new idea of his own – of producing exercises that would help him draw a wider range of sound and greater expression from his chosen instrument. The first of these studies, or Études (nos. 8, 9, 10, and 11 of op.10), were written over the next six months, and with time they were to revolutionise his use of the piano.

      Paganini’s visit was followed by a series of concerts by the violinist Karol Lipiński, who had at one stage been regarded as one of Paganini’s principal rivals, but in Chopin’s view his concerts only underlined the superiority of the Italian’s genius. The same was true of the concerts given soon afterwards by the Hungarian pianist Stephen Heller; his playing was marked by a superior musical intelligence, but lacked the special qualities Chopin was beginning to look for.

      A more portentous event for Chopin was a concert organised by Carlo Soliva, the singing instructor at the Conservatoire, to show off his pupils. One of these, Konstancja Gładkowska, struck the young man not only by her fine voice, but also by her appearance. She was dark-haired and pretty, with a face that exuded melancholy rather than vivaciousness. Of her character, not much is known. Chopin was immediately

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