Chapter I: Front Matter

FREDERICK CHOPIN:
A MAN OF SOLITUDE

_By_
GUY DE POURTALÈS

_Translated from the French by_
CHARLES BAYLY, JR.

THORNTON BUTTERWORTH LIMITED
15 BEDFORD STREET, LONDON, W.C.2

_First published . . . 1927_

_All rights reserved_
MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

_“He used his art only to play
to himself his own tragedy.”_
Liszt.

DEDICATION

When I suggested the example of Liszt to a soul stricken but still capable of enthusiasm, I thought also of offering him this story of Chopin. Not that this latter should serve to discount whatever slight exuberance there might be in the former. On the contrary: they complement and complete each other, and show, the one concave and the other convex, the twofold visage of that symbolic being whom we call the artist. Or, the sensitive man, the cognizant—he, in short, whom we envy.

One of these masks portrays glory and passion: the other, sorrow and loneliness.

I quite realize the romantic sound of these four words in an age when they are so out-moded. But if I agree that in our time every thing possible has been tried, indeed, to eliminate from our orchestra those harps, those tremolos, those rubatos, those great billows of harmony that transported three admiring generations with the struggles between heaven and hell, it is nevertheless necessary only to open a newspaper at the section on the courts of law, to gaze into the show windows of the picture dealers, or to hear a saxophone, to convince myself that the themes of the human legend have in no degree changed. The rhythm, the harmonies, are different, but our responsive vibrations are just the same as they were in the most guileless epochs.

The real disaccord between our parents and us is that the ugly—or what they called the ugly—has been incorporated to-day in the beautiful—or what we call the beautiful. In other words, there are to-day no such things as beauty and ugliness, harmony and discord, there is no longer any æsthetic prohibition. As one of our sages, Paul Valéry, has written: “I see the modern man as a man with an idea of himself and of the world that is no longer fixed.... It has become impossible for him to be a man of a single viewpoint, to hold, really, to one language, to one nation, to one faith, to one physical type.” Let us add: to one music.

Thanks to the rigorous method of science, it has become easy to believe everything, or nothing. To love everyone, or no one. But do we gain other than in childishness and dotage? I question whether this new abundance enriches us more than their apparent poverty fertilized our fathers. This mass of sensations and perceptions has not increased our lucidity any more than the steam siren and the typewriter have added new notes to our scale. And yet we should hardly consent to the loss of one of these recent contributions.

But if a very ironic, very cynical jazz enchants me, it in no way removes the pleasure I feel in hearing Chopin. I should be sorry not to be able to savour two such different forms of modern sadness, the one born in New Orleans and the other in a Warsaw garret. To pursue still further the little problem which the two parallel existences of Liszt and Chopin pose for our reflection, let us say that on certain days we are more apt for action, for youth, for expenditure in any form; on other days for reserve, for shrinking, for incertitude, for concentration, and—even though the word has lost its beauty—for mystery.

The life of Liszt is an open book. He wrote it everywhere in ink and in adventure. Of the life of Chopin almost nothing remains. His nature protected him from needless experiences, and fate furthermore decreed that a great many of his letters and relics should be burned in a house in which his sister lived at Warsaw in 1863. We can discover him therefore only in his music, in a few scraps of correspondence, and in the memories of his friends. Meanwhile, his life was always so simple and so logical that a slight commentary is necessary to understand it, as an _appoggiatura_ enhances the value of a note. Save for two or three journeys, the outside world had little chance to penetrate this imagination that ever turned inward. Its poetry lies in whatever qualities of possibility and of song that were added to the illusions of his days. Badly served in love, in friendship, in everything that demanded blindness or excessive pedal, this clear-sighted sufferer saw himself in only one mirror: the ebony of his piano. “Piano, marvellous instrument,” he said. Naturally, since the piano is an orchestra in itself. But it is something more: it is an instrument. Hence a soul. It was the only one Chopin ever knew; and he made his piano his only legatee.

If Liszt has given you the daring to seize the joys of the moment and a little confidence in yourself, Chopin can become not less a brotherly companion. His life is that of your anxious shadow. His music is perhaps nothing but the risen song of your inner loneliness.

All art is rich above all in the measure of what you yourself bring to it. Every soul possesses you in the measure of the effort you make to receive it. Welcome this one as the purest expression, for which there are no words, of what there is in love that must remain for ever inexpressible.

G. de P.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I “An angel, fair of face as a tall, sad woman” 17

II The Childhood of Chopin 20

III The Birth of the Poet 25

IV “Sorrow” and “Ideal” 30

V Revolution at Warsaw and Solitude at Vienna 43

VI “I doubt whether there is a city on Earth where more
pianists are to be found than in Paris” 55

VII Happy Years, Working Years 67

VIII Marie Wodzinska and the Dusk 76

IX First Sketch of George Sand 94

X Letters of Two Novelists 103

XI The Chartreuse of Valdemosa 127

XII “If music be the food of love, play on” 144

XIII On some Friendships of Chopin, and on his Æsthetics 159

XIV Misunderstandings, Loneliness 177

XV Chagrin, Hate 192

XVI The Story of an Estrangement 205

XVII Swan Song 228

XVIII “The Cypresses have their caprices” 247

XIX The Death of Chopin 251

XX An Epitaph for a Poet 257

Sources 263

Index 267