Читать книгу Chopin - Adam Zamoyski - Страница 10

‘I go to bed at nine; all tea parties, soirées and balls have gone by the board,’ a despondent Chopin wrote to Jan Białobłocki as he began his studies at the Conservatoire in the autumn of 1826. He was beset by a succession of minor ailments, such as toothache, neuralgia and digestive problems. ‘I drink emetic water on Dr Malcz’s orders and stuff myself with oat gruel like a horse.’¹ It was hardly a propitious start to his hard-won musical studies.

The Warsaw Conservatoire, founded in 1821, offered entrants a number of courses to choose from. The one selected by Chopin consisted of three years of musical theory and counterpoint, the last of which was to be devoted to practical work such as writing masses and oratorios to Polish and Latin texts, vocal compositions of various types, works for orchestra, and chamber music. But he seems to have created his own curriculum from the start. When he joined the Conservatoire in September 1826, he took six lessons a week in counterpoint from Elsner and spent the rest of the time working on his own. Elsner was an enlightened teacher, who saw his role as that of adviser. ‘When teaching composition, one should never provide recipes, particularly with pupils of obvious ability,’ he explained; ‘if they wish to rise above themselves, they must find their own, so that they may have the means of discovering that which has not been discovered yet.’² But Chopin found even this relaxed discipline taxing.

In accordance with the compromise reached with his father, he was also attending lectures at the University. Although the original idea had been that he should take a course in general subjects, he soon narrowed this down. The only course he seems to have followed seriously was that on Polish Literature given by the poet Kazimierz Brodziński, whose lectures covered a range of subjects, from aesthetics to folklore, which he was busily recording.³

Chopin had been born into a society that was in the process of reinventing itself: the old Poland embodied in the Commonwealth had failed and been dismembered at the end of the eighteenth century, and patriots bent on the re-establishment of a Polish state were aware that they must create a new synthesis of nationhood on which to build it. This involved, amongst other things, cultural redefinition based on a reassessment of the past and the integration of the mass of common people into the national project. Wittingly or not, Chopin was, through his music, doing just that, by distilling the essence of the old chivalric ideals on the one hand and reaching into the soul of popular culture on the other to create a new national idiom immediately recognisable to all. In this, he virtually epitomised the zeitgeist of his generation. Yet in certain fundamental ways he stood apart from his peers.

Given the accent placed in the Chopin household on education, and particularly on literature – his sisters Ludwika and Emilia had published poems and even a jointly written novel for children – Chopin could hardly fail to be aware that his generation was making literary history. Yet he failed to show any deep understanding of contemporary Polish writers. He did set to music some of the poems of the leading Romantic Adam Mickiewicz, as well as works by his friend the much lesser poet Stefan Witwicki, but he was far too down-to-earth in his approach to life to catch the spirit of exaltation that nourished the Romantic movement. He saw himself as a craftsman, focused exclusively on achieving greater skill and deeper knowledge in his chosen craft of music.

And even in this chosen craft, Chopin remained remarkably aloof from contemporary trends. His reverence for Bach continued undiminished – more than a decade later, he could still play all the Preludes and Fugues from memory, explaining: ‘That is something one never forgets!’⁴ As he learnt more about the theory of music, he developed a greater respect for Haydn, whom he valued for his ‘experience’, and for Mozart, who became his God. The only fashionable music Chopin was enthusiastic about was that of the Italian school. Elsner, who disliked it, steered him towards the music of Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles and the Irishman John Field – hardly exponents of the Romantic movement.⁵

Chopin’s attitude to the world was far removed from that of the typical Romantic. As he entered his eighteenth year he had his first close experience of death, when his fourteen-year-old sister Emilia died of consumption before his eyes. He was profoundly shaken. Where most of his peers would have poured out their grief and indulged their emotions, he did not wallow in his pain – he locked it away in a compartment of his mind where he could revisit it privately.

Soon after Emilia’s death the family moved house, to an apartment in one of the wings of the Krasiński Palace, just across the road from the Lycée. Nicolas Chopin had acquired a third job, teaching at the advanced military school of artillery and engineering, presided over by the revered General Józef Sowiński, who had lost a leg fighting for Napoleon at the battle of Borodino in 1812, and who became a friend of the family. Nicolas had saved enough to be able to do without boarders, which was fortunate as the other two Chopin girls were growing into young ladies, and the presence of young men in the home might have presented a hazard. The new apartment contained a drawing room with a fine view over the most handsome street in Warsaw, and, being so close to his previous home, the move did not affect Chopin’s way of life. On the other hand, it was quieter, and the family now enjoyed greater privacy. Chopin had his own ‘refuge’, a small room at the top of a rickety staircase which accommodated his piano.

This was just as well; that year of 1827 was also something of a landmark in Chopin’s musical development, for it was now that he made his first attempts at writing for orchestra. The most interesting of these are the set of Variations for Piano and Orchestra on the theme of the La ci darem la mano duet from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which, as the Gazette Musicale de Paris asserted more than seven years later, ‘announce the superiority of Chopin’s nature with as much precision as felicity’.⁶

Chopin’s ability to write for the orchestra has often been questioned, and unfavourably compared with Beethoven’s magnificent interweaving of piano and orchestra. But to do this is to miss the point. Chopin used the orchestra essentially as an accompaniment to the piano, which it was meant to support rather than overshadow or outshine, and it is the piano that he used to develop his musical ideas.

He was growing increasingly sure of himself and the direction in which he was moving, and he was further encouraged by Hummel, who arrived in Warsaw to give a couple of concerts in April 1828, and who appears to have been impressed by Chopin. This first mark of recognition from an eminent musical personage was probably what prompted him to send copies of the Variations and his first Piano Sonata to publishers in Leipzig and Vienna.⁷

Chopin was now working on a new Rondo for two pianos, and this absorbed all his attention that summer, spent in a fine country house at Sanniki with his friends the Pruszak family. He was back in Warsaw at the end of August, just in time to see Rossini’s Barber of Seville and his latest opera, Otello, but the production was so bad that he longed to strangle the whole cast. His joy was all the greater when, a few days later, the chance of visiting a foreign capital presented itself.

A 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 smitten, but he was too shy to let this show, and made no attempt to attract her attention over the next few months.

He was now faced by an important hurdle, in the shape of his final exams at the Conservatoire; Nicolas Chopin would certainly take note of the results and plan his son’s future accordingly. It is not known what form the exams took, but they were partly based on his work over the past three years. As he considered this, Elsner noted in his diary that Chopin had ‘opened a new era in piano music through his astonishing playing as well as through his compositions’.¹⁴ In the official verdict on the exams in the Conservatoire register, he was more categorical: ‘Chopin, Fryderyk; third year student. Outstanding abilities; musical genius.’¹⁵

This would have been the logical moment for Chopin to set off on a foreign tour, but there seemed to be no way of financing it. The best he could do for the time being was to join a party of friends from the University who were going on a jaunt to Vienna. They left Warsaw immediately after the exams, on 21 July. On the way they visited the historic city of Kraków, and from there went on a couple of excursions, one down the Wieliczka salt mines, another through the scenic valley of Ojców. The cart they were travelling in got lost and then stuck in a stream, leaving them to wander for hours in the pouring rain before they found shelter and some straw for the night. That Chopin did not catch cold suggests that his health had improved considerably.

The little party reached Vienna on the last day of July 1829, and Chopin took an immediate liking to the city. He saw several operas, by Boieldieu, Meyerbeer and Méhul, went to a number of concerts, and found perfection everywhere. He had mastered the reticence which had held him back in Berlin, and immediately took steps to get acquainted with the musical establishment. He called on Haslinger, the publisher to whom he had sent the scores of the La ci darem la mano Variations and the C minor Sonata; on his old friend and teacher Wilhelm Würfel, who had moved back to Vienna; and on a venerable Polish music-lover, Count Husarzewski. They in turn introduced him to others, including the venerable Ignaz Schuppanzigh, violinist and leader of the quartet which had performed all Beethoven’s chamber music for him; the two foremost piano-makers, Stein and Graf; and, most important, the director of the Kärntnerthor Theatre, Count Gallenberg.

‘I don’t know what it is, but all these Germans are amazed by me, and I am amazed at them being so amazed by me,’ Chopin wrote to his parents a few days after his arrival.¹⁶ Haslinger, who had probably put aside the score of the Variations by an unknown Pole without looking at it, changed his attitude radically when the young man sat down at the piano in his shop and played them through. He promised to publish them if Chopin agreed to play them in public, and the project was taken up with enthusiasm by others. Würfel believed that the Viennese public was ‘hungry for new music’, Husarzewski predicted a resounding success, and Count Gallenberg offered his theatre free if Chopin wished to give a concert. Chopin himself was irresolute, and feared that Elsner and his family might not approve, but let himself be persuaded.¹⁷

The Kärntnerthor Theatre was booked for 11 August and, at Chopin’s request, a Graf piano provided. An orchestra was assembled, and a search made for others who might fill out the programme – all concerts at the time took the form of a succession of different artists performing in a variety of musical forms. There were problems at the rehearsal that afternoon, as the two pieces Chopin intended to play with the orchestra (the La ci darem la mano Variations and the Krakowiak Rondo) were written out in his usual careless way, and the disgruntled orchestra began to mutiny. They refused to play the Krakowiak, and it was only thanks to the diplomatic efforts of Tomasz Nidecki, whose travels had brought him to Vienna, that the concert took place at all. Nidecki made a clean copy of the scores of the Variations, which the orchestra eventually agreed to play. ‘At seven o’clock in the evening I made my appearance on the Imperial and Royal stage!’ Chopin wrote to his parents the following day.¹⁸

The concert opened with the orchestra playing the overture from Beethoven’s Creatures of Prometheus, after which Chopin appeared on stage to play his Variations. He was not nervous of the Viennese audience, but was a little put out to find a highly rouged gentleman sitting down next to him, boasting that he had turned pages for Hummel and Moscheles. The skirmish with the orchestra that afternoon had ruffled him, and he launched into the piece with ‘exasperation’, half expecting them to set a trap for him. But they played perfectly, while the delighted audience applauded after each variation and called him back for a second bow at the end. After an interlude of lieder sung by a lady from Saxony, Chopin reappeared on the stage to play a ‘free fantasy’ without orchestra. He started off by improvising on a theme from Boieldieu’s La Dame Blanche, which was playing to full houses in Vienna at the time, but was subsequently asked by the director of the theatre to play ‘something Polish’, whereupon he launched into an improvisation on a peasants’ wedding song, which, in his own words, ‘electrified’ the audience. When he had finished, the orchestra itself broke into applause, and he was called back for a second bow. Count Dietrichstein, the Emperor’s director of music, came onto the stage and publicly congratulated Chopin, urging him to prolong his stay in Vienna.¹⁹

Chopin could hardly believe his triumph. He had grown used to popularity in Warsaw, but a reception like this from an audience which was used to hearing the greatest masters was something else. His friends had dispersed themselves strategically among the audience and reported its reactions to him, the worst of which came from an old lady who enjoyed the music, but sighed: ‘What a pity the young man hasn’t got a better tournure!’²⁰ But what really went to his head was the sincere admiration of renowned older musicians like the composer Conradin Kreutzer, the virtuoso violinist Josef Mayseder and Gyrowetz, whose concerto Chopin had played at his first public concert eleven years before. It is true that when asked how he had managed to grow into such a fine musician in Warsaw, he answered that ‘With Messrs Żywny and Elsner even a halfwit would learn,’ but this was probably said more out of bravado than conviction.²¹

The only criticism to be heard, not for the first or the last time in Chopin’s life, was that his playing lacked vigour and volume, or was, as he himself put it, ‘too delicate for those accustomed to the piano-bashing of the local artists’. This did not concern him unduly, but he felt obliged to warn his parents not to worry about it either, writing: ‘I expect that criticism to be made in the papers, particularly as the editor’s daughter enjoys nothing like a good thump at her piano.’²² While having dinner at the hotel after the concert, Chopin overheard unfavourable reactions from a man who had just come back from the Kärntnerthor, but as he remarked philosophically, ‘the man who will please everyone has not been born yet’.²³ It was not the first time he noticed that he pleased the more refined.

Prince Lichnowsky, Beethoven’s friend and patron, could not find words enough to praise Chopin, a reaction shared by others with resounding names such as Schwarzenberg and musical reputations like that of Czerny, a pupil of Beethoven and teacher of Liszt, whom Chopin found ‘warmer than any of his com positions’.²⁴ They suggested he give a second concert, and he accepted without protest, excusing himself to his parents for his presumption with the observation that people in Warsaw would not believe that the first had been a success unless it was repeated.

Exactly a week later, on 18 August, Chopin again appeared at the Kärntnerthor. By this time Nidecki had helped him to rewrite the parts of the Krakowiak Rondo, so he was able to perform that. ‘Everyone from Kapellmeister Lachner right down to the piano tuner was astonished by the beauty of the piece,’ Chopin wrote home with pride.²⁵ Again he was called back for a second bow, and even a third, after which the audience called for an encore, a rare occurrence in those days. Rarer still, the orchestra was prepared to join in, so he was able to play the La ci darem la mano Variations as an encore. If the success of the first concert had seemed a little unreal, there was no mistaking the reaction of the audience now. Chopin had got what he had been longing for: an appraisal at the hands of an unbiased and discerning public. As he quipped after the event, he would give up music and become a house-painter if he heard any unfavourable criticism after this.²⁶

Chopin was still, at the age of nineteen, naïve and inexperienced, and this first brush with the commercial side of musical life did not fail to disillusion him. The tetchiness of the orchestra, underscored by petty jealousy, Haslinger’s calculations regarding the printing of the Variations, and the gracious way in which Count Gallenberg lent his theatre while taking money for tickets without volunteering to pay a fee had opened his eyes, and he felt ‘cleverer and more experienced by four years’.²⁷ But such considerations counted for little when set against his reception and the reviews which began to appear as he was preparing to leave the Austrian capital.

‘Chopin surprised people, because they discovered in him not only a fine, but a very eminent talent,’ one of them explained, going on to say that ‘on account of the originality of his playing and compositions, one might almost attribute to him already some genius, at least as far as unconventional forms and pronounced individuality are concerned’. It went on to identify ‘a certain modesty which seems to indicate that to shine is not the aim of this young man’, and summed up accurately Chopin’s attitude when playing before an audience: ‘He emphasised but little, like one conversing in the company of clever people, not with the rhetorical aplomb which is considered by virtuosos as indispensable.’ The reviewer hailed him as a ‘true artist’, pointing out that his improvisation had delighted a public ‘in whose eyes few improvisers, with the exception of Beethoven and Hummel, have as yet found favour’.²⁸ Another called him a ‘master of the first rank’, declaring that his compositions bore ‘the stamp of great genius’ and comparing his appearance in the musical world to that of ‘the most brilliant meteors’.²⁹ The reviewer who must have pleased Chopin more than all the others wrote:

He is a young man who goes his own way, and knows how to please in this way, although his style of playing and writing differs greatly from that of other virtuosos, and indeed chiefly in this; that the desire to make good music predominates noticeably in his case over the desire to please. ³⁰

It was in high spirits that Chopin and his friends left Vienna for Prague, the next city on their itinerary. They spent three days there, sightseeing and calling on some of the local musicians, after which they travelled on towards Dresden, pausing at Toeplitz, whence they went on an excursion to Wallenstein’s castle at Dux. While in Toeplitz, Chopin stumbled on a Warsaw acquaintance who was a distant relative of the lord of the place, Prince Clary, and who took him along to meet the Prince that evening. Chopin’s pleasure at being in such company is evident:

We went in; the company was small but select – some Austrian Prince, a general whose name I forget, an English sea-captain, several young dandies, apparently Austrian Princes too, and a Saxon general called Leiser, covered in medals, with a scar on his face. After tea, before which I talked a good deal with Prince Clary himself, his mother asked me whether I would ‘deign’ to sit down at the piano (good piano – Graf ’s). I did ‘deign’, but asked the company to ‘deign’ to give me a theme to improvise on. Thereupon the table at which the fair sex were knitting, embroidering and crocheting came to life with cries of ‘Un thème!’ Three Princesses consulted together and finally sought the advice of Mr Fritsche (young Clary’s tutor I think), and he, with general assent, gave me a theme from Rossini’s Moses…³¹

The Clarys invited Chopin to spend another day in Toeplitz, but he wanted to press on to Dresden, where he arrived with his friends on 25 August. He visited the celebrated art gallery, went to the theatre to see Goethe’s Faust, called on some of the city’s musicians, and then left for Warsaw, feeling like a homecoming hero.