Читать книгу Chopin - Adam Zamoyski - Страница 11

Chopin had an unpleasant surprise when he reached Warsaw on 12 September. The Warsaw Courier had somehow managed to misconstrue the reviews of his concerts and had published what amounted to an unfavourable account of his Viennese triumph. He was able to show his friends the original versions, but it was too late to scotch the general impression of failure which had attached itself to his trip.¹

This only made Warsaw seem more provincial, and he could not even take solace in the sympathy of his friends. Białobłocki had died, Tytus Woyciechowski had retired to the country to look after his estate, others had gone abroad or, like Matuszyński and Fontana, were working hard at their university studies. Chopin had nothing to do, as he had finished his education and was waiting for the opportunity to begin his travels. As before, the main obstacle was lack of money. While he had been in Vienna, the rest of his family had paid a visit to Prince Antoni Radziwiłł at his summer residence of Antonin, and the consequence of this was an invitation for Chopin to spend the season in Berlin with the Prince. But he was not keen on the idea. Berlin had seemed provincial to him, and he longed for Vienna, Italy and Paris. He must have also considered the possibility of visiting England, for he was now, along with Julian Fontana, taking English lessons – from an Irishman called Macartney, who was usually drunk and trying to borrow cash from the two boys.²

Chopin struggled on with his F minor Concerto (op.21, usually referred to as no.2, although it was the first he wrote) and with the first set of Études. He went to every performance at the opera and to every concert, however uninspiring, and spent much time at Brzezina’s music shop. Like all similar establishments, this was a cross between a shop and a drawing room, with something of the atmosphere of a coffee house thrown in. People interested in music would drop in, see what had arrived from abroad, browse, play pieces through on the piano, and discuss musical topics. Chopin and other musicians used to meet on given days at the rooms of Joseph Kessler, formerly pianist to Count Potocki at Łańcut and now a music teacher in Warsaw. What they played depended on who turned up with what instruments. This way they managed to play through many chamber works that autumn, including pieces by Spohr and Hummel, and a Trio by Beethoven. ‘I have not heard anything quite so great for a long time – in this piece Beethoven makes fools of us all,’ Chopin wrote afterwards to Tytus Woyciechowski.³

Now that Chopin had time on his hands, he entered into the life of the city to a greater extent, and frequented the coffee houses and other haunts of the young intelligentsia, who were in a state of political ferment. The death of Tsar Alexander I in 1825 and the accession of his brother Nicholas I to the throne had altered the political climate in Poland. While all but the most radical had been prepared to accept the Russian hegemony under Alexander, this was becoming extremely difficult under the increasingly autocratic rule of his successor. Chopin’s generation grew restive as it watched the constitution violated, books censored and manifestations of national feeling suppressed, and by the end of 1829 there was a palpable spirit of rebellion. Coffee houses such as Brzezińska’s, which Chopin frequented for coffee in the daytime and punch in the evenings, were the scene of fervent discussions and conspiratorial activity.

But while he was with his generation in spirit, Chopin was not interested in politics, and his closest companions were not revolutionaries but poets. Some, like Stefan Witwicki and Bohdan Zaleski, were also caught up in the nationalist movement, although the one he liked best, Dominik Magnuszewski, was an erratic dilettante poet and amateur musician with a melancholy bent and a sense of alienation from his contemporaries. But from Chopin’s letters to Tytus it is clear that he never developed real intimacy with any of them. ‘You cannot imagine how much I lack something in Warsaw now,’ he wrote. ‘I haven’t got anyone I can say two words to, anyone I can confide in.’⁴ He had a great deal he wished to confide, as he was still nurturing a secret love for Konstancja Gładkowska.

Throughout his childhood and teens Chopin had found the process of musical composition relatively effortless, and he had always been relaxed in his relations with others. Now, at the age of nineteen, he was finding it difficult to fulfil himself either artistically or emotionally, and the resulting sense of frustration pervades his letters. This makes it more difficult to assess his real feelings towards Konstancja, as they are inextricably bound up with that frustration whenever he touches on them. She certainly had no idea of what was going through the composer’s mind, and carried on flirting with a couple of officers less bashful than Chopin. The presence on the scene of these strapping young bloods only served to underline his sense of his own physical shortcomings. His reaction was to withdraw into himself and wallow in self-pity.

In October, Chopin’s sombre thoughts were dispelled by a pleasant distraction. He had been asked down to the country by his godmother, Mrs Wiesiołowska, née Skarbek, whose estate lay close to Prince Radziwiłł’s Antonin, and although he was originally unenthusiastic about the idea, he did go on to stay at Antonin afterwards. He had a delightful sojourn in this ‘paradise’ with its two ‘Eves’, the young princesses, who managed to chase all thoughts of Konstancja from his head. The Prince was charming to him and showed him his own music, amongst which was an accompaniment to Goethe’s Faust which Chopin found surprisingly good.⁵ As well as talking music they made music, for the Prince was a good cellist. Chopin wrote a Polonaise for piano and cello specially for him and his daughter to play. ‘It is nothing but glitter, for the drawing room, for the ladies,’ he explained to Tytus. ‘I wanted Princess Wanda to learn to play it; I’m vaguely supposed to be giving her some lessons while I’m here. She’s young (seventeen), pretty, and it’s a real joy placing her little fingers on the keys.’ He always warmed to anything delicate, pretty and refined. ‘I could have stayed there until I was thrown out,’ he later wrote, but he soon returned to Warsaw, having promised to join the Radziwiłłs in Berlin in May 1830, which he hoped would give him time for another visit to Vienna first. Nothing was to come of these plans.⁶

Try as he might, he still could not get his F minor Concerto finished. He was in the ridiculous situation of being in demand and not being able to come up with the required works. On 6 December, his father’s name day, he arranged a concert in the Chopin apartment, with the participation of Żywny and Elsner, and on 19 December he took part in a public concert at the Merchants’ Club, at which he improvised so brilliantly that he was hailed in the papers as never before. The Polish press, which had largely ignored his existence until now, seems at last to have realised the importance of this national poet of the keyboard. ‘Mr Chopin’s works unquestionably bear the stamp of genius,’ concluded the Warsaw Courier; ‘among them is said to be a concerto in F minor, and it is hoped that he will not delay any longer in confirming our conviction that Poland too can produce great talent.’⁷

But the F minor Concerto was still unfinished, and it was not until 3 March 1830 that he was able to perform it. On that day he made up a small orchestra in the Chopin drawing room, and played the concerto, with Kurpiński conducting. The newspapers reviewed the concert as though it had been a public event, for there had been a select audience present. The Warsaw Courier described Chopin as the ‘Paganini of the piano’,⁸ while the Universal Daily carried a very long review, stating, amongst other things, that:

The creative spirit of the young composer has taken the path of genius…I felt that in the originality of his thought I could glimpse the profundity of Beethoven, and in the execution the art and pleasing qualities of Hummel…All the listeners were moved by these works, and those more closely associated with the artist were deeply affected. His old piano teacher was nearly in tears. Elsner could not conceal his joy as he moved about, hearing only praise of his pupil and his compositions. Kurpiński conducted the orchestra himself for the young artist. This is a real talent, a true talent. Mr Chopin must not hide it and must let himself be heard publicly; but he must also be prepared to hear voices of envy, which usually spare only mediocrity. ⁹

Egged on from all sides, Chopin agreed to perform, and on 12 March the Warsaw Courier informed the public that he would be giving a concert in the National Theatre. Two days later the same paper announced that all the tickets had been sold, although there were still three days to go before the event.

On the morning of 17 March Chopin rehearsed the concerto with full orchestra, under Kurpiński, and on the same evening played it through before his largest audience to date: eight hundred people. He also played his Fantasia on Polish Airs, sandwiched between overtures by Elsner and Kurpiński and some songs by Paër. In his meticulous diary, Kurpiński noted that, although the theatre had been packed with an enthusiastic audience, the piano used had been too soft-toned, and much of the effect had been lost.¹⁰ Chopin himself was not at all pleased with the performance. He realised that some people could not hear properly, and felt that the music had not got through to the audience, whose enthusiastic applause, he felt, was simply ‘to show that they hadn’t been bored’.¹¹

He could not have been more wrong, for although playing on his own quiet piano had clearly been a mistake, the reception was rapturous. The Warsaw newspapers were dominated by reviews of the performance, which in some cases took up a third of the whole issue. The critics could not make their minds up whether it was his playing or his compositions which were the more remarkable, and comparisons with Mozart and Hummel were bandied liberally. Hardly had the sound of his playing died away than a persistent chant for a second appearance began. This was arranged for 22 March, and a Russian general obligingly lent Chopin a strong Viennese instrument for the occasion. The concert opened with a symphony by Józef Nowakowski, an older Conservatoire colleague, after which Chopin played his concerto, the Krakowiak Rondo and an improvisation on a peasant song, again interspersed with other pieces. This time the music got through to everyone, and there was wild enthusiasm in the theatre. People shouted for a third concert, while a French pianist on his way to Moscow, who had dropped in out of boredom, rushed out to buy a bottle of champagne and insisted on toasting the unknown young Pole.

Chopin’s playing had by all accounts been at its best. As one review put it: ‘It was as though his manner of playing was saying: “It is not me – it is music!”’¹² Another explained that ‘Chopin does not play like others; with him we have the impression that every note passes through the eyes to the soul, and that the soul pours it into the fingers…’¹³ Yet another, by a music-lover called Albert Grzymała, compared his playing to ‘a beautiful declamation, which seems to be the natural medium of his compositions’.¹⁴ Perhaps the most interesting reflection, summing up as it did the whole of Chopin’s career as a performing artist as well as his attitude to life as a musician, was made by a society lady, whose diary entry for the evening of the concert was printed in the Polish Courier, and after heaping praise on him, noted:

Chopin’s playing is like, if I may express myself in such manner, the social ton of an important and substantial person who lacks any pretentiousness, because he knows he has a natural right to everything; it is like a young innocent beauty, whose mind has not been tainted by the idea that she could increase her charms through dress. You could be accused of the same innocence, you interesting artist! The stage requires brilliance, excellence, and even something of the terrible, for while the really beautiful and gentle tones are understood by the few, they make only a weak effect on others, and none at all on the many. But even this reproach is a compliment to you…¹⁵

The reproach was certainly justified, for now that he had been reviewed and praised more than Paganini and Hummel during their visits, now that the whole of Warsaw had finally understood his playing and his compositions, Chopin did not give the third concert everyone was clamouring for, even though the money involved would have meant freedom to travel wherever he liked. He explained his reluctance to Tytus by saying that he had nearly finished his second piano concerto (the one in E minor, usually called no. 1), and that, wishing to have something new for his next appearance, he would wait until this was ready, which he hoped would be after Easter.

The real reasons for his refusal lay elsewhere. He found the preparations for the concerts exhausting and stressful, as he had to select musicians and decide whose music would be chosen for the programme, which in a small place like Warsaw was a delicate operation. Friends and acquaintances took offence when he failed to reserve boxes for them or personally invite them to the event. ‘You wouldn’t believe what torture the three days before the concert are,’ he wrote to Tytus after the first one; but he was soon to discover that the period afterwards could be equally bruising.¹⁶

He was horrified by what he considered to be the exaggerated praise and sycophancy that accompanied his appearances: he received verse offerings from hacks; his old friend Alexandrine de Moriolles sent him a crown of laurels; Antoni Orłowski, a colleague from the Conservatoire, was busy writing Waltzes and Mazurkas to themes from Chopin’s concerto; and the music publisher Brzezina wanted to print a lithograph portrait of him. At the same time the newspapers carried a number of articles discussing the nature of Chopin’s genius and its position in the world of music. One long and somewhat illogical article ended up by thanking Heaven and Elsner that the young composer had not been allowed to fall into the hands of ‘some Rossinist’, an ill-concealed jibe at Kurpiński.¹⁷

This provoked an open war between those who were for Elsner and German music, and those who supported Kurpiński and Italian music. Chopin was appalled to find himself at the centre of the fracas, and did everything he could to extricate himself. He begged Antoni Orłowski not to print his com positions, and refused to allow Brzezina to publish a portrait. ‘I don’t want to read or listen to what anyone writes or says any more,’ he wrote petulantly to Tytus, for whose presence he longed more than ever.¹⁸

The quarrel had nothing whatever to do with Chopin himself, and he need not have felt in any way implicated in its un pleasantness. Yet the hitherto highly sociable and uninhibited composer was beginning to develop alarmingly sensitive spots. He had always been self-conscious enough to see the ridiculous in his own behaviour, and had in the past drawn great pleasure from describing it in letters to friends. It may be that this emanated from a deeper fear of being ridiculed by others; both his extreme modesty about his work and the arch tone in which he often referred to himself would suggest an underlying pride hiding behind bashfulness. As he reached the end of his teens and began to take himself a little more seriously – seriously enough to nurture a great passion – he shrank from anything that might expose him to criticism or judgement. His first major appearances as a professional musician had made him a public figure, which embarrassed him, and had provoked a squabble which disgusted and alarmed him. The episode only strengthened his conviction that any sort of public activity was bound, in one way or another, to expose him to unseemliness and possibly ridicule.

This was accompanied by an analogous development in his relations with other people. He still found it easy to make friends, and was outwardly sociable, but he grew more and more suspicious and wary of allowing them to approach too close. That is why the absent Tytus was not replaced by any other as Chopin’s confidant, and why their intimacy grew instead of waning. It also explains a great deal about Chopin’s behaviour with regard to Konstancja Gładkowska.

Warsaw was not a large city, and it would have been impossible for him not to have seen her quite often, either socially or at musical evenings. After his triumphal concerts she must have been more than ever aware of his existence. And yet it would appear that he continued to pine from afar, without attempting to let her know his feelings. Romantic adolescents are often more interested in nurturing emotions than in achieving intimacy with their object, but in Chopin’s case the fear of putting himself in an embarrassing position is probably what paralysed any move towards intimacy. It was less risky to keep pining and at the same time to channel his frustration and self-pity towards Tytus, who remained the only real presence in Chopin’s heart. ‘Nobody apart from you shall have a portrait of me,’ he wrote to Tytus after the fuss over Brzezina’s attempt to print his portrait; ‘– one other person could, but never before you, for you are dearer to me.’¹⁹

This intimacy went beyond the purely emotional. Tytus was a good pianist and wrote a little, and Chopin trusted his taste. Once he even wrote that Tytus had taught him how to ‘feel’ music.²⁰ Chopin was always sending him his ‘rubbish’ or ‘laboured bits of dreariness’, as he liked to refer to his works, particularly during the spring of 1830. ‘When I write something new, I’d like to know how you would like it,’ he wrote, ‘and I feel that my new concerto in E minor will hold no value for me until you have heard it.’²¹

Chopin’s infatuation with Konstancja, and the attendant sense of frustration, were no doubt responsible for this uncharacteristic uncertainty, and for the sudden need to give his music meaning. For the first and last time in his life he was overtaken by the Romantic urge to programme his music both sentimentally and thematically. ‘I say to my piano what I would like to be saying to you,’ he wrote to Tytus – and what he would like to be saying to Konstancja, he might have added.²² The Adagio of the new concerto he was writing, which was secretly dedicated to her, is the only piece of his whose meaning Chopin ever tried to explain. ‘It is not supposed to be strong, but romantic, calm, melancholy; it should give the impression of gazing at a spot which brings back a thousand cherished mem ories,’ he wrote. ‘It should be like dreaming in beautiful springtime – by moonlight.’²³ Other pieces written during the same period are also tinged with sentimentality, like the Nocturnes, op.9, the E flat major Étude of op.10, and some of the songs he wrote to Witwicki’s poems, like ‘The Wish’ or ‘Where Does She Lovę’ (op.74). Even Elsner noticed that some of the music from this period was inspired by ‘beautiful eyes’.²⁴

During the remainder of March and April Chopin let himself go to pieces. He had intended to finish his second concerto within a few weeks and perform it publicly at the end of April or the beginning of May, as he needed to pursue his career and earn more money, however much it cost him in ruffled sensibilities. He was still vaguely aiming to set out for Berlin in May, and thence go wherever seemed appropriate. But May came and went, and Chopin had neither finished his new concerto nor arranged another performance. While he was heaving sighs in Warsaw, Tsar Nicholas arrived for the state opening of the Polish parliament, and, as usual on such occasions, various artists converged on the city from abroad. These included the King of Prussia’s pianist Sigismund Woerlitzer; Miss Belleville, a fine pianist and pupil of Czerny, who had recently played Chopin’s La ci darem la mano Variations at a concert in Vienna; and the singer Henriette Sontag, a beautiful woman with a magnificent voice for whom Weber had composed the title role of Euryanthe six years before. She had retired from the operatic stage after her marriage to Count Rossi and now only sang in concerts.

She gave eleven in Warsaw, most of which Chopin attended. He went into ecstasies over her voice, the elegance and control of which he related to his own touch on the piano, but felt she lacked depth of expression. ‘She seems to breathe into the stalls with the scent of the freshest flowers, and she caresses, soothes deliciously, but rarely moves to tears,’ he wrote to Tytus.²⁵ Prince Radziwiłł, who had also arrived in Warsaw, introduced them. They immediately took a liking to each other, and since Henriette was besieged all day long by admiring dignitaries and aristocrats, she asked him to come and call on her in the mornings at her hotel. At this time of day he would find her in her déshabille, and he soon became infatuated with her. ‘You cannot imagine how much pleasure I have had from a closer acquaintance – in her room, on the sofa – with this “envoy of heaven” as some of the local hotheads call her,’ he wrote to his friend, all thoughts of Konstancja temporarily banished from his head.²⁶

Chopin had intended to give a concert himself during the Tsar’s visit, but for reasons which remain unclear no such event took place. While Miss Sontag sang to the various imperial majesties and Woerlitzer and Belleville played to them, people in Warsaw wondered why Chopin did not. It may be that his contacts with some of those identified by the authorities as subversive elements had something to do with it.

With the end of June, the parliament dissolved and people began to leave the city. At the beginning of July the Haslinger edition of the La ci darem la mano Variations arrived in the Warsaw shops, and Chopin agreed to play them at a concert given on 8 July by a singer who had taken part in his earlier appearances. The audience was small, the public wearied by all the activity of the previous weeks, and although the reviews were favourable, the event failed to make any great impact.

Chopin was wondering what to do next. Romuald Hube, one of his companions on the previous year’s trip to Vienna, with whom he had been intending to travel to Paris that summer, and then on to Italy, had departed, leaving him stranded in Warsaw. Since Tytus had not come to Warsaw as he had intended, and as Chopin had nothing better to do, he went to stay with him in the country, apparently intending to spend some time there. But after he had been there only two weeks, he read in the papers that Soliva had organised a concert in which Konstancja was to make her stage debut, and he rushed back to Warsaw, much to the annoyance of Tytus.

The event may have been emotionally rewarding for Chopin, but when it was over he was once more at a loose end, harking back to his stay with Tytus. ‘Your fields have left me with a dull longing,’ he wrote; ‘that birch tree before your windows will not leave my thoughts.’ In an attempt to dispel these he went to join the rest of his family who were staying with the Skarbeks at Żelazowa Wola.²⁷ He spent a couple of weeks there, adding the finishing touches to his E minor Concerto. On the warm summer nights the piano would be wheeled out onto the terrace, and Chopin would play to the house party and to the local children who would creep into the park to listen.²⁸

In the middle of August Chopin returned to Warsaw, and although he was restless and bored, he took no action to bring forward his departure. ‘Nothing draws me abroad,’ he wrote to Tytus. ‘Believe me that when I leave next week it will only be out of deference to my calling and common sense (which must be very small, since it cannot banish everything else from my mind).’²⁹ But while plans for a departure ‘next week for certain’ were announced in one letter, this was followed by another a couple of weeks later in which he informed his friend that ‘I’m still here; I don’t have enough will to decide on the day…’³⁰ The delays may have had something to do with the alarming situation in Europe: in July a revolution in Paris had swept the Bourbons from the throne and replaced them with a constitutional monarchy under Louis Philippe, another revolution had broken out in Belgium against Dutch rule, and there were rumblings of discontent in various other parts of the Continent. But they probably had as much to do with Chopin’s own state of mind.

By the end of the summer he had reached new heights of emotional turmoil, ostensibly on account of Konstancja. Having met her well over a year before and immediately recognised her as his ‘ideal’ (the very word is redolent of schoolboy ritual), he had still not declared himself to her. ‘I could go on hiding my pathetic and ungainly passions for another couple of years,’ he wrote to Tytus, at the same time stressing their depth and force.³¹ Strong his feelings may have been, but they were certainly not exclusive. The brief infatuations with the Radziwiłł girls and Henriette Sontag are only some of the manifestations of an acute susceptibility to women. From his letters we know that at one soirée in August he saw a girl (who of course reminded him of Konstancja) whom he could not take his eyes off, and who had set his heart on fire by the end of the evening. Another day, in church, he caught the eye of ‘a certain person’, as a result of which he staggered out in a state of sensuous inebriation and nearly got himself run over by a passing carriage.

These and similar stories are recounted to Tytus in tones of mawkish self-pity, alongside assurances that he, Tytus, is in fact the most important person in Chopin’s life. While reaffirming his constant and undying love for the girl, he would write to his friend that he thought constantly of him: ‘I do not forget you, I am with you, and it shall be so till death.’³² It was Tytus who would have a portrait of Chopin before Konstancja, and it was Tytus who was the recipient of what would have been love letters to Konstancja, had Chopin dared write to her. These letters, sometimes friendly, sometimes petulant, sometimes verging on the passionate, are freely strewn with declarations of love and affinity, and contain passages of extraordinary sensuality.

This has prompted some to conclude that the two young men were or had been lovers. On the face of it, the equivocal references to passions, secrets and torment combine with the extremely specific terms of endearment to make this appear plausible. Chopin signs off one letter to Tytus with the following jumble of childishness and coy eroticism:

I must go now and wash. So don’t embrace me now, as I haven’t washed myself yet. – You? If I anointed myself with fragrant oils from the East, – you wouldn’t embrace me, not unless I forced you to by magnetic means. But there are forces in Nature, and tonight you will dream that you are embracing me. – I have to pay you back for the nightmare you caused me last night! ³³

Taken out of context, this may appear a little risqué, as might the endless kisses sent and demanded by Chopin. But these expressions were, and to some extent still are, common currency in Polish, and carry no greater implication than the ‘love’ people regularly sign off with today. And the traces of infantile eroticism in the letters are of little significance in themselves. The spirit of the times, pervaded by the Romantic movement in art and literature, favoured extreme expression of feeling and glorified transcendent friendship, and it is probably this that lies at the heart of these letters, written as they were at a period in Chopin’s life when he came nearest to living out the Romantic ideal.

While the possibility cannot be ruled out entirely, it is highly unlikely that the two were ever lovers. Had the slightly sentimental relationship between the older, stronger boy and his gentler, more emotional classmate really developed into a sexual rapport, it would almost certainly, knowing Chopin’s malleable and undecided nature, have become an exclusive and long-lasting passion. In such a case there would have been no reason for Chopin to sit about being bored in Warsaw while the bucolic seclusion of Tytus’s estate beckoned.

Tytus’s role in Chopin’s life was nevertheless an important one. ‘I swear that only you have power over me, you and…no one else!’ Chopin wrote, somewhat dramatically, to his friend, and he was hardly exaggerating.³⁴ His upbringing had marked his character. The strong paternal authority to which he had been subjected had rendered him almost incapable of making a decision on his own. His loving mother and admiring sisters had led him to demand and expect boundless affection from people. The sheltered and regular life of the Chopin household only served to make the outside world and its cares seem more problematic and frightening. While his early exposure to a wide acquaintance had developed in him a gift for easy sociability, this was, apparently, accompanied by a certain fear of giving himself. All this made Chopin dependent, now that he was beginning to live outside his family, on the support of friends. Since he was finding it increasingly difficult to get close to people, he clung more and more to his old friend Tytus. He kept trying to abdicate responsibility, begging Tytus for advice and direction, but Tytus apparently evaded the responsibilities of a mentor and pressed Chopin to take a hold on himself. At the same time he became the recipient of some of Chopin’s repressed or frustrated feelings, which is why some of the letters he received from the young composer read like love letters.

In Warsaw, Chopin’s only close friends were Jan Matuszyński, who was pursuing medical studies, and Julian Fontana, who had now, after finishing his studies at the Conservatoire, taken up law at the University. Along with Witwicki, they formed a small group which often met at the house of their friend the poet Dominik Magnuszewski. The latter lived with his grandfather, a former judge who seemed to embody the spirit of pre-partition Poland, still dressing in the traditional costume of the Polish nobility. Chopin and his friends loved to listen to him talking about that past which now seemed so distant. The atmosphere of the old Poland had been superseded by the more modern and secular spirit of the 1820s, and Chopin was strongly drawn to what was heroic and elegant about it – it was this he was attempting to capture in the rhythmic and melodic gestures of the more sophisticated Polonaises he was beginning to write.

The atmosphere at Magnuszewski’s house was congenial, and here he could let himself go with abandon. ‘Everyone always wanted him to improvise,’ Magnuszewski’s sister recorded. ‘He never tried to wriggle out of this, but first he would ask my sister Klara, who had a beautiful voice, to sing something, and it was only afterwards that he would start. We would sit in silence for hours, listening to that music which fired our young souls, and afterwards we would usually start dancing. At that point the dreamy improviser would turn into a lusty player and start thundering out Mazurkas, Waltzes and Polkas until, tired of playing and eager to join in the dancing himself, he would cede the keyboard to a humbler replacement, Fontana, who played fluently and beautifully.’³⁵

By mid-September, Chopin was trying out various movements of his new E minor Concerto in quartet or other forms, and on the twenty-second he arranged a full performance of the work in the Chopin apartment, again with a select audience of music-lovers, amongst whom were Count Skarbek, Grzymała and Witwicki. It was they who reviewed the event in the press and prompted a public clamour for Chopin to make himself heard. His travel plans had again been put off. He therefore agreed to give a concert, and what is more, invited Konstancja and her fellow pupils to take part in it. This entailed obtaining permission from the Minister of the Interior, which was not difficult, and also getting Kurpiński, who had a natural right to be the conductor, to cede his place to Soliva for the evening, which was a more delicate matter. This activity woke Chopin from his lethargy, and he was now seriously planning his departure as well. ‘A week after the concert at the latest I shall have left Warsaw,’ he wrote to Tytus, who had agreed to accompany him.³⁶ Chopin was, for once, decided; he had bought a trunk and clothes, and was writing out the scores he would need on his travels.

The concert which took place on 11 October 1830, his last in his native country, went off perfectly. He played his E minor Concerto and the Fantasia on Polish Airs. The concerto benefited from the conducting of Soliva, who took it slowly and did not let the over-excited Chopin get carried away. ‘I was not the slightest bit nervous, and I played as I play when I’m alone,’ he wrote to Tytus. Konstancja sang an aria as never before and looked seductive, the other performances were good, and the Fantasia, which he played at the end, delighted him and the audience. ‘This time I understood what I was doing, the orchestra understood what they were doing, and the public understood as well,’ he wrote. ‘It seemed to me that I had never been so much at ease when playing with an orchestra.’³⁷

Chopin was delighted with every aspect of the evening, but it is worth noting that the hall, with only seven hundred people in the audience, was not quite full, and that notwithstanding the deafening applause, there was only one review of the concert, and that a short one.

Chopin himself was convinced that the theatre had been full, and was probably relieved by the silence in the press. He was by now busy with the preparations for his departure, and had to pay farewell calls on all his acquaintances, many of whom gave him letters of introduction to friends and relatives in Vienna. On 25 October he called on Konstancja in order to take his leave.

At some stage in the course of the previous weeks Chopin had at last given her some intimation of his feelings, and he had apparently met with a good reception. Rings were exchanged and Chopin was allowed to write to her, through the discreet agency of Matuszyński. At this last meeting, she wrote a little verse into his album, which ended with the lines:

Others may value and reward you more.

But they can never love you more than we do.

[At some later date, Chopin added, in pencil: ‘Oh yes they can!’]³⁸

On the evening of 1 November, a party of friends organised a farewell dinner attended by Nicolas Chopin, Żywny, Magnuszewski, Fontana and others. They sang, danced and played late into the night, after which they walked Chopin back to his house. The next morning he made his last farewells while Ludwika finished copying some of the scores he was taking with him, and in the afternoon the family accompanied him to the coaching station. Neither the young man nor his worried family knew how long he would be away or how he would fare alone in the world.

The coach trundled away, through the dingy western suburb of Wola, but was stopped just after passing the city gates. It was surrounded by a group of men, who turned out to be Elsner with a small male choir. To the accompaniment of a guitar, they performed a cantata which the old man had composed for the occasion. It exhorted Chopin to remember his motherland, and to keep its harmonies in his soul wherever he might find himself. There was something prophetic, both in the words and in the emotion with which Elsner embraced his pupil, as though he never expected to see him again. After the last tearful embrace, Chopin climbed back into the coach, which rolled away, bearing him off from his native land for ever.