Читать книгу The Music of the Netherlands Antilles - Jan Brokken - Страница 14

One European composer was an instant hit when his work reached Oriente, Havana, Saint-Pierre, San Juan, and Willemstad. The primary reason was that he was able to elevate all sorts of banal dances into sublime forms of music.

Chopin was best suited to the Caribbean temperament, with his mix of volcanic fire and cooling wistfulness, of refinement and rhythm, of melody and dance. To a Caribbean islander, music is only music if you can dance to it, as is certainly the case with waltzes and mazurkas. Consequently, Caribbean composers started composing waltzes and mazurkas in great numbers.

Polish dances were used by European composers from Rameau to Mozart, long before Chopin was born. They even enchanted Johann Sebastian Bach, who composed a polonaise in his Leipzig period. Chopin heard the simple harmonies at their source: the peasant weddings and harvest feasts he attended on the country estates of his friends in the region around Warsaw. The polonaise and mazurka were excellent vehicles for him to use in his attempts to radically implement musical innovations without shedding traditional structures. Within the fixed confines of a dance form they offered him great stylistic freedom, and he was able to ingeniously exploit them to the fullest.

The mazurkas became, as Benita Eisler wrote, “the laboratory of the alchemist.” They were a place where Chopin could experiment with expanding the traditional structure of the dance form, but where he could also play with fire. He kept erupting out of strict rhythmic confines, leaning more toward the volatile, the asymmetrical, to mutant forms and sharp dissonances, allowing them to accelerate at a feverish pitch before collapsing in the end. In the words of Benita Eisler, his mazurkas “complied with the ultimate demands of the romantic: ‘beauty that is touched by the exotic.’”

Chopin already had something in him of the jazz musician who thrives on balancing at the cutting edge of every single measure. His contemporaries had a hard time accepting that aspect of his playing. Even Hector Berlioz, himself an innovator and upstart in many ways, complained in his autobiography like an old schoolmaster about some young whippersnapper: “If you ask me, Chopin has pushed rhythmic freedom far too far.”

Chopin was just as quirkily adept at turning his hand to waltzes. During his stay in Vienna, he witnessed the rise of Johann Strauss Sr. and in a letter to his father he wrote: “They call a waltz a ‘work’ here.” He thought the Viennese waltz constituted bad taste, but he could not resist exploiting the stuffy one-two-three beat with as many melodic options as he could. In the final analysis, the polonaise was also rhythmically boring. Chopin had already begun experimenting with it at the age of eight and did not rest until he had composed his Grande Polonaise Brillante, a brilliant piece indeed, and just as impetuous as his Grande Valse Brillante.

The fact that he stuck so stubbornly to the dance beat, while at the same time treating it with such freedom, is what made him appeal to Caribbean composers. But they also recognized other facets of themselves in him: the Pole who had fled to France and ended up in between two worlds. He may have been the son of a Frenchman, but he had not spoken much French in his childhood. His father was just as patriotic as a born and bred Pole; he owed his upbringing and his career to a Polish family and considered himself one of them. Without the care of the Weydlich family, Nicolas Chopin would have taken over his father’s vineyard and remained just as illiterate as all the other small winegrowers of the Lorraine.

Owing to the cunning machinations of politics involving marriages between European royal families, the duchy of Lorraine was bequeathed to the former king of Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century. A Polish count took up residence in a castle near the village of Marainville; his secretary Weydlich took a shine to the young Nicolas, saw to his education, and took him with him to Poland in 1787. Nicolas was sixteen and left to avoid military conscription. In Warsaw he extended his knowledge of French and Polish literature, became adept at mathematics and music (he was an excellent flautist), and took part in the first Polish popular uprising in 1794. The noble, upper-class families saw in him the perfect home tutor: French by birth, Polish by disposition. He took up a post with Count Skarbek and moved to Zelazowa Wola, married a Polish domestic servant girl, and became father to a son and three daughters, to whom he all gave Polish names. He taught the Skarbek children French, and spoke Polish at home. In Warsaw, too, where he had found a better position, he refused to speak a word of French, even though it was the lingua franca of the upper echelons of society. The fear of being mistaken for a foreigner hounded him even in his dreams and was no less acute than the other thing that made him shudder: the fear of being buried alive. When his son left the country, he wrote to him in Polish. The fact that the replies he received from Fryderyk soon came from Paris and were signed Frédéric did nothing to change this; father and son continued to correspond in Polish about money and career matters, ill health, and the wretched situation in which Poland found itself.

Frédéric would never master French spelling and grammar. Even after having lived in Paris for several years he still spoke French with a strong accent. To make fun of his Slavic sibilants and rolling r’s, George Sand tauntingly called him Frik-Frik or Chip-Chip. She was crazy about his soft lisping voice; he was as ashamed of his pronunciation as he was with a crease in the trousers to his dinner jacket.

In France, Chopin felt exiled from both his country and language, and that was no doubt the major reason why he sought refuge in Polish melodies and dance forms.

A similar situation existed for composers from Curaçao. Most of them were of European descent, from France (Blasini), Sweden (Palm), England (Corsen), Germany (Ulder), or Holland (Boskaljon), but they no longer spoke the language of their forebears. At home or in public they spoke Papiamentu or Spanish, seldom Dutch even though it was the official language of the island. A part of them was European due to their exposure to European civilization, while another part was a product of living at the threshold of South America. In Chopin they encountered the same sort of split personality.

Their admiration for the Pole no doubt had to do with the character his music exuded. Chopin was an elegant creature, if not as appealing to the ladies as I imagined him to be when as a nine-year-old I cut his picture out of a radio guide. On advertisements to promote his performances, they always printed Delacroix’s portrait in which the composer is immortalized with those wild chestnut brown locks of hair, a sharp straight nose, and the brooding look of an introvert. In reality his hair was matted and colorless and he had a hooked nose, pouting lips, and timid-looking eyes without any lashes. His dandy image was an invention, intended to spread the spirit of romanticism. Notwithstanding, he did possess an inner refinement.

Chopin was reserved, proud, elegant, wistful, suddenly volatile and passionate, and then tranquil, closed, mysterious. He avoided women or sought refuge in impossible loves. Rejection was to be expected from the parents of the fifteen-year-old Maria Wodzinska, a young lady of noble birth in whom he was interested: he had no title and no money. When the inevitable rejection took place he slipped the letters from Maria in a folder and wrote on the cover in elegant calligraphy: “My Misfortune.” Like a true romantic, he cultivated his grief; George Sand had to practically kidnap him, and when she finally did snare him, he did not want to share his bed with her right away. She won her suit by mothering him and nursing him on Majorca, where he fell gravely ill. Chopin inspired love, he seldom expressed it; he gave, as Liszt wrote, “everything except himself.”

These were characteristics that matched the Caribbean temperament. Despite what the Dutch believe, Curaçaoans are neither crude nor ill mannered. Like true islanders they show a great deal of reservation at first toward foreigners. Even among themselves, they only show their true feelings with the greatest of difficulty; nowhere is the distance from the north to south shore very far, and on an island word gets around easily. In public they hide behind male pride or female respectability, but even more so through a show of exceptionally courteous manners. In familiar surroundings, the slightest incident is enough to trigger volatile displays of temper in no way inferior to that of the Latin American; yet their thoughts are just as easily distracted and they engage in the most heated debates with a faint smile on their faces. In fact, they are just as wistful as a sunset, and it is precisely this mood we hear in Chopin’s plaintive harmonies.

In Western Europe, the mazurka was not granted a long life. After Chopin’s death practically no composer dared try his hand at this dance form. The mazurka emigrated to Russia, where Tchaikovsky, Borodin, and Glinka indulged in it as the purest expression of the Slavic soul. Therefore Sergei Rachmaninov dedicated his 1894 mazurka to Tchaikovsky and not Chopin. The mazurka that formed the final movement of Rachmaninov’s Morceaux de Salon was composed shortly after Tchaikovsky’s death.

As far as I know Scriabin was the last Russian to compose an impressive series of mazurkas, written between 1888 and 1903. It was not until then that the mazurka began to become popular on the other side of the ocean. The dance was just as popular on Martinique and Guadeloupe as it was on Curaçao and Aruba; it was frequently a part of the concert repertoire in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo from 1890 until well into the twentieth century. Both salon pianists and jazz orchestras performed mazurkas.

Chopin’s influence could be heard throughout the Caribbean islands during the entire twentieth century, and his name lived on, from Havana to Kingston Town.