There
is, however, another side to the story of victimhood that came to be known as
“captive Poland,” one that tapped into a larger narrative that had taken hold
in the early nineteenth century. Even as it was under constant attack by
foreign enemies, as far back as the sixteenth century Poland practiced a kind
of liberal humanism that even today seems fragile around the world. The idea of
a parliament, an assembly of members drawn from the community, took root there
in 1454; a century later, religious freedom was engraved into the Confederation
of Warsaw. “We swear to each other,” the document reads, “that we who differ in
matters of religion will keep the peace among ourselves, and neither shed blood
on account of differences of Faith, or kinds of church, nor punish one another
by confiscation of goods, deprivation of honor, imprisonment, exile.” The
nobility elected its kings in an elaborate ceremony that took place on
horseback in a meadow. They retained for themselves the right to control
military finances and declarations of war and taxation, and all it took was one
member’s vote to overrule any decision made by the king. Baked into the
political consciousness of Poland’s “Noble Democracy” was the right of
citizens—noble ones, that is—to resist. It was in Poland in May 1791 that the
first constitution in Europe was written and adopted; this is astonishing
because at the time its people lived in a fractured country carved up by a
“Satanic Trinity” of foreign autocrats. Even then, stateless and oppressed, the
Poles produced a document that poet Czeslaw Milosz called a “landmark [on] the
road to a new type of democracy.” It guaranteed freedom of the press, religious
tolerance, personal liberty, and, perhaps most important of all, the right of
peasants to acquire land. What Milosz describes as Poland’s “abnormal” history
gave rise to an idealistic notion of citizenship and individual freedom—values
that put many Poles in sympathy with the French in the years following their
revolution. It was precisely those values that posed an unacceptable threat to
the Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Romanovs who had claimed Poland’s lands for their
collective empires. It was only four years after Poland adopted its
unprecedented, progressive, enlightened constitution that the final partition
of 1795 wiped the country off the map of Europe. No longer a nation, Davies
writes, “Poland was now an Idea.”
For the
generation that followed, which included Chopin and his equally famous
compatriot, the poet Adam Mickiewicz, the Romantic ideal of the homeland
developed from all this violence and loss. It’s so ingrained in the Polish
character that the country’s own national anthem, composed two years after the
final partition, begins with the lines “Poland has not yet perished, as long as
we live.” This strange, oddly disheartening amalgam of verb tenses suggests
that patriotism is a perpetual fight to a death that never quite arrives. For
Mickiewicz, these words signify that “people who have in them what indeed
constitutes nationality are able to extend the existence of their nation
regardless of the political circumstances of that existence, and may even pursue
its re-creation.” What he meant is that even if their country was controlled by
foreign invaders, as so often was the case, the idea of Poland constituted the
nation itself in the hearts of its own people, and that idea could live on, no
matter what. When a friend of Chopin’s wrote that “through his music he
imparted Poland; he composed Poland,” this is what, I believe, he was
expressing: that Chopin’s music manifested the juxtaposition of tragedy and
hope that both define and animate the history and spirit of the Polish people.
What’s extraordinary is how enduring this legacy turned out to be.
The
decisive moment in Chopin’s story, and that of Poland during the first half of
the nineteenth century, came in 1830, when he was twenty years old and a spark
of independence flew in Warsaw. The year before, Nicholas I of Russia had
crowned himself King of Poland, disregarding the national constitution and
parliament. The czar’s brother and factotum, Grand Duke Constantine, unleashed
his secret police, abolished press freedoms, imposed taxes, closed Vilnius
University, and deported Mickiewicz, the country’s most famous poet. The final
insult was a Russian scheme to use Poland’s army against the people of France
to suppress their July Revolution, which deposed the last Bourbon monarch and
put Louis Philippe—the “citizen king”—on the throne. On November 29, 1830, a
cadet at the Warsaw officers’ school led a group of co-conspirators in an
attack on Constantine’s palace. The grand duke managed to escape (according to
one historian he scurried off in women’s clothing), but the failed rebellion
launched six months of unrest and turmoil.
Chopin
had left Warsaw three weeks before the November Uprising for a European sojourn
of music and adventure, traveling through Dresden, Vienna, Salzburg, and
Munich, going to the opera and immersing himself in the local musical life. It
being his first long-term trip abroad, a group of friends sent him off with a
silver cup filled with earth they had collected in Zelazowa Wola, the small
town where Chopin was born, thus allowing him to carry a bit of the beloved
homeland away with him on his travels. When the uprising began, Chopin’s
friends rushed home to join the fight, but insisted he remain in exile and use
his music to give voice to Poland’s struggle. Traveling the Continent, keeping
in touch with friends and family through a regular stream of letters, he went
to parties, dinners, plays, and operas. Then, as he wrote to a friend, he would
return home around midnight, sit down, “play the piano, have a good cry, read,
look at things, have a laugh, get into bed, blow out my candle and always dream
about you all.”
The
November Uprising lasted less than a year, and in September 1831 the Russians
brought the hammer down in Warsaw. From Stuttgart Chopin learned there was
hand-to-hand fighting in the streets, including in the cemetery where his
younger sister Emilia had been buried after suffering a massive tubercular
hemorrhage at age fourteen. Being separated from his family was, for Chopin, a
type of death. Only a month after he left home, he described himself as “a
corpse” and began using the metaphor of the crypt to convey his melancholia.
“Graves behind me and beneath me, everywhere,” he wrote to a friend; “a gloomy
harmony arose within me.” In Stuttgart, his separation anxiety developed into a
morbid, fantastical obsession with death. He imagined his family butchered, the
woman he loved in the hands of the Muscovites… “seizing her, strangling her,
murdering, killing.” In his notebook Chopin wondered: “is a corpse any worse
than I? A corpse… knows nothing of father, mother or sisters… it cannot speak
its own language to those around it.” He was voiceless, homeless, and alone,
“beyond ten frontiers” from friends and family, and to make matters worse his
passport had expired and there was no safe way back to Poland. Stuttgart was an
abyss; “I pour out my grief on the piano,” he confided to his diary. It was
during this time, as he faced his first Christmas alone, that he likely began
composing the harrowing B-minor Scherzo op. 20, a work that begins with a
piercing cry at the top of the keyboard followed by an anguished growl at the
bottom. It then proceeds on a frenzied, anxious journey until suddenly, and
surprisingly, the music devolves into a melody known and loved by all Poles,
the Christmas carol “Lulajze Jezuniu” (“Hush Little Jesus”), only to be rudely
interrupted again by the tonal lacerations that began the piece. The scherzo
concludes with the repetition, nine times in a row, of a single dissonant
chord, a piece of musical language that always elicits in me the same tragic
pain I experience when King Lear exclaims, over and over, the word Howl! after
discovering the hanged body of Cordelia.
This
early work contains Chopin’s musical signature: a collision of worlds fueled by
the polar opposites of mood, tempo, melody, and emotional shadowing he would
later deploy with such power in the funeral march of Opus 35. During this
period he experimented in many genres, taking, for example, the mazurka, a
lively, traditional Polish national dance, and reimagining it with startling
rhythms and chromatically induced inner conflict. Leonard Bernstein loved these
pieces, especially the op. 17, no. 4 Mazurka in A minor, because Chopin put him
in “a bliss of ambiguities.” In études, short practice pieces traditionally
designed to explore different aspects of performance technique, Chopin
experimented with tones, harmonies, and syncopations that would, a century
later, become standard features of modern jazz. He also took a salon genre, the
nocturne, and repurposed it. An early example is the otherworldly op. 15, no. 3
in G minor, composed in the early years of the 1830s. It begins in one style,
that of another Polish folk dance, the kujawiak, and then, after passing
through a dark, sometimes jagged melody, he pauses, almost like a novelist
reaching a chapter break, and changes the voice of the piece entirely, moving
into a chorale, a form of plainchant one might hear in a church service. Then,
before sending it off to his publisher, he slapped onto this strange-sounding
work the label “Nocturne,” a brand-new genre pioneered by an English composer,
John Field, which Chopin undertook to reinvent in his own voice and style.
These
were startling creations, works that threw listeners into an unfamiliar musical
landscape. For scholar Jim Samson it was this sojourn, far from home and with
news trickling in week by week of the worsening situation in Poland, that saw
Chopin’s now unmistakable tone journey from a post-Classical to a Romantic
idiom. Responding to the turmoil at home, he “renovated” the old forms, mixing
styles and bending genres, using a new kind of musical language to disrupt a
listener’s expectations and tell a different kind of story. Exiled from his
homeland, wandering through Europe trying to decide where to settle, Chopin
began developing the voice that would come to define his music deep into the
future. He arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1831, just weeks after the
uprising had been brutally put down, and virtually overnight became the poetic
embodiment of “captive Poland.” It would be just a few years later when the
story of the failed revolution and Chopin’s poignant separation from family and
friends crept into his writing and, without his planning it, formed the basis
of what would become his most famous composition. For not only is a love of
homeland deeply embedded in the funeral march; it’s where it all started.
The
earliest clue in the composition story of Opus 35 turns up in an unlikely
place: an auction house on Madison Avenue in New York City. It was a Tuesday in
March 1969 when the Parke-Bernet Galleries held a sale of “Important Autographs
and Manuscripts” that was noteworthy for its scope and variety: rare original
documents spanning three centuries, authored by notable figures in politics,
science, and the arts. Just a partial list includes Alexander Hamilton,
Napoleon Bonaparte, Clarence Darrow, Henry David Thoreau, Queen Victoria,
Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, John James Audubon, the abolitionist John
Brown, items from twenty-three American presidents (including a letter from
Thomas Jefferson stating “I am out of wine”), and a handwritten manuscript by
John Steinbeck. Also included was a musical fragment in the hand of Frédéric
Chopin, a manuscript consisting of just eight measures with no title except the
notation Lento cantabile: an instruction to the performer to play slowly, in a
singing style. (The word comes from the Italian verb cantare, to sing.) It’s
the melody of the Trio, the major-key lullaby that breaks up the two statements
of the minor-key march—the music that so startled me when I first heard it in
the Polish Consulate. This is the sweet, nocturne-like tune that invites you to
forget, at least for a moment, the heavy, violent dirge that precedes and
follows it.
Little
is known about the Parke-Bernet fragment, which immediately disappeared into
private hands after being acquired at the auction for $1,500, but the best
guess of scholars is that Chopin inscribed the music into someone’s autograph
album. These were popular in the nineteenth century: large, blank books bound
in leather that friends (and the occasional celebrity) would “autograph” with a
poem, drawing, musical sketch, or personal greeting. Some of these albums
apparently had pages with music staves that made it easy to dash off short
compositions, and Chopin was known to have inscribed his music into the albums
of friends and admirers. Once, for fellow composer Ignaz Moscheles, he wrote
out eight measures from the celebrated refrain of the 17th Prelude from op. 28,
popularly known as “Castle Clock” for the low A flat that is intoned eleven
times in a row, like a tolling bell. There’s something touching in this
gesture: one great musician copying a famous lick for another. In the case of
the Lento cantabile fragment there’s an intriguing clue about Chopin’s
intentions, and reason to believe he attached great sentimental value to that
lovely, portentous melody. It’s right there in the date near his signature,
November 27: the eve of the 1838 November Uprising in Warsaw six years earlier.
Lento
cantabile fragment.
No one
knows who the recipient of the Trio fragment was, but given the anniversary it
seems likely it was a fellow Pole living in exile in Paris, part of “the Great
Migration” from postrevolutionary Poland. What’s poignant about the discovery
of the fragment is it suggests that the roots of Chopin’s funeral march—one of
the saddest pieces of music ever written—were put down in the soil of patriotism
and hope, not death and loss. He built the minor-key march around this
beautiful, major-key melody; it was the seed from which the larger composition
grew. Yet all this is lost in the austere ceremonies and pop culture vignettes
where the march is so frequently evoked and riffed on, because when we hear
those iconic bass chords tolling a new death—be it of Joseph Stalin, Winston
Churchill, or Sylvester the Cat—we are hearing only the half of it, the part
Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein famously described as “night winds sweeping
over churchyard graves.” Outside of the concert hall where the entire work—both
statements of the funeral march bracketing the Trio—is played as written, most
of us never knew there was another, juxtaposing reality embedded in Chopin’s
contemplation of death. Like so much about the story of the man himself, his
most famous melody became a stereotype of sorrow, tragedy, illness, and death,
abrogated in the public sphere so it could serve a heroic purpose that, as
we’ll see, Chopin never intended for it.
Love of
country may have been inscribed into the original melody of the Trio, but there
was another ache in Chopin’s heart at the time he composed these lines:
rejection by his sweetheart, Maria Wodzinska. She was seventeen when he (then
twenty-six) proposed marriage, after they had spent much of the summer of 1836
together. By this time Chopin was a famous musician, but rumors of his ill
health had circulated widely. Maria’s mother, the Countess Teresa, seems to
have been torn between these two realities. Frédéric’s celebrity was attractive
to her for many reasons, not the least of which was his access to more
celebrities. In 1835 she wrote to him: “Forgive me, dear Mr. Fryderyk, if I ask
you to obtain for me a collection of the autographs of the famous people among
whom (quite rightly!) you live: Poles, Frenchmen, Germans, etc.—it’s all the
same to me—even a bearded Jew, such as we see at home, provided that he is
worthy of it. I shall be immensely grateful.” Whether Chopin complied is
unknown, but in the end Maria’s parents settled on a slow form of torture for
the poor man. Nervous about their daughter’s future happiness, they sat on his
marriage proposal and prevented Maria from replying. Chopin, trying to make the
best of it, joked in a letter to a friend that Maria’s father, after all,
considered him just “a street musician.” He returned to Paris to wait, but the
silence was agonizing. The following summer, with still no reply to his
proposal, he made a trip to London, hoping a change of scenery would ease his
mind. In salons he kept a low profile, going around town under cover as “Mr.
Fritz,” but the moment he sat down at a piano everyone knew who it was. Just
before his return to Paris in July 1837 he had his answer: Maria declined.
Chopin gathered together all her letters, placed them in an envelope, scrawled
across it “My Sorrow,” and secreted the package in his apartment, where it was
discovered after his death. It was just a few months after he received Maria’s
breezy, final epistle (“Goodbye, remember us”) that Chopin, recovering from a
broken heart and with the anniversary of Poland’s political upheaval in mind,
copied out the melody for the Trio.
The
literature about Maria Wodzinska is thin, and it’s hard to get a real sense of
her. She was not without talent, both as an amateur pianist and artist (she
painted one of the surviving and most evocative portraits of Chopin), but
history has not been kind to her. Her own niece described Maria as having had a
“passive nature,” being without “energy and independence… and easy to
influence.” Édouard Ganche, an early twentieth-century Chopin biographer,
dismissed her pretty much altogether: “It is useless to incriminate [her]
conduct,” he wrote. “She was a girl of seventeen years old, without will,
without courage.” Maria is interesting in the story of these years not because
she was Chopin’s last Polish love and callously broke his heart, but for the
way she prepares us for what’s to come: another liaison that will have, in the end,
a much greater consequence, with an artist who was, in the words of her
prolific rival and friend Honoré de Balzac, anything but passive: she was a
“lioness.” These very different women—the traditional Polish family friend and
France’s notorious, cigar-smoking, cross-dressing, writer (Ivan Turgenev: “What
a brave man she was!”)—represent two animating forces in Chopin’s life that
intersected around the time he began working on Opus 35. The first would
largely be forgotten; the second became the stuff of legend that still,
hundreds of years later, captivates modern imaginations.
Chopin
met George Sand the year he proposed to Maria, but it was not an auspicious
beginning. “What an unattractive person La Sand is,” he commented to a friend
after their introduction in late 1836. “There is something about her which
positively repels me.” (Maybe it was what Balzac also described as her “double
chin, like a canon of the church.”) Then he asked the question that was on so
many minds at the time: “Is she really a woman?” But when they met again two
years later, it was love at second sight. The situation, however, was
complicated, and in classic Sand style she treated the question of an affair
with the exotic Polish exile as she would a new writing project, casting it in
a sweeping, contemporary theme that was especially dear to both of their
hearts: nationhood. It was a subject that came naturally to her. Sand’s
autobiography, Story of My Life, was so huge it took a team of sixty-five
translators five years to produce the entire thing in English; she becomes so
immersed in the role her family played in the history of France that it takes
twenty-one chapters to get to her own birth. Sand’s memoir has been read by
scholars not just as the life of a singular woman but as the story of a century
of French history and the birth of the modern nation.
So when
Sand wrote a letter that was immense even by her own standards—more than five
thousand words—to Chopin’s closest friend to solicit advice about what course
their relationship should take, it was perfectly fitting she would cast the
drama in terms of patriotism. In the aftermath of revolutions in America,
France, Poland, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland, the idea of citizenship, of
national belonging, was the most powerful metaphor she could reach for when it
came to articulating the project of human love. Someone once said of George
Sand that “her work is an immense legal plea, advanced by an indefatigable
lawyer,” and her June 1838 letter to Albert (Wojciech) Grzymala, a Polish
statesman and banker variously described as a brother and father figure to
Chopin, is worthy of the Cour de Cassation, France’s highest court. She begins
with the reality on the ground: she is involved with another man (“as good as
married”) and Chopin is still in love with “this childhood friend… this young
lady.” After a peroration on chastity and her own honorable intentions she goes
all-out Cleopatra, casting their love in a language for the ages. “I have no
wish to steal anyone from anyone, unless it be prisoners from their jailers,
victims from their executioners, Poland from Russia.” She commands Grzymala to
“tell me whether it is some Russia whose memory haunts our boy,” in which case
she would, like the avenging sorceress in a popular opera, muster her
“allurements” and “save him from surrendering.” But: “if it is a Poland, let
him go on,” because “Nothing is so precious as a fatherland, and a man who has
one already must not make unto himself a new one.” If that were the case, she
goes on, “I shall represent for him an Italy… a land that one dreams of, longs
for or regrets… which one visits and enjoys on spring days but where one cannot
remain permanently.”
Like
almost everything Sand wrote, this masterful letter is about many things at
once, including a worldview about love and marriage that was well ahead of its
time and had been developing for many years. She had articulated her notion of
true love in a letter to a girlhood friend ten years earlier, explaining it
could only occur “when the heart, the mind, and the body understand and embrace
each other.” It was rare, she admitted—“This happens once every thousand
years”—but it became her lifelong project. She had begun working out these
ideas in her first novel, Indiana (1832), a highly unconventional portrait of
an unhappy woman trapped in a crippling marriage Sand describes as a form of
slavery: “the chain beneath which my life has been shattered and my youth
spoiled.” Now, instead of shackling herself and her companion to a traditional union
defined by laws of the state—“a graveyard for this artist soul” she said to
Gryzmala, no doubt speaking for them both—she puts forth a vision of ideal love
that eschews “the bonds of everyday life” and favors a true friendship based on
“chaste passion and gentle poetry.” Sand was famous for her gender-bending
liberation—dressing like a man, earning money by the pen like a man—but at this
moment in her life, when she met Chopin, she was focused on something more
complex: a penetrating contemplation of what gender really meant—for women and
for men. She would refine and develop this theme in Gabriel, the novel she
commenced writing just after the love affair with Chopin began, but it’s here,
in the “frightful letter” (her words) that she begins working out her ideas
about friendship between the genders, exploring a radical notion that people
should be able to love in “different ways.” She outwardly wrestles with “this
question of possession” that defined relations between men and women and seeks
a richer, more enlightened path, one that was unmoored from physical and sexual
burdens. She herself, Sand confides to Chopin’s mentor, had known many
varieties of love: that of an artist, a woman, sister, mother, nun (from her
Catholic school days), and poet. She believed that the heart can—and ideally
should—be large enough to contain two different but simultaneous loves: one
“for the body of life while the other is the soul.” Sand is well known for
innovating in her work as a writer; here, at this early stage in her
relationship with Chopin, she was, it seems, ready to improvise on a whole new
style of friendship. There’s no record of a reply from Albert Gryzmala, but
within some number of days following Sand’s epic letter she and Chopin
consummated their love.
In the
end Sand did not have to become Italy in the contest of nations, but her famous
letter anticipated the way future generations would come to associate Chopin
with an enlightened ideal of patriotism, a phenomenon that becomes manifestly
evident every hundred years as the world pauses to commemorate his birth. If
the second centennial “Year of Chopin” in 2010 inspired young entrepreneurs to
resurrect him as a superhero in high-tech video games, it was the first that
paved the way by solidifying forever the idea that “Chopin composed Poland.” It
was Ignacy Jan Paderewski, himself one of the world’s most famous pianists, who
opened the Chopin Centenary Festival in the Polish town of Lemberg in October
1910. Like every Pole of his generation, Paderewski had grown up under
authoritarian rule; even now, when he was fifty, the region was still under
Austrian control. We have suffered “thunderbolt after thunderbolt,” he told the
crowd, and the whole shattered nation “quivers, not with fear but with dismay.”
Why then, he asked, “should the spirit of our country have expressed itself so
clearly in Chopin, above all others?” For Paderewski, the answer was in the
music, and to explain how his compositions personified the embattled nation he
cited Chopin’s innovative use of rhythm, fixating on his signature technique of
tempo rubato. Franz Liszt had dubbed this the “rule of irregularity”: a rhythm
flexible enough to depart from the unforgiving metronome, but which always
accelerates just a bit to make up for lost time. This strategy of “stolen time”
(the term derives from the Italian verb rubare, to steal) accounts for the
often improvisatory sound of Chopin’s works, because the performer has some
discretion to liberate notes from the mathematics that govern a piece of music,
which are set out in the little fraction known as a time signature at the
beginning of each work. Rubato is permission to, at least temporarily, thwart
time, to put your own signature on a phrase, and it was in this gesture that
Paderewski located the historic fighting spirit of the Polish people. To his
countrymen in Lemberg he said: “This music which eludes metrical discipline,
rejects the fetters of rhythmic rule, and refuses submission to the metronome
as if it were the yoke of some hated government: this music bids us hear, know,
and realize that our nation, our land, the whole of Poland, lives, feels, and
moves, in Tempo Rubato.” How do we endure through our tragic journey?
Paderewski asked his fellow Poles. “Chopin best of all can tell us.”
Paderewski’s
story took an improbable turn eight years later, in what I think of as an only
in Poland phenomenon: in 1918 he abandoned the concert hall and became prime
minister of his newly freed country. It’s hard to grasp how astonishing this
is, but if you’re an American living in the twenty-first century, imagine Yo-Yo
Ma giving a stirring speech about how George Gershwin “composed America”
through his use of melodic chromaticism, unexpected rhythms, and wanderings
into remote harmonic territories (and yes, using that highly technical
language) and then, a decade later, becoming president of the country. The
sensitive musician as supreme leader; it’s something unimaginable—unless,
apparently, you are Polish.
After
Paderewski’s speech there was much more suffering ahead, beginning with the
German invasion of Poland in 1939, which led to a ban on Chopin’s music in his
homeland. Paderewski died in New York in 1941; his body was taken to
Washington, DC, and transported by a horse-drawn caisson and military honor
guard to Arlington National Cemetery, where it was temporarily entombed in the
vault of USS Maine Monument. “He may lie there until Poland is free,” Franklin
Delano Roosevelt proclaimed. In 1992, after the fall of Communism, Paderewski’s
body was finally returned to Warsaw. All but his heart, that is; it was the
pianist-statesman’s wish that it remain in America forever, and to this day the
organ is interred in a shrine at the Our Lady of Czestochowa Cemetery in
Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
The
“very hard story” of Poland continues in the twenty-first century under the
far-right Law and Justice Party, with its nationalist vision of “Poland first.”
Since assuming power in 2015, the government has acted to seize control of the
country’s public media; attempted to overhaul the judicial system and
neutralize the highest court by imposing age restrictions on justices; curbed
public gatherings; imposed restrictions on freedom of speech; and launched a
nationwide initiative in schools committed to “patriotic education.” A leading
Polish intellectual described the party’s philosophy in stark, if haunting,
terms. Law and Justice, he said, “offered a meaning [and] their meaning was:
‘We’ll make Poland great again.’?” Even so, the ruling party could be counted
on to use the language of music and Frédéric Chopin when, in 2018, it kicked
off a year of events designed to commemorate a century of independence. In
opening remarks before a concert in Warsaw on February 24—the day that, two
hundred years earlier, an eight-year-old Chopin first performed in public with
an orchestra—Law and Justice president Andrzej Duda said that without Chopin it
was highly likely Poland would have remained under the yoke of its autocratic
neighbors. Unlike Paderewski, he offered no concrete examples, musical or
otherwise, but ended by stating that “it was thanks to his music that Poland
re-emerged on the world map in 1918.”
This is
how Chopin became, over the course of two centuries, inextricably embedded in
the patriotic imagination of his country, in both its historic struggles and
contemporary culture wars. Most of the landscape he knew in Warsaw was
destroyed by German bombs in World War II, and during those years of
twentieth-century strife there were many attempts made to censure his music, remove
his name from repertoires, musical publications, and radio programs. Even
monuments erected to commemorate his work were destroyed, including the most
famous, which depicts Chopin underneath a willow tree, a symbol of Polishness.
It was restored in 1958 and placed in a Warsaw park, where every weekend during
the summer a piano is set next to the statue and an artist performs Chopin’s
music to a large, diverse crowd. In recent years city officials went even
further in their effort to fill the air with Chopin by installing “musical
benches” that, at the touch of a button, play a famous work. New smartphone
apps hit the market regularly, enabling users to do everything from take a
selfie with Chopin in places where he once hung out to providing geo-tagged
locations with relevant background and history. But while technology,
monuments, and media programming come and go, one thing never changes in this
remarkable country, with its long, poignant, ever-present history. As a Polish
journalist put it in 1995, as the entire country was fixated on the prestigious
International Chopin Piano Competition being broadcast live on national
television and radio: “Poles are born with Chopin in their souls. Chopin for us
is everything that surrounds us, everything we would like to express, but for
which there are no words.”
Excerpt
from Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries,
and a Half-Dozen Revolutions. By Annik LaFarge. Simon & Schuster , 2020.
The
decisive moment in Frédéric Chopin’s story, and that of Poland during the first
half of the 19th century, came in 1830, when he was 20 years old and a spark of
independence flew in Warsaw. The year before, Nicholas I of Russia had crowned
himself King of Poland, disregarding the national constitution and parliament.
The czar’s brother and factotum, Grand Duke Constantine, unleashed his secret
police, abolished press freedoms, imposed taxes, closed Vilnius University, and
deported Mickiewicz, the country’s most famous poet.
The
final insult was a Russian scheme to use Poland’s army against the people of
France to suppress their July Revolution, which deposed the last Bourbon
monarch and put Louis Philippe—the “citizen king”—on the throne. On November
29th, 1830, a cadet at the Warsaw officers’ school led a group of
co-conspirators in an attack on Constantine’s palace. The grand duke managed to
escape (according to one historian he scurried off in women’s clothing), but
the failed rebellion launched six months of unrest and turmoil.
Chopin
had left Warsaw three weeks before the November Uprising for a European sojourn
of music and adventure, traveling through Dresden, Vienna, Salzburg, and
Munich, going to the opera and immersing himself in the local musical life. It
being his first long-term trip abroad, a group of friends sent him off with a
silver cup filled with earth they had collected in Żelazowa Wola, the small
town where Chopin was born, thus allowing him to carry a bit of the beloved homeland
away with him on his travels.
When the
uprising began, Chopin’s friends rushed home to join the fight, but insisted he
remain in exile and use his music to give voice to Poland’s struggle. Traveling
the Continent, keeping in touch with friends and family through a regular
stream of letters, he went to parties, dinners, plays, and operas. Then, as he
wrote to a friend, he would return home around midnight, sit down, “play the
piano, have a good cry, read, look at things, have a laugh, get into bed, blow
out my candle and always dream about you all.”
The
November Uprising lasted less than a year, and in September 1831 the Russians
brought the hammer down in Warsaw. From Stuttgart Chopin learned there was
hand-to-hand fighting in the streets, including in the cemetery where his
younger sister Emilia had been buried after suffering a massive tubercular
hemorrhage at age 14. Being separated from his family was, for Chopin, a type
of death. Only a month after he left home, he described himself as “a corpse”
and began using the metaphor of the crypt to convey his melancholia. “Graves
behind me and beneath me, everywhere,” he wrote to a friend; “a gloomy harmony
arose within me.”
In
Stuttgart, his separation anxiety developed into a morbid, fantastical
obsession with death. He imagined his family butchered, the woman he loved in
the hands of the Muscovites . . . “seizing her, strangling her, murdering,
killing.” In his notebook Chopin wondered: “is a corpse any worse than I? A
corpse . . . knows nothing of father, mother or sisters . . . it cannot speak
its own language to those around it.”
He was
voiceless, homeless, and alone, “beyond ten frontiers” from friends and family,
and to make matters worse his passport had expired and there was no safe way
back to Poland. Stuttgart was an abyss; “I pour out my grief on the piano,” he
confided to his diary. It was during this time, as he faced his first Christmas
alone, that he likely began composing the harrowing B-minor Scherzo op. 20, a work
that begins with a piercing cry at the top of the keyboard followed by an
anguished growl at the bottom.
It then
proceeds on a frenzied, anxious journey until suddenly, and surprisingly, the music
devolves into a melody known and loved by all Poles, the Christmas carol
“Lulajże Jezuniu” (“Hush Little Jesus”), only to be rudely interrupted again by
the tonal lacerations that began the piece. The scherzo concludes with the
repetition, nine times in a row, of a single dissonant chord, a piece of
musical language that always elicits in me the same tragic pain I experience
when King Lear exclaims, over and over, the word Howl! after discovering the
hanged body of Cordelia.
This
early work contains Chopin’s musical signature: a collision of worlds fueled by
the polar opposites of mood, tempo, melody, and emotional shadowing he would
later deploy with such power in the funeral march of Opus 35. During this
period he experimented in many genres, taking, for example, the mazurka, a
lively, traditional Polish national dance, and reimagining it with startling
rhythms and chromatically induced inner conflict. Leonard Bernstein loved these
pieces, especially the op. 17, no. 4 Mazurka in A minor, because Chopin put him
in “a bliss of ambiguities.”
In
études, short practice pieces traditionally designed to explore different
aspects of performance technique, Chopin experimented with tones, harmonies,
and syncopations that would, a century later, become standard features of
modern jazz. He also took a salon genre, the nocturne, and repurposed it.
An early
example is the otherworldly op. 15, no. 3 in G minor, composed in the early
years of the 1830s. It begins in one style, that of another Polish folk dance,
the kujawiak, and then, after passing through a dark, sometimes jagged melody,
he pauses, almost like a novelist reaching a chapter break, and changes the
voice of the piece entirely, moving into a chorale, a form of plain chant one
might hear in a church service. Then, before sending it off to his publisher,
he slapped onto this strange-sounding work the label “Nocturne,” a brand-new
genre pioneered by an English composer, John Field, which Chopin undertook to
reinvent in his own voice and style.
These
were startling creations, works that threw listeners into an unfamiliar musical
landscape. For scholar Jim Samson it was this sojourn, far from home and with
news trickling in week by week of the worsening situation in Poland, that saw
Chopin’s now unmistakable tone journey from a post-Classical to a Romantic
idiom. Responding to the turmoil at home, he “renovated” the old forms, mixing
styles and bending genres, using a new kind of musical language to disrupt a
listener’s expectations and tell a different kind of story.
Exiled
from his homeland, wandering through Europe trying to decide where to settle,
Chopin began developing the voice that would come to define his music deep into
the future. He arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1831, just weeks after the
uprising had been brutally put down, and virtually overnight became the poetic
embodiment of “captive Poland.”
It would
be just a few years later when the story of the failed revolution and Chopin’s
poignant separation from family and friends crept into his writing and, without
his planning it, formed the basis of what would become his most famous
composition. For not only is a love of homeland deeply embedded in the funeral
march; it’s where it all started.
The
earliest clue in the composition story of Opus 35 turns up in an unlikely
place: an auction house on Madison Avenue in New York City. It was a Tuesday in
March 1969 when the Parke-Bernet Galleries held a sale of “Important Autographs
and Manuscripts” that was noteworthy for its scope and variety: rare original
documents spanning three centuries, authored by notable figures in politics,
science, and the arts.
Just a
partial list includes Alexander Hamilton, Napoleon Bonaparte, Clarence Darrow,
Henry David Thoreau, Queen Victoria, Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, John
James Audubon, the abolitionist John Brown, items from 23 American presidents
(including a letter from Thomas Jefferson stating “I am out of wine”), and a
handwritten manuscript by John Steinbeck. Also included was a musical fragment
in the hand of Frédéric Chopin, a manuscript consisting of just eight measures
with no title except the notation Lento cantabile: an instruction to the
performer to play slowly, in a singing style. (The word comes from the Italian
verb cantare, to sing.)
It’s the
melody of the Trio, the major-key lullaby that breaks up the two statements of
the minor-key march—the music that so startled me when I first heard it in the
Polish Consulate. This is the sweet, nocturne-like tune that invites you to
forget, at least for a moment, the heavy, violent dirge that precedes and
follows it.
Little
is known about the Parke-Bernet fragment, which immediately disappeared into
private hands after being acquired at the auction for $1,500, but the best
guess of scholars is that Chopin inscribed the music into someone’s autograph
album. These were popular in the 19th century: large, blank books bound in
leather that friends (and the occasional celebrity) would “autograph” with a
poem, drawing, musical sketch, or personal greeting. Some of these albums
apparently had pages with music staves that made it easy to dash off short
compositions, and Chopin was known to have inscribed his music into the albums
of friends and admirers.
Once,
for fellow composer Ignaz Moscheles, he wrote out eight measures from the
celebrated refrain of the 17th Prelude from op. 28, popularly known as “Castle
Clock” for the low A flat that is intoned 11 times in a row, like a tolling
bell. The e’s something touching in this gesture: one great musician copying a
famous lick for another. In the case of the Lento cantabile fragment there’s an
intriguing clue about Chopin’s intentions, and reason to believe he attached
great sentimental value to that lovely, portentous melody. It’s right there in
the date near his signature, November 27th: the eve of the 1838 November
Uprising in Warsaw six years earlier.
Excerpt
from Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries,
and a Half-Dozen Revolutions.
Frédéric
Chopin in Exile: The Making of a Romantic. By Annik LaFarge. LitHub , August 11, 2020
Joshua
Weilerstein talks with with Annik Lafarge, author of “Chasing Chopin,” a book
being released Tomorrow, August 11th, wherever books are sold. This is really a
wonderful book and you’ll hear in this interview all of Annik’s abiding
enthusiasm about Chopin which comes through so beautifully in the book. We talk
about Chopin’s pianos, Chopin as a symbol of Poland, the famous Funeral March,
Georges Sand, and traveling to places that Chopin lived and worked. In essence,
this is an immersion into Chopin and his music, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy this
fascinating interview.
Sticky Notes
, August 10, 2020.
In the
fourth episode of our new season on Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady,
Annika LaFarge joins Roxanne to discuss her book, Chasing Chopin.
Roxanne
Coady: Even someone who doesn’t know that much about Chopin knows that he had
an almost ten-year affair with George Sand. When I think about resurrecting,
Chopin had a shortcut reputation as being sort of a snob and a dandy. And
George Sand had a reputation as being cigar-smoking, scandalous, promiscuous.
And yet I came away from reading the book thinking about each of them in quite
a different way. Did you set out to do that? Was that just a byproduct of your
research?
Annik
LaFarge: No, I didn’t set out to do it. It was really another of the surprises
to me, that the cliché I had grown up with about both of them was really—I
mean, all of those things that you said about Chopin are in the literature,
that he was a dandy, that he didn’t read, that he was short tempered, that he
wrote sentimental music. All of those things are there. But what I was really,
to talk about one aspect, I already mentioned that he resisted this intense pressure
on him to write in these larger forms. And he went against everybody that was
urging him to do that and wrote from his heart what he felt he needed to say.
But he
was also, as a teacher he was an extraordinarily, I think, generous man. He was
exacting, and it was really important to him that his students would understand
precisely the technique to play his works as they were intended to be played.
He always had a metronome on the piano. He was very exacting. But he also told
them that they should play it the way—he said to one student, “Play it like no
one’s ever played it before or ever will again.” He said to another student, “I
give you complete license when you’re sitting here at the keyboard to be
yourself.” He was really preoccupied with enabling his students. He wrote for
amateurs. That’s another thing that’s really important to remember about
Chopin, was that he was he was very concerned with the amateur pianist. This
was a time when pianos were popping up in everybody’s living room.
And
George Sand too, in their relationship what I kept hearing as I traveled around
to Spain, where they spent a very consequential several months together, and
then in central France, where she had a house, I kept hearing this conversation
between two artists that I found really fascinating. They were really, really
different. They could not have been more different. But Sand had a very, very
difficult, complicated childhood, and lots of heartbreak and anxiety. She
became a really independent person who saw a kind of duty in friendship. Her
métier was to enable other artists to be able to achieve their own great work.
So she structured her household in a way that would enable everyone who came
into her orbit to do good work. I found that really, really inspiring. So along
with the clichés about Sand, she also wrote very innovative—I write about this
book that she wrote called Gabriel, which is about what today we might call a
transgender person. She was way ahead of her time and and really a very
innovative and also an intellectually generous person.
Like
many people, I learned about Chopin’s “Funeral March” at an early age, on the
family couch, watching Saturday morning cartoons. Cartoons, like fairy tales,
often require death as a plot device, but they want it slightly defanged.
Chopin’s march was a convenient, campy shorthand — foreboding but comic, no
more serious than the words “game over” at the end of a video game. It is
therefore almost impossible for me to imagine a world in which the piece is
both fresh and tragic, where its death is real.
Annik
LaFarge’s charming and loving new book, “Chasing Chopin,” attempts to recover
this world. A combination of biography, cultural commentary and personal
reflection, it radiates out from the “Funeral March,” the third movement of
Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2, in many directions. Looking back in time, LaFarge
describes the composer’s loves and pianos (often the same); she explores his
handwriting, his fingerings, his Polish identity. But she also turns to the
present day, consulting aspiring pianists, authorities in historical
performance and Zibi, the creator of the video game “Frederic: The Resurrection
of Music.” For a book about death, it’s bursting with life and lively research.
LaFarge writes passionately about Bach’s influence on Chopin, and the virtues
of listening to period pianos to know what Chopin heard and imagined.
“Chasing
Chopin” is only a partial biography, with much of its focus falling on the odd
celebrity couple of Chopin and George Sand: tubercular composer, gender-bending
author. Their relationship was a constantly revised arrangement, forged against
norms — a precursor of pods and friends with benefits. LaFarge links this
modern lifestyle to the revolutionary quality of their work. She charts the
couple’s tumultuous beginnings, including an epic letter in which Sand outlines
“a vision of ideal love that eschews ‘the bonds of everyday life’ and favors a
true friendship based on ‘chaste passion and gentle poetry.’” A week later Sand
seemingly changes her mind — the relationship is consummated. After a year or
so, she changes her mind again, and they become platonic lover-friends. Sand’s
interactions with Chopin acquire aspects of mothering, enabling and nursing —
not uncommon when you date an artist (ask any of my exes!). Eventually, they
have a falling-out, and LaFarge makes you feel the decline of this ideally
modern relationship, maybe even more than Chopin’s looming physical decline.
Toward
the beginning, LaFarge, the author of a book about the High Line as well as an
amateur pianist, confesses that the motivation for “Chasing Chopin” was a
performance of the “Funeral March,” and in particular one striking contrast:
between the march’s somber main theme and a ravishing major key section that
comes later. She describes this middle section as a “rampant joy … smuggled
into the heart of a death march.” She continues: “It seemed daring but also
fundamentally true, that our experience of death should be animated, not
haunted, by a force of beauty. Of life.”
It’s
hard to argue with such a personal interpretation, and I love the word
“smuggled,” but there are other ways to read this contrast. It’s not so much
what Chopin does, as what he doesn’t do. Chopin was an incomparable crafter of
transitions, and he loved asymmetry, but his “Funeral March” has almost no
transitions, and heaves back and forth in symmetrical twos and fours. The form
is static and ritualized. The minor march and its major antidote stare at each
other across section breaks, socially distanced, unable to interlace.
This
book took me into many unexpected corners — often I wished LaFarge had taken
more time to explore the nooks she uncovered. I especially wish she had spent
more time on the march’s sequel, the last section of the grand sonata, an
epilogue to a funeral. This movement is a middle finger lifted to every
convention. It has no tunes, little variation, no clear drama: a minute of
hushed, running unison between the hands, darkly forming and re-forming. People
have long struggled to describe its perverse genius. Anton Rubinstein’s “night
winds sweeping over churchyard graves” is the most famous image, but seems a little
too lush and evocative — too Halloween. LaFarge cites Chopin’s description: The
two hands “gossip in unison.” That touch of bitterness and contempt feels
closer to the mark. You could imagine proud Chopin, facing disease and death
every day, refusing to give people or even himself the triumph they crave, or
an easy answer, or any answer at all. When you hear the piece in concert, and
that last minute comes to a close, it always seems wrong to applaud. You sense
that Chopin wants your discomfort. The audience hesitates, as if asking the
questions we’re asking ourselves, day after quarantined day: Is it over? And,
What now?
From
Concerts to Cartoons: Chopin’s Most Famous Composition. By
Jeremy Denk. The New York Times, August. 11,
2020
In Annik
LaFarge's new book, Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries,
Four Countries, and a Half-Dozen Revolutions, Chopin isn't the melancholic,
tragic figure portrayed in literature and film. He is an innovator and outlier
who forged "a truly modernist vision", and an artist of enduring
relevance. On the book's cover, he's pictured in what looks like an Adidas
track suit (but the stripes down the sleeves are the lines of a musical staff)
festooned with a pin that reads "I love Warsaw". This makes sense,
since Chopin not only renovated classical forms, but also, while in self-exile
from Poland, developed a musical signature that made use of wild
juxtapositions.
Chopin
was ahead of his times, a modernizer who mixed styles and bent genres. LaFarge
discovered his "special genius" while listening to the Funeral March
(from the Opus 35 Sonata) being performed in two different settings, one formal
(the Polish consulate in 1998) and one intimate (a jazz club in Chicago in 2017).
At the performance in the Polish consulate, LaFarge heard all of Opus 35 played
for the first time in her life. She experienced "a sense of awe" when
she heard the Trio in D-flat major being "smuggled into" the third
movement (the March in B-flat minor that we all know).
The
Trio, she writes, is "hopeful, sweet, beckoning; a grown-up lullaby,"
animating the death march with "a force of beauty. Of life." She
reflects, "What struck me…was hearing a piece of music that was so
familiar but also so new. And so unorthodox: a funeral march that speaks the
language of life as well as death."
Nearly
20 years later, the performance in the jazz club surprised LaFarge because the
famous March—dum dum da dum—began in the middle of "a swinging tune",
as a bit of improvisation. LaFarge was astonished by how "the language of
the march was still there, but it's been rhythmically transformed into a new
vernacular." Why, she wondered, did Chopin's music still resonate so
powerfully?
Inspired
by the performances at the Polish consulate and Chicago jazz club, LaFarge set
out to investigate the Opus 35 Sonata. Chasing Chopin is the outcome, and it's
more than an exploration of a famous piece of music. It's a wonderfully smart,
fascinating look at Chopin's life and times. LaFarge focuses on the three years
during which Chopin composed Opus 35 (1837 to 1840), but her investigation
inevitably leads her back to the Poland of Chopin's youth, to Paris as Chopin
found it when he arrived in 1831, and to the French and Spanish countryside
where Chopin did much of his composing while romantically involved with the
feminist writer George Sand.
There
are, of course, already several biographies of Chopin out in the world.
LaFarge's slim book—only 160 pages—stands out because it's a hybrid
work—biography and journalism—with utterly lovely, vivid descriptions of
Chopin's music. It's all the more compelling because LaFarge looks carefully at
the circumstances that made the composition of Opus 35 possible. She considers
the changing technology of the piano, for instance, that allowed Chopin to
"capture a new universe of emotional color."
She also
probes the complicated Chopin-Sand love affair, which lasted nine years and
perhaps enabled Chopin to produce works of genius, including Opus 35, as his
health was failing. Sand made sure that Chopin always had "the best
conditions to create." She also famously nursed Chopin back to health
numerous times. She was so nurturing that Chopin referred to her as "my
angel" in letters home.
The 19th
century history in this book is seamlessly interwoven with the journalism
exploring Chopin's sound and message. LaFarge moves between the past and
present seemingly without effort. She veers, for example, from the story of how
Chopin learned to play the piano (he was largely self-taught, though he had two
influential teachers) to her excursion to New York City's Morgan Library, where
she views Chopin's never-published book on piano method.
In
another chapter, she writes about the Chopin-Sand relationship before
chronicling her own trip to Majorca, Spain, where she discovers the landscape
that may have influenced Chopin's work in general. She suggests the Spanish
landscape provides context for "the exquisite juxtaposition of tenderness
and violence, hope and despair, darkness and light" in many of Chopin's
pieces.
Although
this unusual book takes many detours, Opus 35 is LaFarge's primary focus. She
reports on what makes Opus 35 so powerful, groundbreaking, and contemporary. I
can't sum up her revelations here, but I can point to a few highlights. In an
early chapter, she writes about how the great sonata imparts Poland under
Russian occupation. Most people who love Chopin know that he grieved his
homeland and famously said "I pour out my grief on the piano," but
few know how he inscribed his love of Poland on Opus 35 in particular.
In
another chapter, she writes about how Opus 35 was influenced by Beethoven's
Opus 25 Piano Sonata in A-flat major, a work that completely abandons the
sonata form. Later in this chapter, she writes about how, before Chopin gave
Opus 35 to his publisher, he crossed out the word funèbre, leaving just the
word marche at the top of the third movement. This has left scholars to wonder
whether the most famous funeral march in the world is a funeral march at all.
LaFarge
is well aware that Chopin has been viewed as "a snob, a dandy obsessed
with fine clothes and aristocratic ways, a man who didn't read books or show
much interest in other artists, melancholy, short-tempered, and (perhaps)
anti-Semitic." In her book, she doesn't attempt to rescue Chopin from this
reputation, but her precise description and thoughtful analysis of Opus 35
somehow do that job.
Chopin
emerges in these pages a fiercely independent artist, a virtuoso with a
"playful, roguish sense of humor", an ingenious musical trailblazer
who "coaxed large meanings from the smallest forms" as he created a
new musical language. If only all the great composers could be reintroduced to
us in this fashion.
'Chasing
Chopin' from the Concert Hall to the Jazz Club. By Adrienne Davich. PopMatters, May 20, 2020.
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