Chopin E-Book

Michael Steen

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: The Great Composers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 81

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music. Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time. 'After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.' In his typically perverse way, Oscar Wilde puts his finger on the fact that no one can capture a mood quite like Chopin. Where Liszt dazzles with technical virtuosity, Chopin's music concentrates on nuance and expressive depth. His ballades, nocturnes, preludes and etudes, and even those pieces based on dance forms, the waltzes, polkas and mazurkas, belong essentially to the salon (it is reckoned Chopin gave no more than 30 public concerts in his life). Yet his predominantly solo piano works, full of harmonic invention and poetic power, are universally acknowledged as a pinnacle of the repertoire. Frederic Chopin, though born in Poland, spent most of his adult life in France. Michael Steen follows his tragically short life from the early years in Warsaw and Vienna, to the Paris of the 1830s, the Paris of Rossini, Berlioz, Liszt and George Sand. Chopin's notorious affair with Sand, the outrageous free-thinking, trouser-wearing, smoking, female author, was a central feature of his life, but it ended bitterly. Strangled with tuberculosis, exhausted with coughing, he undertook a short visit to England and Scotland. Soon after returning to France, he finally yielded to the disease which had been gnawing away at him for so long.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd,

Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-1-84831-810-6

Text copyright © 2003, 2010 Michael Steen

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation.

Also by the Michael Steen:

The Lives and Times of the Great Composers (ebook and paperback)

Great Operas: A Guide to 25 of the World’s Finest Musical Experiences (ebook and paperback)

Enchantress of Nations: Pauline Viardot, Soprano, Muse and Lover (hardback).

He is currently engaged in a project to publish one hundred ebooks in the series A Short Guide to a Great Opera. Around forty of these have already been published' and further details on these are given at the back of this book.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

POLAND

CHOPIN’S YOUTH IN POLAND

TO VIENNA

AU REVOIR, POLAND

ARRIVAL IN PARIS

GEORGE SAND

MAJORCA, AT FIRST

VALLDEMOSSA

BACK IN FRANCE

SUMMERS AT NOHANT

THE LAST YEARS

LONDON AND SCOTLAND

FINALLY, PARIS

Notes

Other Books in the Series

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to our ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from his book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, Michael Steen explores the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

‘After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.’ In his typically perverse way, Oscar Wilde puts his finger on the fact that no one can capture a mood quite like Chopin. Where Liszt dazzles with technical virtuosity, Chopin's music concentrates on nuance and expressive depth. His ballades, nocturnes, preludes and etudes, and even those pieces based on dance forms, the waltzes, polkas and mazurkas, belong essentially to the salon (it is reckoned Chopin gave no more than 30 public concerts in his life). Yet his predominantly solo piano works, full of harmonic invention and poetic power, are universally acknowledged as a pinnacle of the repertoire.

Frederic Chopin, though born in Poland, spent most of his adult life in France. Michael Steen follows his tragically short life from the early years in Warsaw and Vienna, to the Paris of the 1830s, the Paris of Rossini, Berlioz, Liszt and George Sand. Chopin's notorious affair with Sand, the outrageous free-thinking, trouser-wearing, smoking, female author, was a central feature of his life, but it ended bitterly. Strangled with tuberculosis, exhausted with coughing, he undertook a short visit to England and Scotland. Soon after returning to France, he finally yielded to the disease which had been gnawing away at him for so long.

A PENCIL DRAWING BY GEORGE SAND, 1844

CHOPIN

AT AROUND TWO in the morning on 17 October 1849, Chopin died of consumption in an apartment in the Place Vendôme, that most elegant 18th-century square in Paris. It is almost exactly opposite the hotel where, about 150 years later, Diana, Princess of Wales set out to her death; today, Chopin’s plaque can be seen above a very smart jeweller’s shop.

The dying man was visited by many friends. Pauline Viardot, the well-known mezzo-soprano, said that ‘all the grand Parisian ladies considered it de rigueur to faint in his room’.1 Three ladies were more constant and stayed at his bedside: his sister Louise, the Polish Princess Marcelline Czartoryska and the wayward Solange Clésinger.2 They represented the three periods of his life: his young years in Poland, his society life among émigré Poles in Paris, and his long affair with Solange’s extraordinary mother, the notorious novelist George Sand. She was absent.

Frédéric Chopin had been born less than 40 years earlier, in a village near Warsaw.* We shall follow his tragically short life from the early years in Warsaw and Vienna, to the Paris of the 1830s, the Paris of Rossini, Berlioz, Liszt and George Sand. Chopin’s notorious affair with Sand broke up bitterly. Strangled by tuberculosis, exhausted with coughing, he undertook a short visit to England and Scotland. Soon after returning to France, he finally yielded to the disease which had been gnawing away at him for so long.

POLAND

The Poland into which Chopin was born, and for which he became a symbol, had long been an unhappy place. For centuries, its borders with Muscovy and the fiefdoms of the Ottoman Empire seem to have been permanently elastic. In seeking their disparate aims, thugs with Romantic names like Boleslaw and Casimir, and their supporters, hacked each other to bits. Some of the worst were that ferocious combination of grail and sword known euphemistically as the Teutonic Knights. Then, two centuries after the Knights ceased to be an active force, the Swedes and Russians inflicted damage on Poland as serious as that experienced by Germany in the Thirty Years War.* Much of the story of Poland is epitomised by the statue of King Sigismund III Vasa at the entrance to the Old City of Warsaw. Wearing his crown, he brandishes a sword in one hand; in the other, he bears an enormous cross.

An unusual feature of Poland was its paralysing political system whereby the nobility elected their king, whose powers were then constrained by the liberum veto: legislation could technically be frustrated by a single objecting noble’s vote. As a consequence, the country was virtually ungovernable and it could easily be squeezed by powerful neighbours.

The king was usually someone backed by either the Russians or the Swedes. The Electors of Saxony, who were chosen to be kings in Poland during the 18th century, and to whose officials Bach sent his complaints, owed their Polish crown to the Russians. The Swedes tried to push them out by getting their puppet-ruler Stanislas Leszinski elected;** but the Russians twice ejected him and reinstated the Saxons, and Leszinski was compensated with the dukedom of Lorraine, which is found on modern maps around Nancy in the north-east of France bordering with Germany. Chopin’s forebears, it seems, followed King Stanislas there.

The Saxons, however, took little interest in their Polish domains. On the death of Augustus III, the Poles elected Stanislas Poniatowski, a veteran of the bedroom of the Russian Empress Catherine the Great. But his attempted reforms were too much for both his ex-lover to the east and his neighbour to the west. In 1772, the Prussian King Frederick the Great dismembered Poland: he diverted the Russians and Austrians from a war over moribund Turkey, in which victory by either would have destabilised the balance of power. He awarded each of them a slice of Poland; for himself, he took the tastiest portion, which enabled him to join up Berlin with East Prussia. This outrageous action reduced Poland’s population by a fifth.3

Following a few years of considerable instability, there was a second ‘Partition’ in 1793. Poland was shorn of two thirds of its people. Around this time, the composer’s father, Nicholas Chopin, returned to Poland to work as an accounts clerk in a tobacco factory. This went bust, but before he could go back to France, Nicholas got caught up in a revolt led by Thaddeus Kosciusko, who had fought in the War of Independence in the United States. Kosciusko’s Polish peasants, armed with pikes and war scythes, were no match for the Russians. The Poles retreated into Warsaw and, after two months, the city was sacked with great cruelty: up to as many as 20,000 were slaughtered in a single day.4 Nicholas must have been very fortunate to survive.

Under the final partitions of 1795–6, Poland, which had once been twice the size of France,* disappeared. The Russian Romanovs, the Austrian Habsburgs and the Prussian Hohenzollerns agreed that they should ‘abolish everything which can recall the memory of the existence of the Kingdom of Poland’.5 There was a saying at the time: ‘God made a mistake when he created the Poles.’6

However, a few years later, when Napoleon defeated Prussia and Austria, a remnant of Poland was re-constituted as ‘the Grand Duchy of Warsaw’. This entity benefited from the introduction of French administrative procedures and laws. Thus it was, when Frédéric Chopin was born, as February turned to March, in 1810. However, the Grand Duchy did not last long. After Napoleon was defeated, the Kingdom of Poland, which emerged in 1815 from the lengthy discussions at the Congress of Vienna, was a Russian fiefdom and only three quarters the size of Napoleon’s Grand Duchy.7 With the pragmatic support of the leaders of the Polish nobility, it was ruled by a viceroy, the tsar’s brother, the ‘ill-tempered and brutal’ Grand Duke Konstantin.8

CHOPIN’S YOUTH IN POLAND