Frédéric Chopin

Austrian composer and musician

• Born: March 1, 1810
• Birthplace: Zelazowa Wola, Duchy of Warsaw (now in Poland)
• Died: October 17, 1849
• Place of death: Paris, France

Chopin achieved musical eminence as both a performer and a composer. He was the foremost pianist of his time, although his delicate style and unwillingness to perform in public placed him outside contemporary fashion and practice. His eminence as a composer is equally startling, for unlike every other composer of comparable stature, Chopin devoted himself almost exclusively to keyboard music. Against what some have perceived as the narrowness of his interests, one may posit the brilliance and diversity of his compositions.

Early Life

Frédéric Chopin (shoh-PAHN) was born in a Polish village located thirty-four miles from the then-provincial city of Warsaw. His mother, Justyna, was the well-educated daughter of an impoverished, upper-class family. His father, Nicholas, a Frenchman by birth, was employed as a tutor by another and more well-to-do branch of that same family, the Skarbeks. Shortly after Frédéric’s birth, the family moved to Warsaw, where Nicholas eventually secured a position as a teacher of French at the Lyceum. Impressed by the playing of his mother and older sister, Ludwika, Chopin began to play the piano at the age of four or five.

At the age of six, Chopin was already composing and taking lessons from Wojciech Zwyny. His first published work, the Polonaise in G Minor, appeared when he was only seven, and he made his first public appearance the following year (1818) at a charity concert. Soon afterward, he played before Poland’s Grand Duke Konstantine and in 1825 was selected to demonstrate the aeolomelodicon before Czar Alexander I. While still a student at the Lyceum (1823-1826), Chopin began taking lessons from Josef Elsner, director of the Warsaw Conservatory. Elsner proved an especially fortunate choice; himself inclined toward the Romanticism that Chopin would perfect, he was willing to bend his own strict academic standards to accommodate his student’s evident genius.

While under Elsner’s tutelage, Chopin composed his first major work, a set of variations on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “La ci darem” from Don Giovanni (1787), which evidenced a surprising originality and maturity. The trip he made to Berlin in 1828 seems to have whetted his appetite for travel and, more important, for a wider musical world than Warsaw could then provide, and so, after having their request for a travel scholarship rejected by the government, his parents financed his 1829 trip to Vienna themselves. There with the help of a letter of introduction from Elsner, Chopin secured a publisher for his Mozart variations and, as part of his agreement with the publisher, Tobias Haslinger, gave a free concert in order to advertise his work. In fact, Chopin gave two concerts while in Vienna, both of which were successful. His audience was surprised by the lightness of his touch and delighted by his technical skills and use of Polish materials.

Upon his return to Warsaw, Chopin fell in love with Konstantia Gladkowska and continued to be well received by Polish audiences. Chopin grew restive, however, and on November 2, 1830, he again journeyed to Vienna, this time accompanied by his close friend, Tytus Wojciechkowski. News of the Polish revolt against the Russians reached them later that month. Wojciechkowski immediately returned to Poland. Chopin, at the urging of his family, remained in Vienna, where he expected to repeat his earlier success. In this he was mistaken. The few concerts he gave attracted little attention and even less cash. After eight months he left Vienna for Paris, learning en route that the revolt had failed and Warsaw had fallen.

Life’s Work

Until his death nineteen years later, Paris was to be Chopin’s home. The city was then the center of European culture, and thanks to a Viennese friend, Chopin quickly gained entrance to its cultural life. Just as important, Paris was also home to a large number of Polish émigrés, including Adam Mickiewicz, an exile, a poet, and a patriot. Unlike Mickiewicz, Chopin could return to Poland but chose not to do so. Although sensitive to the plight of his countrymen and even supportive of many of them, Chopin was not an activist; nor are his works nationalist in the same sense or to the same degree that Mickiewicz’s poems and plays clearly are. Himself half French, Chopin quickly adapted to his new home, largely because it received him so warmly.

Chopin’s first concert, on February 26, 1832, attended by Franz Liszt and Felix Mendelssohn, was a decided success, and in the autumn of that year he was invited to play for the Rothschilds. Having gained entry into the highest level of Parisian society, Chopin quickly became the most fashionable and highest paid piano teacher in the city. Financially secure, he could afford to give up the public concert hall performances he disliked so much and that were so ill-suited to both the character of his music and the delicacy of his playing. His immense and financially rewarding success in the salons of Paris, however, extracted its own price.

By the 1830’s, an important shift had occurred in the world of music. Aristocratic patrons of the arts, especially music, had begun to play a less significant role, while the mass audience was beginning to exert a far greater influence than ever before. Liszt’s style of music and playing was well suited to this new audience; Chopin’s was not. The aristocratic salons of Paris therefore played a most important role in nurturing Chopin’s genius, but not without limiting or at least misunderstanding it as well, for what the Rothschilds and others prized was not Chopin’s compositions but his playing, his imitations, and his improvisations in particular.

Three years after his introduction into this world, there began a sequence of events that was to have a profound effect on Chopin’s life and art. Chopin met and fell in love with Maria Wodzinska in 1835, but when he proposed marriage, the family, having heard the rumors of Chopin’s poor health, refused to give their consent. Disappointed, Chopin paid a short visit to England and within the year had begun his famous liaison with the author Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, or George Sand, as she is better known. It was Sand who made the first overtures (in 1836), and these Chopin refused, disturbed by her evident masculinity. However, in 1837 he became as passionately drawn to her as she was to him.

Over the next nine years, Chopin transformed his passion into some of his greatest music. (Over the same period, Sand’s passion would undergo a quite different change in the direction of maternal devotion.) At Sand’s suggestion, they spent the winter of 1838-1839 on the island of Majorca. Poor food and even worse weather, coupled with the islanders’ fear of contagion caused by Chopin’s tubercular condition as well as their distaste for this evidently immoral bohemian household, made composing difficult and the worsening of Chopin’s health inevitable. They returned to the mainland in February, but the seriousness of Chopin’s condition (he had begun to hemorrhage) forced them to delay their arrival at Sand’s country home in Nohant until June.

Located 180 miles south of the French capital, Nohant was well suited to Chopin’s needs. Sensitive to noise and other distractions, and physically weak, Chopin always found it difficult to write while in Paris, and so the summers he spent at Nohant (1839, 1841-1849) proved to be especially rewarding. Even as his art advanced, the relationship with Sand deteriorated into recriminations and finally separation, first as her passion cooled and then as the result of plots hatched by her two grown children.

Chopin’s physical decline, which had begun on Majorca and that had worsened upon his learning of his father’s death (May 3, 1844), advanced more precipitously following his estrangement from Sand. On February 16, 1848, he gave his first public concert in ten years; it was also the last one he would ever give in Paris. A second concert had been planned but had to be canceled when revolution broke out in the city’s streets. The revolutions of 1848 put an end not only to the French monarchy but to Chopin’s patronage as well. Out of necessity, he accepted an invitation from Jane Stirling, a wealthy former pupil, to visit Great Britain.

After spending much of the year traveling and performing in London and Scotland, Chopin returned to Paris in late 1848, too weak either to write or to teach. Generously supported by the Stirlings and comforted by his sister, he continued to decline. His death occurred on October 17, 1849, but preparations were so elaborate that the funeral had to be delayed nearly two weeks. Some three thousand mourners were in attendance as the funeral march from his Sonata in B Minor and (at Chopin’s own request) Mozart’s Requiem were played. Chopin was buried in Paris, and his heart was interred in Warsaw.

Significance

For Frédéric Chopin, playing and composing were integrally related. A brilliant if unusual performer, he preferred to be judged chiefly as a composer, and it was to this end that he increasingly devoted himself from the late 1830’s onward. Chopin gave no public concerts from 1838 until 1848; in fact, he gave only thirty public performances during his entire career. However, as Derek Melville has noted, “Curiously enough, the less he played in public, the more legendary he became.” Unfortunately, the acclaim he received as early as 1837 as Europe’s greatest pianist overshadowed his work as a composer. Even after his death, Chopin’s compositions have rarely been given the credit they are due. That he wrote almost exclusively for the piano has been misunderstood as a major limitation, one that has barred him from the ranks of greatness. While his contribution to harmonic development has been acknowledged, critics have tended to slight his overall achievement.

The narrow range of Chopin’s achievement is not a sign of weakness, however, but of a strength comparable to what his near contemporary, the novelist Jane Austen, managed to achieve on her “inch of ivory.” To defend Chopin’s breadth is impossible, and to defend his sense of musical structure along conventional lines is fruitless. This is not to say that he was, as often accused, inattentive to form or unable “to develop his materials on a large scale.” Chopin’s great strength lies not in his adherence to the conventions but in his innovations, including his use of a “departure and return pattern” in many of his works and his experimentation with organic form in a number of his later ones.

When Chopin felt the need to do so, he was more than willing to learn and to adopt traditional techniques, such as counterpoint, which he began to study in earnest only during the 1840’s. The very real narrowness of range of Chopin’s oeuvre needs, therefore, to be reevaluated. As a performer, Chopin was physically too frail to compete with his contemporaries in terms of virtuosity and dramatic effects, and as a result both as performer and as composer he chose, or was perhaps forced, to explore and exploit the subtleties of his playing, his music, and his medium, the piano, in compositions and performances far better suited to the intimacy of the salon than to the impersonal space of the concert hall.

Although Chopin wrote almost exclusively for the piano, he did so with incredible variety: waltzes, nocturnes, preludes, études, scherzos, polonaises, and mazurkas, with the emphasis clearly on the solo piano (139 of his 167 compositions). In his desire to make the piano imitate the human voice, Chopin utterly transformed keyboard music and keyboard technique. One needs to realize that in Chopin’s age, the piano was essentially a new instrument. The introduction of leather-bound hammers, for example, made possible the production of much softer tones than in previous times. Although it was John Field and J. N. Hummel who first began to compose music adapted to this new instrument and sound, it was Chopin who came to exploit the piano so masterfully.

Legend often portrays Chopin as at best a melancholy Romantic and at worst a pampered high-society narcissist. Fact portrays a quite different figure, fashionable in his dress and fastidious in his conduct, sickly and shy, less proud than committed to his art, and not so much a recluse as an introvert. The facts are perhaps too few to draw as complete a portrait as one might like. For this reason one may turn to the music to distinguish more definitely the character of the man from the qualities of his music: passionate yet introspective, emotional but never sentimental, delicate and refined, expressive yet restrained, as much concerned with perfection as with originality.

In many respects, Chopin is the very embodiment of Romanticism, yet he is a strange avatar of the Romantic movement, for his music was clearly influenced by the classical style of Johann Sebastian Bach and Mozart at least as much as it was by the Italian opera of his own age. Chopin’s influence on others has, however, been far greater than anyone else’s influence on him: on the keyboard music of Liszt, Arnold Schönberg, and others, and on the use of national—especially folk—materials by Antonín Dvořák, Manuel de Falla, Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, and others. Chopin stands as the first and perhaps the most important of the modern composers to become aware that the breadth, grandeur, and order that were both possible and inevitable in the classical period might no longer be advisable even if they were technically still possible. Narrowness, or specialization, Chopin proved, has its own possibilities and its own frontiers.

Bibliography

Abraham, Gerald. Chopin’s Musical Style. London: Oxford University Press, 1939. A brief but important study of the “unfolding and maturing of Chopin’s musical style,” intended chiefly, but by no means exclusively, for performers and students of harmony. Abraham distinguishes three significant periods of development (1822-1831, 1831-1840, and 1841-1849) but fails to discuss the problems of chronology within each period and does not consider the origins of Chopin’s style. Nevertheless, long considered the standard work on the subject.

Chopin, Fryderyk. Chopin’s Letters. Edited by Henryk Opienski. Translated by E. L. Voynich. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931. Although it has been largely superseded by later editions, Opienski’s work is noteworthy both for its relative extensiveness (given the time it was published) and for the excellence of Voynich’s translations from the original Polish and French. The dating of many items is, however, incorrect.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Selected Correspondence of Fryderyk Chopin. Edited and translated by Arthur Hedley. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963. This volume is abridged from Chopin’s correspondence, collected and edited by Bronislaw Edward Sydow. Although less exhaustive than Sydow’s volume of nearly eight hundred items, Hedley’s book does add appreciably to the slimmer Opienski work. However, Hedley not only omits pieces included in Sydow but also abridges a number of items. Even so, this is an indispensable volume; the eleven-page appendix concerning the history and inauthenticity of the erotic “Chopin-Potocka Letters” is especially interesting.

Hedley, Arthur. Chopin. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1947. Especially noteworthy because Hedley’s Chopin does not merely summarize previous scholarship. Recognizing the inadequacy of the standard English-language study, Frederick Niecks’s Fredrick Chopin (1888), Hedley has examined materials at first hand, many for the first time. He devotes somewhat more than half of his authoritative study to Chopin’s biography and the remainder to discussions of Chopin as performer, as teacher, and as composer and of Chopin’s works according to type.

Huneker, James. Chopin: The Man and His Music. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900. Trained as a pianist, Huneker was the foremost American music critic at the time he wrote this study. Enthusiastic and knowledgeable, he devotes the first third of this book to biographical analysis, the import of which is clearly evident in his chapter titles “The Artist” and “Poet and Psychologist.” The remaining chapters deal with each of the various kinds of musical compositions Chopin wrote.

Melville, Derek. Chopin. Hamden, Conn.: Linnet Books, 1977. Part of the Concertgoer’s Companion series, Melville’s book includes a surprising amount of material in its very few (108) pages. Despite going unnecessarily far in his efforts to undermine the credibility of George Sand’s remarks about Chopin, Melville’s writing is balanced and especially well informed. His lengthy annotated bibliography of works in English about Chopin and his music (pp. 62-78) is particularly useful.

Samson, Jim. Chopin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Biography written by a Chopin scholar, containing musical analysis as well as information on Chopin’s life.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Chopin: The Four Ballades. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Collection of essays providing a brief biography and more detailed descriptions of Chopin’s music. Essays include analyses of nocturnes, sonatas, and etudes, and discussions of Chopin’s reception in nineteenth century Poland and Victorian attitudes toward the composer.

Szulc, Tad. Chopin in Paris: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1998. Biography focusing on the eighteen years Chopin spent in Paris. Szulc uses primary sources, such as diaries, memoirs, letters, and Chopin’s journal, to provide information about Chopin’s personality, relationship with George Sand, and the artistic and intellectual life in Paris.