How (Not) to Write About Chopin?

fryderyk_chopin_radziwil_polona.jpg, default, Henryk Hektor Siemiradzki, ‘Chopin Playing the Piano in Prince Radziwiłł’s Salon’, 1888, photo: Polona National Library

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Only the music of Fryderyk Chopin could rouse Friedrich Nietzsche from the edge of delirium. Boris Pasternak deemed the Polish composer the Tolstoy of music. Claude Lévi-Strauss believed that the development of this form of art stopped with him. According to Zbigniew Herbert, everyone carries with them their own image of Chopin. How does that image emerge from Polish and foreign writings on the famous composer?

If one were to gather all the works concerned with Fryderyk Chopin and his music, even excluding biographical writings and musicology studies, they would take up several rather large bookshelves. How can literature convey the great composer’s musical genius? How can his compositions be translated into words? Out of all Chopin’s portraits, the one most valued by Zbigniew Herbert was the oil sketch by Eugene Delacroix which, according to the writer, most successfully represented the composer’s personality. Let’s then begin by examining Chopin’s appearance before we dive deeper and question what makes him such an appealing literary protagonist.

Skin

Thumbnail — A fragment of interior with Fryderyk Chopin's last grand piano, photo: gifted by Krystyna Gołębiewska, Gdynia 1972 / Polona National Library

‘Chopin would begin like this. He would lie down under his mother’s piano to feel the vibrations. Music is, above all, a physical sensation. Misers listen with their ears only – be extravagant and listen with your whole body’, says Madame Pylinska to her pupil in Éric-Emmanual Schmitt’s Madame Pylinksa et le Secret de Chopin. The novel by the French author, a semi-autobiographical story of the love of music and the search for one’s own literary path, is an homage to the Polish composer, but it’s a non-gooey one, wary of trivial expressions of admiration.

Schmitt tells a story about unconventional piano lessons delivered to him by an ‘eccentric, funny, authoritative, demanding, affectionate’ Polish woman, an emigrant in Paris. The exercises Pylinska assigns to her pupil look more or less like this: first of all – avoid the instrument. In the morning, pick flowers in the Luxembourg Garden without shaking the dew off of their petals. Make circles on the water (to achieve resonance), then throw a seed or a petal and observe the blow (to extract the tone and achieve harmony). Before the next lesson, have intercourse (you need to give your whole self to music, too!). During their musical meetings, the student and the teacher discuss Chopin and his passion, most of all the emotions he evoked. Schmitt manages a balance between artistry and intimacy. In this literary portrait, the composer is not so much a master as he is a guide, and not so much around the world of music as around life as a whole. The author shows that, while no one can successfully mimic Chopin, one can get inspired by him, and that before one starts to play his music, one should feel it first.

Nose

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Chopin’s torso, Greater Poland Chopin Centre, photo: Daniel Pach / Forum

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While Schmitt’s Chopin penetrates the skin, other writers focused on different body parts, of their audience and of the composer himself. Herbert describes ‘an elongated visage, glowing eyes and a large, aquiline nose’. Joseph Brodsky focuses provocatively on Chopin’s nose:

Text

As the lamps flare up, one may well denounce
one’s own curves as jarring the jigsaw puzzle
of the rooms whose air savours every ounce
pecked by Frederyk’s keyboard-bedevilled nozzle.

Author

Trans. Joseph Brodsky

Having never visited Poland, the Russian author described the country on the River Wisła as if seen through the eyes of the composer. The poem, written in 1982, resembles a letter written by an emigrant longing for his country, brooding over lost love and demanding freedom for his nation.

Eyes

Chopin was endowed with a peculiar look in his eyes by Robert Schumann, who insisted that every composer has got a notation characteristic for the eye: ‘Here, however, it seemed to me that eerie, alien eyes are looking at me – eyes of flowers, basilisks, peacocks and young girls […]‘. What made such an impression on the German critic and pianist? Chopin’s Variations on ‘Là Ci Darem La Mano’ from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. In his book O Fryderyku Chopinie (On Fryderyk Chopin), Schumann assures the readers that, although the author (deliberately anonymous at the beginning) wasn’t known to the participants of the music seminar, he was immediately hailed as a genius. Besides, it was Schumann who made Chopin famous in Germany. In this poetic rendition of Chopin, Schumann highlights the composer’s mysteriousness – a trait that has drawn the attention of many.

Fingers

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A replica cast of Fryderyk Chopin’s hand, photo: Polona National Library

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In literary descriptions of Chopin, no other body part has received as much attention as his fingers. (Perhaps excluding his heart, which, after the composer’s death, became a subject of numerous discussions when considering his nationality. Chopin was ‘a Pole at heart, a citizen of the world by virtue of his talent’, in the words of Cyprian Kamil Norwid.)

Gottfried Benn, condensing the pianist’s life in nine stanzas, devoted two of them to his fingers. The German poet’s medical education helped him notice ‘the fourth being the weakest / (twinned with the middle finger)’ [Trans. Michael Hofmann]. Yielding to the temptation of writing a poetic summary of Chopin’s biography, Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote about the ‘good, left hand’ making ‘decisive strikes’. His lyric devoted to the composer comprises twelve stanzas, some of them as ironic as those in Benn’s poetic portrait. The Łódź poet Marian Piechal, in turn, assumed a pompous tone in talking about the resurrective power of Chopin’s music, writing, ‘Here, a finger extracting life from under the piano keys’.

The Polish pianist’s gorgeous hands were appreciated by other composers. In a letter to his mother, Felix Mendelssohn recalled meeting at the piano with Chopin and Ferdinand Hiller to ‘develop the nimbleness of [their] fingers’. Such nimbleness allowed Chopin to perform miracles and garnered him the rank of a top pianist. An avalanche of complements came also from Charles Hallé who, hearing the notes resounding from under the Polish composer’s ‘magic fingers’, insisted that ‘[…] it sounded like slowly unfolding, unfailingly enchanting, improvised poetry’.

Ode to sadness

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Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix, ‘Portrait of Fryderyk Chopin’, photo: Jan Morek / Forum

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A lot of writers perceive Chopin as the embodiment of sadness. Polish authors treat this idea in purely national terms, as a symbol of longing for freedom and the lost homeland. Such sadness is the theme of Stanisław Baliński’s poem Chopin’s Mirror:

Text

And the foreigner won’t understand Chopin’s woes.
For could he fathom, living in freedom,
That sorrow’s the mournful reflection of slavedom?

Author

Trans. Anna Teńczyńska

In Swallow’s Shadow, Ryszard Przybylski notices Chopin’s ‘painful duality’ tied to the composer’s constant thinking of Warsaw during his stay abroad. ‘All that’s left here [in Vienna – ed.] is only the empty shell of the body’.

Witold Gombrowicz, on the other hand, warns against this sort of discourse. According to him, viewing Chopin’s Romanticism through the lens of patriotism is no more than a poor rhetorical device. Instead, one should interpret it as sadness subordinated to discipline, turning into ‘raw classicism’ and ‘the will to power’. Then, the composer’s apparent weakness would actually testify to the strength and perseverance of the musician who ‘categorically decides to be who he really is’.

For foreign authors, the word ‘sadness’ has a wider meaning – it’s treated as an expression of European melancholy, typical for the Romantic period. According to Marcel Proust, the pianist’s ‘Romantic sadness’ balances on the verge of both sorrow and joy. In a way, the French writer liberates Chopin from patriotism by interpreting his emotions as more universal. The Polish composer’s music is similarly perceived by André Gide. In his Notes on Chopin, free from swooning and polemical interpretations of the musician’s personality and oeuvre, Gide leans towards a joyful depiction of Chopin. He insists that, despite the obvious sentimental nature of the Polish composer, he is dominated by

Text

joy, but a joy that has nothing to do with the cheerfulness of Schumann, which is somewhat superficial and vulgar. It’s a sort of happiness slightly resembling Mozart but at the same time more human, striving towards unity with nature and merging with the landscape like the ineffable smile in the scene by the stream in Beethoven’s No. 6 Symphony ‘Pastoral’.

Author

Trans. AP

Herman Hesse goes a step further, writing about Chopin’s ‘wild’ and ‘frivolous’ dance. However, there’s a hint of anxiety sneaking into his description, a fear of cheerful moments being interrupted any second. Chopin’s works – particularly the polonaises – enraptured Anna Achmat as well. Of his music, she writes, the ‘shade of this music flickers through a wall’, and somewhere else ‘the rustle of betrayal’ is to be heard. If, then, there’s sadness to be found in the works of the Polish composer, according to men and women of letters it’s not of the petrifying kind, but one that constitutes a warning; sadness that brings hope rather than despair.

Like Tolstoy

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Fryderyk Chopin’s monument in Parc Monceau, Paris, photo: De Agostini / Getty Images

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The tension between sadness and joy is not the only source of ambiguity that – according to writers – characterises Chopin. While Oscar Wilde writes volubly and gushingly about his music in one of his essays (‘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’), Boris Pasternak insists that Chopin was a realist, thereby undermining the idea of the composer as a great Romanticist. He claims that, although music more than any other kind of art is ‘shrouded in a Romantic spirit’, there are at least two exceptions to that rule: Bach and Chopin. ‘Their music abounds in detail and resembles a chronicle of their lives’, the Russian poet emphasises. For him, Chopin’s melody doesn’t constitute a recurring motif or a repetitive aria, but rather a progressively unfolding thought, ‘similar to the plot of a gripping novel or a historically significant message’. Let’s remember that as a child, Pasternak was so fascinated with music that for a long time he thought he’d become a composer. He eventually gave up on this dream due to inadequacies in his technique. He replaced musical notation with words, but music remained a recurring motif in his writing.

Like Baudelaire

Chopin often appears accompanied by other artists, both in Polish and foreign literature. They’re usually either musicians – comparisons that emphasise Chopin’s individuality or superiority – or poets. Ryszard Przybulski, the author of Swallow’s Shadow, frequently evokes Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, as the works of the latter perfectly depict Chopin’s thoughts and actions. Of course, Przybylski isn’t the first one to point out the parallels between the two men’s oeuvres and lives.

Słowacki and Chopin shared a physical similarity, almost the same dates of birth and death, and other biographical analogies (after the fall of the November Uprising, they both emigrated to Paris, had strong feelings for Maria Wodzińska, and died prematurely of tuberculosis). These commonalities, as well as their similar sense of aesthetics, were a topic frequently discussed by the press and during social meetings. As Jan Koźmian, the editor of Przegląd Poznański (The Poznań Review), recalled after the composer’s death: ‘Just like Chopin was the most sublime poet among musicians, Słowacki was the most subtle musician among poets’. The two artists, however, kept each other at a cold distance. Perhaps Słowacki envied the pianist his fame and comfortable life?

This distance was accurately conveyed by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz in his poem A Meeting:

Text

They met on a grey corner of the street […]
Chopin’s eyes were enamelled like holy medals
From Częstochowa, Mr Juliusz’s pupils were steel.
[…]
They stood like this. Perhaps not a second passed.
Chopin remembered: ah, it’s him, the… Talentless
Poet. Słowacki sighed: the moribund […].

Author

Trans. AP

Although in his Notes on Chopin, Gide objects to comparing music to other forms of art, he falls into the trap of poetry himself, repeating the widespread view regarding the similarity between the Polish composer and Baudelaire. He perceives both as pursuers of perfection characterised by the same ‘use of surprising moments as shortcuts’. Just like The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire’s most famous volume of poetry, is often called ‘unhealthy poetry’, Chopin’s works are frequently deemed ‘unhealthy music’. Baudelaire himself called the pianist a ‘poet-musician”’ Madame Pylinska from Schmitt’s novel claims that ‘Chopin searched for the poetry of the piano and let it envelop him. For him, the instrument was a separate, finite world with no door or windows’. Honoré de Balzac goes a step further: ‘Chopin, an extraordinary genius, is not so much a musician as a soul’.

It’s exactly this lyrical vein that has led to Chopin’s frequent appearances in poetry, novels and essays, each time showing the readers another one of his faces.

Originally written in Polish, translated by Anna Potoczny, 4 October 2021

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