The letters of master and pupil testify to their unceasing mutual esteem and love. Those of the master are full of fatherly affection and advice, those of the pupil full of filial devotion and reverence. Allusions to and messages for Elsner are very frequent in Chopin"s letters. He seems always anxious that his old master should know how he fared, especially hear of his success. His sentiments regarding Elsner reveal themselves perhaps nowhere more strikingly than in an incidental remark which escapes him when writing to his friend Woyciechowski. Speaking of a new acquaintance he has made, he says, "He is a great friend of Elsner"s, which in my estimation means much." No doubt Chopin looked up with more respect and thought himself more indebted to Elsner than to Zywny; but that he had a good opinion of both his masters is evident from his pithy reply to the Viennese gentleman who told him that people were astonished at his having learned all he knew at Warsaw: "From Messrs. Zywny and Elsner even the greatest a.s.s must learn something."
CHAPTER III
FREDERICK ENTERS THE WARSAW LYCEUM.--VARIOUS EDUCATIONAL INFLUENCES.--HIS FATHER"S FRIENDS.--RISE OF ROMANTICISM IN POLISH LITERATURE.--FREDERICK"S STAY AT SZAFARNIA DURING HIS FIRST SCHOOL HOLIDAYS.--HIS TALENT FOR IMPROVISATION.--HIS DEVELOPMENT AS A COMPOSER AND PIANIST.--HIS PUBLIC PERFORMANCES.--PUBLICATION OF OP. I.--EARLY COMPOSITIONS.--HIS PIANOFORTE STYLE.
FREDERICK, who up to the age of fifteen was taught at home along with his father"s boarders, became in 1824 a pupil of the Warsaw Lyceum, a kind of high-school, the curriculum of which comprised Latin, Greek, modern languages, mathematics, history, &c. His education was so far advanced that he could at once enter the fourth cla.s.s, and the liveliness of his parts, combined with application to work, enabled him to distinguish himself in the following years as a student and to carry off twice a prize. Polish history and literature are said to have been his favourite studies.
Liszt relates that Chopin was placed at an early age in one of the first colleges of Warsaw, "thanks to the generous and intelligent protection which Prince Anton Radziwill always bestowed upon the arts and upon young men of talent." This statement, however, has met with a direct denial on the part of the Chopin family, and may, therefore, be considered as disposed of. But even without such a denial the statement would appear suspicious to all but those unacquainted with Nicholas Chopin"s position. Surely he must have been able to pay for his son"s schooling! Moreover, one would think that, as a professor at the Lyceum, he might even have got it gratis. As to Frederick"s musical education in Warsaw, it cannot have cost much. And then, how improbable that the Prince should have paid the comparatively trifling school-fees and left the young man when he went abroad dependent upon the support of his parents! The letters from Vienna (1831) show unmistakably that Chopin applied to his father repeatedly for money, and regretted being such a burden to him. Further, Chopin"s correspondence, which throws much light on his relation to Prince Radziwili, contains nothing which would lead one to infer any such indebtedness as Liszt mentions. But in order that the reader may be in possession of the whole evidence and able to judge for himself, I shall place before him Liszt"s curiously circ.u.mstantial account in its entirety:--
The Prince bestowed upon him the inappreciable gift of a good education, no part of which remained neglected. His elevated mind enabling him to understand the exigencies of an artist"s career, he, from the time of his protege"s entering the college to the entire completion of his studies, paid the pension through the agency of a friend, M. Antoine Korzuchowski, [FOOTNOTE: Liszt should have called this gentleman Adam Kozuchowski.] who always maintained cordial relations and a constant friendship with Chopin.
Liszt"s informant was no doubt Chopin"s Paris friend Albert Grzymala, [FOOTNOTE: M. Karasowski calls this Grzymala erroneously Francis. More information about this gentleman will be given in a subsequent chapter.]
who seems to have had no connection with the Chopin family in Poland.
Karasowski thinks that the only foundation of the story is a letter and present from Prince Radziwill--acknowledgments of the dedication to him of the Trio, Op. 8--which Adam Kozuchowski brought to Chopin in 1833.
[FOOTNOTE: M. Karasowski, Fryderyk Chopin, vol. i., p. 65.]
Frederick was much liked by his school-fellows, which, as his manners and disposition were of a nature thoroughly appreciated by boys, is not at all to be wondered at. One of the most striking features in the character of young Chopin was his sprightliness, a sparkling effervescence that manifested itself by all sorts of fun and mischief.
He was never weary of playing pranks on his sisters, his comrades, and even on older people, and indulged to the utmost his fondness for caricaturing by pictorial and personal imitations. In the course of a lecture the worthy rector of the Lyceum discovered the scapegrace making free with the face and figure of no less a person than his own rectorial self. Nevertheless the irreverent pupil got off easily, for the master, with as much magnanimity as wisdom, abstained from punishing the culprit, and, in a subscript which he added to the caricature, even praised the execution of it. A German Protestant pastor at Warsaw, who made always sad havoc of the Polish language, in which he had every Sunday to preach one of his sermons, was the prototype of one of the imitations with which Frederick frequently amused his friends. Our hero"s talent for changing the expression of his face, of which George Sand, Liszt, Balzac, Hiller, Moscheles, and other personal acquaintances, speak with admiration, seems already at this time to have been extraordinary. Of the theatricals which the young folks were wont to get up at the paternal house, especially on the name-days of their parents and friends, Frederick was the soul and mainstay. With a good delivery he combined a presence of mind that enabled him to be always ready with an improvisation when another player forgot his part. A clever Polish actor, Albert Piasecki, who was stage-manager on these occasions, gave it as his opinion that the lad was born to be a great actor. In after years two distinguished members of the profession in France, M. Bocage and Mdme. Dorval, expressed similar opinions. For their father"s name-day in 1824, Frederick and his sister Emilia wrote conjointly a one-act comedy in verse, ent.i.tled THE MISTAKE; OR, THE PRETENDED ROGUE, which was acted by a juvenile company. According to Karasowski, the play showed that the authors had a not inconsiderable command of language, but in other respects could not be called a very brilliant achievement. Seeing that fine comedies are not often written at the ages of fifteen and eleven, n.o.body will be in the least surprised at the result.
These domestic amus.e.m.e.nts naturally lead us to inquire who were the visitors that frequented the house. Among them there was Dr. Samuel Bogumil Linde, rector of the Lyceum and first librarian of the National Library, a distinguished philologist, who, a.s.sisted by the best Slavonic scholars, wrote a valuable and voluminous "Dictionary of the Polish Language," and published many other works on the Slavonic languages.
After this oldest of Nicholas Chopin"s friends I shall mention Waclaw Alexander Maciejowski, who, like Linde, received his university education in Germany, taught then for a short time at the Lyceum, and became in 1819 a professor at the University of Warsaw. His contributions to various branches of Slavonic history (law, literature, &c.) are very numerous. However, one of the most widely known of those who were occasionally seen at Chopin"s home was Casimir Brodzinski, the poet, critic, and champion of romanticism, a prominent figure in Polish literary history, who lived in Warsaw from about 1815 to 1822, in which year he went as professor of literature to the University of Cracow.
Nicholas Chopin"s pupil, Count Frederick Skarbek, must not be forgotten; he had now become a man of note, being professor of political economy at the university, and author of several books that treat of that science.
Besides Elsner and Zywny, who have already been noticed at some length, a third musician has to be numbered among friends of the Chopin family--namely, Joseph Javurek, the esteemed composer and professor at the Conservatorium; further, I must yet make mention of Anton Barcinski, professor at the Polytechnic School, teacher at Nicholas Chopin"s inst.i.tution, and by-and-by his son-in-law; Dr. Jarocki, the zoologist; Julius Kolberg, the engineer; and Brodowski, the painter. These and others, although to us only names, or little more, are nevertheless not without their significance. We may liken them to the supernumeraries on the stage, who, dumb as they are, help to set off and show the position of the princ.i.p.al figure or figures.
The love of literature which we have noticed in the young Chopins, more particularly in the sisters, implanted by an excellent education and fostered by the taste, habits, and encouragement of their father, cannot but have been greatly influenced and strengthened by the characters and conversation of such visitors. And let it not be overlooked that this was the time of Poland"s intellectual renascence--a time when the influence of man over man is greater than at other times, he being, as it were, charged with a kind of vivifying electricity. The misfortunes that had pa.s.sed over Poland had purified and fortified the nation--breathed into it a new and healthier life. The change which the country underwent from the middle of the eighteenth to the earlier part of the nineteenth century was indeed immense. Then Poland, to use Carlyle"s drastic phraseology, had ripened into a condition of "beautifully phosph.o.r.escent rot-heap"; now, with an improved agriculture, reviving commerce, and rising industry, it was more prosperous than it had been for centuries. As regards intellectual matters, the comparison with the past was even more favourable to the present. The government that took the helm in 1815 followed the direction taken by its predecessors, and schools and universities flourished; but a most hopeful sign was this, that whilst the epoch of Stanislas Augustus was, as Mickiewicz remarked (in Les Slaves), little Slavonic and not even national, now the national spirit pervaded the whole intellectual atmosphere, and incited workers in all branches of science and art to unprecedented efforts. To confine ourselves to one department, we find that the study of the history and literature of Poland had received a vigorous impulse, folk-songs were zealously collected, and a new school of poetry, romanticism, rose victoriously over the fading splendour of an effete cla.s.sicism. The literature of the time of Stanislas was a court and salon literature, and under the influence of France and ancient Rome. The literature that began to bud about 1815, and whose germs are to be sought for in the preceding revolutionary time, was more of a people"s literature, and under the influence of Germany, England, and Russia. The one was a hot-house plant, the other a garden flower, or even a wild flower. The cla.s.sics swore by the precepts of Horace and Boileau, and held that among the works of Shakespeare there was not one veritable tragedy. The romanticists, on the other hand, showed by their criticisms and works that their sympathies were with Schiller, Goethe, Burger, Byron, Shukovski, &c. Wilna was the chief centre from which this movement issued, and Brodziriski one of the foremost defenders of the new principles and the precursor of Mickiewicz, the appearance of whose ballads, romances, "Dziady" and "Grazyna" (1822), decided the war in favour of romanticism. The names of Anton Malczewski, Bogdan Zaleski, Severyn Goszczynski, and others, ought to be cited along with that of the more ill.u.s.trious Mickiewicz, but I will not weary the reader either with a long disquisition or with a dry enumeration. I have said above that Polish poetry had become more of a people"s poetry. This, however, must not be understood in the sense of democratic poetry.
The Polish poets [says C. Courriere, to whose "Histoire de la litterature chez les Slaves" I am much indebted] ransacked with avidity the past of their country, which appeared to them so much the more brilliant because it presented a unique spectacle in the history of nations. Instead of breaking with the historic traditions they respected them, and gave them a new l.u.s.tre, a new life, by representing them under a more beautiful, more animated, and more striking form. In short, if Polish romanticism was an evolution of poetry in the national sense, it did not depart from the tendencies of its elder sister, for it saw in the past only the n.o.bility; it was and remained, except in a few instances, aristocratic.
Now let us keep in mind that this contest of cla.s.sicism and romanticism, this turning away from a dead formalism to living ideals, was taking place at that period of Frederick Chopin"s life when the human mind is most open to new impressions, and most disposed to entertain bold and n.o.ble ideas. And, further, let us not undervalue the circ.u.mstance that he must have come in close contact with one of the chief actors in this unb.l.o.o.d.y revolution.
Frederick spent his first school holidays at Szafarnia, in Mazovia, the property of the Dziewanowski family. In a letter written on August 19, 1824, he gives his friend and school-fellow William Kolberg, some account of his doings there--of his strolls and runs in the garden, his walks and drives to the forest, and above all of his horsemanship. He tells his dear Willie that he manages to keep his seat, but would not like to be asked how. Indeed, he confesses that, his equestrian accomplishments amount to no more than to letting the horse go slowly where it lists, and sitting on it, like a monkey, with fear. If he had not yet met with an accident, it was because the horse had so far not felt any inclination to throw him off. In connection with his drives--in britzka and in coach--he does not forget to mention that he is always honoured with a back-seat. Still, life at Szafarnia was not unmixed happiness, although our hero bore the ills with admirable stoicism:--
Very often [he writes] the flies sit on my prominent nose-- this, however, is of no consequence, it is the habit of these little animals. The mosquitoes bite me--this too, however, is of no consequence, for they don"t bite me in the nose.
The reader sees from this specimen of epistolary writing that Frederick is still a boy, and if I had given the letter in extenso, the boyishness would have been even more apparent, in the loose and careless style as well as in the frolicsome matter.
His letters to his people at home took on this occasion the form of a ma.n.u.script newspaper, called, in imitation of the "Kuryer Warszawski"
("Warsaw Courier"), "Kuryer Szafarski" ("Szafarnia Courier"), which the editor, in imitation of the then obtaining press regulation, did not send off until it had been seen and approved of by the censor, Miss Dziewanowska. One of the numbers of the paper contains among other news the report of a musical gathering of "some persons and demi-persons"
at which, on July 15, 1824, Mr. Pichon (anagram of Chopin) played a Concerto of Kalkbrenner"s and a little song, the latter being received by the youthful audience with more applause than the former.
Two anecdotes that relate to this stay at Szafarnia further exemplify what has already been said of Frederick"s love of fun and mischief.
Having on one of his visits to the village of Oberow met some Jews who had come to buy grain, he invited them to his room, and there entertained them with music, playing to them "Majufes."
[FOOTNOTE: Karasowski describes "Majufes" as a kind of Jewish wedding march. Ph. Lobenstein says that it means "the beautiful, the pleasing one." With this word opened a Hebrew song which dates from the time of the sojourn of the Jews in Spain, and which the orthodox Polish Jews sing on Sat.u.r.days after dinner, and whose often-heard melody the Poles imitate as a parody of Jewish singing.]
His guests were delighted--they began to dance, told him that he played like a born Jew, and urged him to come to the next Jewish wedding and play to them there. The other anecdote would be a very ugly story were it not for the redeeming conclusion. Again we meet with one of the numerous, but by no means well-loved, cla.s.s of Polish citizens.
Frederick, having heard that a certain Jew had bought grain from Mr. Romecki, the proprietor of Oberow, sent this gentleman a letter purporting to be written by the grain-dealer in question, in which he informed him that after reconsidering the matter he would rather not take the grain. The imitation of the jargon in use among the Polish Jews was so good, and the spelling and writing so bad, that Mr. Romecki was taken in. Indeed, he flew at once into such a pa.s.sion that he sent for the Jew with the intention of administering to him a sound thrashing.
Only Frederick"s timely confession saved the poor fellow from his undeserved punishment. But enough of Szafarnia, where the young scapegrace paid so long a holiday visit (from his letter to William Kolberg we learn that he would not see his friend for four weeks more), and where, judging from what has already been told, and also from a remark in the same letter, he must have "enjoyed himself pretty well."
And now we will return to Warsaw, to Nicholas Chopin"s boarding-school.
To take away any bad impression that may be left by the last anecdote, I shall tell another of a more pleasing character, which, indeed, has had the honour of being made the subject of a picture. It was often told, says Karasowski, by Casimir Wodzinski, a boarder of Nicholas Chopin"s.
One day when the latter was out, Barcinski, the a.s.sistant master, could not manage the noisy boys. Seeing this, Frederick, who just then happened to come into the room, said to them that he would improvise a pretty story if they would sit down and be quiet. This quickly restored silence. He thereupon had the lights extinguished, took his seat at the piano, and began as follows:--
Robbers set out to plunder a house. They come nearer and nearer. Then they halt, and put up the ladders they have brought with them. But just when they are about to enter through the windows, they hear a noise within. This gives them a fright. They run away to the woods. There, amidst the stillness and darkness of the night, they lie down and before long fall fast asleep.
When Frederick had got to this part of the story he began to play softer and softer, and ever softer, till his auditors, like the robbers, were fast asleep. Noticing this he stole out of the room, called in the other inmates of the house, who came carrying lights with them, and then with a tremendous, crashing chord disturbed the sweet slumbers of the evil-doers.
Here we have an instance of "la richesse de son improvisation," by which, as Fontana tells us, Chopin, from his earliest youth, astonished all who had the good fortune to hear him. Those who think that there is no salvation outside the pale of absolute music, will no doubt be horror-stricken at the heretical tendency manifested on this occasion by an otherwise so promising musician. Nay, even the less orthodox, those who do not altogether deny the admissibility of programme-music if it conforms to certain conditions and keeps within certain limits, will shake their heads sadly. The duty of an enthusiastic biographer, it would seem, is unmistakable; he ought to justify, or, at least, excuse his hero--if nothing else availed, plead his youth and inexperience.
My leaving the poor suspected heretic in the lurch under these circ.u.mstances will draw upon me the reproach of remissness; but, as I have what I consider more important business on hand, I must not be deterred from proceeding to it by the fear of censure.
The year 1825 was, in many respects, a memorable one in the life of Chopin. On May 27 and June 10 Joseph Javurek, whom I mentioned a few pages back among the friends of the Chopin family, gave two concerts for charitable purposes in the large hall of the Conservatorium. At one of these Frederick appeared again in public. A Warsaw correspondent of the "Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung" says in the course of one of his letters:--
The Academist Chopin performed the first Allegro of Moscheles" Pianoforte Concerto in F [G?] minor, and an improvisation on the aeolopantaleon. This instrument, invented by the cabinet-maker Dlugosz, of this town, combines the aeolomelodicon [FOOTNOTE: An instrument of the organ species, invented by Professor Hoffmann, and constructed by the mechanician Brunner, of Warsaw.] with the piano- forte....Young Chopin distinguished himself in his improvisation by wealth of musical ideas, and under his hands this instrument, of which he is a thorough master, made a great impression.
Unfortunately we learn nothing of Chopin"s rendering of the movement from Moscheles" Concerto. Still, this meagre notice, written by a contemporary--an ear-witness, who wrote down his impressions soon after the performance--is very precious, indeed more precious than the most complete and elaborate criticism written fifty years after the occurrence would be. I cannot help thinking that Karasowski somewhat exaggerates when he says that Chopin"s pianoforte playing transported the audience into a state of enthusiasm, and that no concert had a brilliant success unless he took part in it. The biographer seems either to trust too much to the fancy-coloured recollections of his informants, or to allow himself to be carried away by his zeal for the exaltation of his hero. At any rate, the tenor of the above-quoted notice, laudatory as it is, and the absence of Chopin"s name from other Warsaw letters, do not remove the doubts which such eulogistic superlatives raise in the mind of an unbia.s.sed inquirer. But that Chopin, as a pianist and as a musician generally, had attained a proficiency far beyond his years becomes evident if we examine his compositions of that time, to which I shall presently advert. And that he had risen into notoriety and saw his talents appreciated cannot be doubted for a moment after what has been said. Were further proof needed, we should find it in the fact that he was selected to display the excellences of the aeolomelodicon when the Emperor Alexander I, during his sojourn in Warsaw in 1825, [FOOTNOTE: The Emperor Alexander opened the Diet at Warsaw on May 13, 1825, and closed it on June 13.] expressed the wish to hear this instrument.
Chopin"s performance is said to have pleased the august auditor, who, at all events, rewarded the young musician with a diamond ring.
A greater event than either the concert or the performance before the Emperor, in fact, THE event of the year 1825, was the publication of Chopin"s Opus 1. Only he who has experienced the delicious sensation of seeing himself for the first time in print can realise what our young author felt on this occasion. Before we examine this work, we will give a pa.s.sing glance at some less important early compositions of the maestro which were published posthumously.
There is first of all a Polonaise in G sharp minor, said to be of the year 1822, [FOOTNOTE: See No. 15 of the Posthumous Works in the Breitkopf and Hartel edition.] but which, on account of the savoir-faire and invention exhibited in it, I hold to be of a considerably later time. Chopin"s individuality, it is true, is here still in a rudimentary state, chiefly manifested in the light-winged figuration; the thoughts and the expression, however, are natural and even graceful, bearing thus the divine impress. The echoes of Weber should be noted. Of two mazurkas, in G and B flat major, of the year 1825, the first is, especially in its last part, rather commonplace; the second is more interesting, because more suggestive of better things, which the first is only to an inconsiderable extent. In No. 2 we meet already with harmonic piquancies which charmed musicians and lovers of music so much in the later mazurkas. Critics and students will not overlook the octaves between, treble and ba.s.s in the second bar of part two in No.
1. A. Polonaise in B flat minor, superscribed "Farewell to William Kolberg," of the year 1826, has not less naturalness and grace than the Polonaise of 1822, but in addition to these qualities, it has also at least one thought (part 1) which contains something of the sweet ring of Chopinian melancholy. The trio of the Polonaise is headed by the words: "Au revoir! after an aria from "Gazza ladra"." Two foot-notes accompany this composition in the Breitkopf and Hartel edition (No. 16 of the Posthumous Works). The first says that the Polonaise was composed "at Chopin"s departure from [should be "for"] Reinerz"; and the second, in connection with the trio, that "some days before Chopin"s departure the two friends had been present at a performance of Rossini"s opera."
There is one other early posthumously-published work of Chopin"s, whose status, however, differs from the above-mentioned ones in this, that the composer seems to have intended to publish it. The composition in question is the Variations sur un air national allemand.
Szulc says that Oskar Kolberg related that he had still in his possession these Variations on the theme of Der Schweizerbub, which Chopin composed between his twelfth and seventeenth years at the house of General Sowinski"s wife in the course of "a few quarter-hours."
The Variations sur un air national allemand were published after the composer"s death along with his Sonata, Op. 4, by Haslinger, of Vienna, in 1851. They are, no doubt, the identical composition of which Chopin in a letter from Vienna (December 1, 1830) writes: "Haslinger received me very kindly, but nevertheless would publish neither the Sonata nor the Second Variations." The First Variations were those on La ci darem, Op. 2, the first of his compositions that was published in Germany.
Without inquiring too curiously into the exact time of its production and into the exact meaning of "a few quarter-hours," also leaving it an open question whether the composer did or did not revise his first conception of the Variations before sending them to Vienna, I shall regard this unnumbered work--which, by the way, in the Breitkopf and Hartel edition is dated 1824--on account of its greater simplicity and inferior interest, as an earlier composition than the Premier Rondeau (C minor), Op. 1, dedicated to Mdme. de Linde (the wife of his father"s friend and colleague, the rector Dr. Linde), a lady with whom Frederick often played duets. What strikes one at once in both of them is the almost total absence of awkwardness and the presence of a rarely-disturbed ease. They have a natural air which is alike free from affected profundity and insipid childishness. And the hand that wrote them betrays so little inexperience in the treatment of the instrument that they can hold their ground without difficulty and honourably among the better cla.s.s of light drawing-room pieces. Of course, there are weak points: the introduction to the Variations with those interminable sequences of dominant and tonic chords accompanying a stereotyped run, and the want of cohesiveness in the Rondo, the different subjects of which are too loosely strung together, may be instanced. But, although these two compositions leave behind them a pleasurable impression, they can lay only a small claim to originality. Still, there are slight indications of it in the tempo di valse, the concluding portion of the Variations, and more distinct ones in the Rondo, in which it is possible to discover the embryos of forms--chromatic and serpentining progressions, &c.--which subequently develop most exuberantly. But if on the one hand we must admit that the composer"s individuality is as yet weak, on the other hand we cannot accuse him of being the imitator of any one master--such a dominant influence is not perceptible.
[FOOTNOTE: Schumann, who in 1831 became acquainted with Chopin"s Op.
2, and conceived an enthusiastic admiration for the composer, must have made inquiries after his Op. 1, and succeeded in getting it. For on January 1832, he wrote to Frederick Wieck: "Chopin"s first work (I believe firmly that it is his tenth) is in my hands: a lady would say that it was very pretty, very piquant, almost Moschelesque. But I believe you will make Clara [Wieck"s daughter, afterwards Mdme.
Schumann] study it; for there is plenty of Geist in it and few difficulties. But I humbly venture to a.s.sert that there are between this composition and Op. 2 two years and twenty works"]
All this, however, is changed in another composition, the Rondeau a la Mazur, Op. 5, dedicated to the Comtesse Alexandrine de Moriolles (a daughter of the Comte de Moriolles mentioned in Chapter II), which, like the Rondo, Op. 1, was first published in Warsaw, and made its appearance in Germany some years later. I do not know the exact time of its composition, but I presume it was a year or two after that of the previously mentioned works. Schumann, who reviewed it in 1836, thought it had perhaps been written in the eighteenth year of the composer, but he found in it, some confused pa.s.sages excepted, no indications of the author"s youth. In this Rondeau a la Mazur the individuality of Chopin and with it his nationality begin to reveal themselves unmistakably. Who could fail to recognise him in the peculiar sweet and persuasive flows of sound, and the serpent-like winding of the melodic outline, the wide-spread chords, the chromatic progressions, the dissolving of the harmonies and the linking of their const.i.tuent parts! And, as I have said elsewhere in speaking of this work: "The harmonies are often novel, and the matter is more h.o.m.ogeneous and better welded into oneness."
Chopin"s pianoforte lessons, as has already been stated, came to an end when he was twelve years old, and thenceforth he was left to his own resources.
The school of that time [remarks Fontana] could no longer suffice him, he aimed higher, and felt himself impelled towards an ideal which, at first vague, before long grew into greater distinctness. It was then that, in trying his strength, he acquired that touch and style, so different from those of his predecessors, and that he succeeded in creating at last that execution which since then has been the admiration of the artistic world.
The first stages of the development of his peculiar style may be traced in the compositions we have just now discussed. In the variations and first Rondo which Chopin wrote at or before the age of fifteen, the treatment of the instrument not only proves that he was already as much in his element on the pianoforte as a fish in the water, but also shows that an as yet vaguely-perceived ideal began to beckon him onward.
Karasowski, informed by witnesses of the boy"s studies in pianoforte playing, relates that Frederick, being struck with the fine effect of a chord in extended harmony, and unable, on account of the smallness of his hands, to strike the notes simultaneously, set about thinking how this physical obstacle could be overcome. The result of his cogitations was the invention of a contrivance which he put between his fingers and kept there even during the night, by this means endeavouring to increase the extensibility and flexibility of his hands. Who, in reading of this incident in Chopin"s life, is not reminded of Schumann and his attempt to strengthen his fingers, an attempt that ended so fatally for his prospects as a virtuoso! And the question, an idle one I admit, suggests itself: Had Chopin been less fortunate than he was, and lost, like Schumann, the command of one of his hands before he had formed his pianoforte style, would he, as a composer, have risen to a higher position than we know him to have attained, or would he have achieved less than he actually did? From the place and wording of Karasowski"s account it would appear that this experiment of Chopin"s took place at or near the age of ten. Of course it does not matter much whether we know or do not know the year or day of the adoption of the practice, what is really interesting is the fact itself. I may, however, remark that Chopin"s love of wide-spread chords and skips, if marked at all, is not strongly marked in the Variations on the German air and the first Rondo. Let the curious examine with regard to this matter the Tempo di Valse of the former work, and bars 38-43 of the Piu lento of the latter.
In the Rondeau a la Mazur, the next work in chronological order, this peculiarity begins to show itself distinctly, and it continues to grow in the works that follow. It is not my intention to weary the reader with microscopical criticism, but I thought the first manifestations of Chopin"s individuality ought not to be pa.s.sed over in silence. As to his style, it will be more fully discussed in a subsequent chapter, where also the seeds from which it sprang will be pointed out.