Chopin. Adam Zamoyski
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Название: Chopin
Автор: Adam Zamoyski
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007351824
isbn:
Chopin was delighted with every aspect of the evening, but it is worth noting that the hall, with only seven hundred people in the audience, was not quite full, and that notwithstanding the deafening applause, there was only one review of the concert, and that a short one.
Chopin himself was convinced that the theatre had been full, and was probably relieved by the silence in the press. He was by now busy with the preparations for his departure, and had to pay farewell calls on all his acquaintances, many of whom gave him letters of introduction to friends and relatives in Vienna. On 25 October he called on Konstancja in order to take his leave.
At some stage in the course of the previous weeks Chopin had at last given her some intimation of his feelings, and he had apparently met with a good reception. Rings were exchanged and Chopin was allowed to write to her, through the discreet agency of Matuszyński. At this last meeting, she wrote a little verse into his album, which ended with the lines:
Others may value and reward you more.
But they can never love you more than we do.
[At some later date, Chopin added, in pencil: ‘Oh yes they can!’]38
On the evening of 1 November, a party of friends organised a farewell dinner attended by Nicolas Chopin, Żywny, Magnuszewski, Fontana and others. They sang, danced and played late into the night, after which they walked Chopin back to his house. The next morning he made his last farewells while Ludwika finished copying some of the scores he was taking with him, and in the afternoon the family accompanied him to the coaching station. Neither the young man nor his worried family knew how long he would be away or how he would fare alone in the world.
The coach trundled away, through the dingy western suburb of Wola, but was stopped just after passing the city gates. It was surrounded by a group of men, who turned out to be Elsner with a small male choir. To the accompaniment of a guitar, they performed a cantata which the old man had composed for the occasion. It exhorted Chopin to remember his motherland, and to keep its harmonies in his soul wherever he might find himself. There was something prophetic, both in the words and in the emotion with which Elsner embraced his pupil, as though he never expected to see him again. After the last tearful embrace, Chopin climbed back into the coach, which rolled away, bearing him off from his native land for ever.
Chopin was not alone for long. At Kalisz, the first halt, he was joined by Tytus, whose company quickly banished the sorrows of leave-taking. Together they went on to Breslau, where they spent four days. One afternoon they wandered idly into the Merchants’ Hall to find a rehearsal for the evening’s concert in progress. During a break, Chopin sat down at the piano and started showing off. The local pianist who was billed to play at the concert heard him and immediately renounced his role in terror, with the result that the unsuspecting public were that evening treated not to the Moscheles concerto advertised, but to Chopin playing two movements of his E minor Concerto as a solo.
From Breslau they travelled to Dresden, which Chopin knew already. He revisited the art gallery, its main attraction for him. ‘There are pictures there at the sight of which I hear music,’ he explained to his parents in one of the very few references he ever made to the other arts.1 Chopin liked the beautiful eighteenth-century city, with its large Polish colony surviving from the days when Poland and Saxony had been united under one crown, but he was less keen on the traditional form of transport, the sedan chair, which made him feel foolish as he was carried to a soirée.
He called on the principal musical figures in the city, some of whom suggested that he give a concert before moving on. But he refused. A concert in Dresden would have earned him some money and would certainly not have done his reputation any harm, but he was in such a sanguine frame of mind that he thought it a waste of time; he was in a hurry to reach Vienna. He felt he knew Vienna and that Vienna knew and valued him, and it was in high spirits that he arrived there on 22 November 1830.
‘How happy I am to have reached Vienna, where I shall make so many interesting and useful acquaintances, and where I may even fall in love!’ he wrote to Matuszyński the moment he and Tytus had settled into their rooms at the Stadt London Hotel.2 That evening they went off to the opera to see Rossini’s Otello, eyeing the girls in the street on the way (although Chopin did not fail to insert a pious reference to Konstancja in his letter to the go-between Matuszyński).
The next morning he received the greatest possible compliment of a visit from Hummel. Such a mark of respect from the most eminent composer left in what was still the capital of music could not have failed to encourage Chopin’s boldest expectations. But these were a little clouded later that morning by the publisher Haslinger, whom he hastened to call on. Haslinger had probably lost money on the La ci darem la mano Variations, and had therefore not published the C minor Sonata (op.4) or the variations that Chopin had left with him on his previous visit. He declared that he had no intention of giving Chopin any money for the two concertos he had brought him. He did intimate that he might consider publishing one of them if Chopin let him have the copyright for nothing, but Chopin was determined not to let himself be exploited further. ‘From now on it’s: “Pay up, Animal!”’ he announced in a letter to his family, explaining that he was growing wary of the ‘crooks and Jews’ who stood between him and making money.3 With the reputation he had built up and the contacts he had made, he felt he could afford to be firm with them.
After a few days Chopin and Tytus moved to a cheaper hotel while they waited for the lodgings they had found to be vacated by their current tenant, an English admiral. ‘An Admiral! Yes, but I shall be held in admiration, so the lodgings will lose nothing in the change!’ Chopin blustered in his letter home.4 The three spacious rooms were ‘beautifully, luxuriously and elegantly furnished’, the rent was low, and the landlady, a pretty young widow who professed a love for Poles and contempt for Austrians and Germans, had been to Warsaw and had heard of Chopin. But it was the position of the apartment, on the third floor of a house on the Kohlmarkt, which particularly delighted the two young men. As Chopin pointed out to his parents, it was ‘right in the centre of town, with a wonderful promenade below’, the music shop of Artaria on the left, and those of Mechetti and Haslinger on the right, and the opera just behind – ‘what else could one possibly need?’5 Graf, whose soft-toned pianos enchanted him, and to whose shop he had been going every afternoon in order to ‘loosen [his] fingers after the journey’, had promised to move an instrument into the lodgings free of charge, and this would enable Chopin to invite people to come and listen to him.6
His immediate preoccupation was to arrange a concert, and he duly called on musicians СКАЧАТЬ