Chopin. Adam Zamoyski

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       ONE A Prodigy Restrained

      On 30 October 1849 a large crowd gathered at the church of La Madeleine in Paris, and hundreds of carriages clogged the surrounding streets, causing a jam that stretched as far as the place de la Concorde. The front of the enormous temple-like church was draped with panels of black velvet bearing the initials ‘F.C.’ embroidered in silver. Entry was by ticket only, and those who had not managed to obtain one thronged the monumental steps.

      ‘At noon, the grim servants of death appeared at the entrance to the temple bearing the coffin of the great artist. At the same time a funeral march familiar to all admirers of Chopin burst from the recesses of the choir. A shiver of death ran through the congregation,’ recalled the French poet Théophile Gautier. ‘As for me, I fancied I could see the sun grow pale and the gilding of the domes take on an evil greenish tint…’¹

      Mozart’s Requiem was sung, with the legendary mezzo-soprano Pauline Garcia-Viardot and the famous bass Luigi Lablache supported by the orchestra and choir of the Paris Conservatoire, the finest in Europe. During the offertory, the organist of the Madeleine played two of Chopin’s preludes.

      After the service, the coffin was borne from the church to the cemetery of Père Lachaise. The mourners were led by Prince Adam Czartoryski, widely regarded as Poland’s uncrowned king, and the pall-bearers included the most famous operatic composer of the day, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and the painter Eugène Delacroix. Behind the coffin came dozens of musicians and artists, and thousands of the dead man’s friends and admirers, with even the grandest ladies walking on foot, their escutcheoned carriages following in a long cortège. At the cemetery, the coffin was lowered into the grave without a homily, and the mourners dispersed in silence.²

      With the possible exception of Beethoven, no musician had ever had such a splendid funeral, and few have been so mourned. A year later, a monument was placed over the grave, and this quickly became, and remains to this day, not only a place of pilgrimage but also the recipient of letters and messages. Some merely express admiration and gratitude, but most are personal communications, often passionate and sometimes pathological in nature, professing a decidedly possessive love.

      Chopin has been worshipped not only for his music, but for himself, and not only worshipped but desired and appropriated. This most private and diffident of men has been taken over by musicians, musicologists, artists, biographers, film-makers and even politicians who believed they understood him and knew him intimately, moulding his image to their own purposes. Musicians have imposed their own often highly subjective interpretations on his music, musicologists have rewritten it, artists have painted him as they would like to see him, biographers have introduced their own dramatic imagination into his life, film-makers have dripped blood on the keyboard and politicians have attempted to claim him, for France, for Poland, СКАЧАТЬ