Chopin. Adam Zamoyski
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Название: Chopin
Автор: Adam Zamoyski
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007351824
isbn:
He looked back on his life, pointing to its worthlessness and to the fact that, cut off as he was from everything dear to him, it made no sense. There is less affectation here than in some of his letters from Vienna, and the feelings expressed have a genuine ring to them. The twenty-one-year-old composer felt lost, and anxious over his future. He was now quite alone, and further from home than he had ever been. Not the least of his worries was the fact that, while philandering in the company of Kumelski, he had caught a venereal disease.36 If he had invested his twentieth birthday with such significance, he can hardly have regarded what may well have been his first sexual encounter, let alone its consequence, as anything but a watershed in his existence.
But he did not have time to indulge his own miseries, as only a couple of days later he received news which was to alter the course of his life dramatically – the Polish army had been defeated and Warsaw had fallen to the notoriously ruthless Russian commander General Paskievich. In his diary, Chopin wrote:
I wrote the preceding pages without knowing that the enemy had already broken in – the suburbs are destroyed, burnt down – Oh, Jaś[Matuszyński]! Wiluś [Kolberg] probably died on the ramparts! I can see Marceli [Woyciechowski] in chains! Sowiński [the general in whose house Chopin wrote the Fantasia on Polish Airs], that kind old man, in the hands of those monsters! Oh God! You exist! You exist and yet You do not punish! Have You not seen enough Russian crimes? Or perhaps – maybe You are a Russian Yourself! My poor father! My dearest! Perhaps he has nothing left to buy my mother bread with! Perhaps my sisters have succumbed to the fury of the Russian rabble! Paskievich, that dog from Mohilev, has stormed the capital of the first monarchs of Europe! The Russian is master of the world!? Oh, father, so this is your reward in old age! Mother, suffering, gentle mother, you watched your daughter die, and now the Russian marches in over her bones to come and oppress you!…Did they spare her gravę They trampled it and covered it with a thousand fresh corpses! They have burnt the city! Oh, why could I not have killed at least one Russian! Oh, Tytus, Tytus!…What is happening to her, where is shę – unfortunate creature! – Perhaps she is in Russian hands? The Russians are pressing her, stifling, murdering, killing her! Oh my love, I am alone here, come to me, – I shall wipe away the tears and heal the wounds of the present with memories of the past…when there were no Russians…Maybe I have no mother any more, perhaps the Russians have killed her, murdered her…my sisters unconscious, yes, or struggling; my father in despair, helpless – no one left to pick up my dead mother. I am inactive, I sit here empty-handed, just groaning, suffering on the piano in despair…and what next? God, God! Move the earth – may it swallow up the people of this century. May the cruellest tortures fall on the heads of the French, who would not come to our aid!…37
Having cursed the French, Chopin set off for Paris a few days later. He was to build a new life there which suited him better than any he could have had in Warsaw, but the sense of loss sustained on that night in Stuttgart never left him. It came to embrace everything – home, country, family, friends, love and youth – and remained the fundamental inspiration for his music. As he had promised Konstancja, he would ‘heal the wounds of the present with memories of the past’.
The Paris that Chopin saw for the first time in September 1831 was a formidable city. Its size, the grandeur of its buildings and monuments, the scale of its open spaces, its bustle and vitality, not to mention emblems of modernity such as the gas lighting to be seen here and there, all made Vienna look like a market town by comparison. But Paris was far more than that. ‘Paris is the capital not only of France, but of the entire civilised world; it is the rendezvous of its intellectual notables,’ wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine, who had exiled himself there. ‘Here is assembled all that is great in love or in hate, in sentiment as in thought, in knowledge or in power, in happiness as in misery, in the future or in the past. When one considers the collection of distinguished or famous men that one finds here, Paris appears like the Pantheon of the living. They are creating a new art here, a new religion, a new life; it is here that the creators of a new world are happily at work.’1
Chopin was no intellectual, and what arrested his attention first in Paris was the allure of the decadent yet vibrant capital, so very different from the strait-laced cities he was used to. It exuded a permissive atmosphere which both shocked and delighted him. Apart from the bright lights, what intrigued him most were the whores who pursued him in the street, the chorus girls who were so keen on ‘duets’, as he coyly put it, and the lady upstairs who suggested they share a fire on cold days. ‘Here you have the greatest luxury, the greatest squalor, the greatest virtue and the greatest vice – everywhere you look there are notices about ven. disease – you simply cannot imagine the shouting, the commotion, the bustle and the dirt; one could positively lose oneself in this anthill, and the nice thing is that nobody cares what anyone else does,’ he wrote to Kumelski after a few days in the city, adding that he was prevented by his ailment from ‘tasting the forbidden fruit’.2
The other thing Chopin quickly became aware of was that Paris lay at the epicentre of European dissidence. The revolution which had swept the Bourbon Charles X off the throne in the previous year and replaced him with Louis Philippe had been incomplete, and there was continuing unrest, fuelled by the influx of defeated revolutionaries from Italy, Germany and Poland.
While Chopin was conservative by instinct, the shock of seeing his country crushed had induced a spirit of rebellion in him, and he ranged himself on the side of the enemies of the status quo, voicing subversive views on all authority. Possibly out of a desire to compensate for having failed to take part in the insurrection, he attended meetings along with other young Polish émigrés, and may even have been mixed up in some rioting.3
The artistic life of the French capital was as unbridled as its manners and as partisan as its politics. The progress of the Romantic revolution against the literary establishment had been marked by violent battles, as the supporters and opponents of Victor Hugo resorted to physical as well as literary weapons. This had created an atmosphere congenial to anyone with a new idea, and the city attracted artists of every kind. It was, as Heine pointed out, the artistic capital of the Western world.
‘I’m delighted with what I have found here,’ Chopin wrote to Kumelski. ‘I have the best musicians and the best opera in the world.’4 With Beethoven, Weber and Schubert dead, and the next generation of great composers not having yet made a significant impact (Mendelssohn was twenty-two, Schumann and Chopin twenty-one, Liszt nineteen, Verdi seventeen and Wagner eighteen), the musical establishment of Paris, consisting as it did of a handful of venerables like Cherubini (Director of the Conservatoire), Paër and Lesueur; renowned opera composers like Auber and Hérold; and above all the two lions of the moment, Rossini and Meyerbeer, was indeed the most brilliant in the world.
Paris also boasted the finest collection of performing musicians. In the concert halls, Chopin heard the pianists Herz, Liszt, Osborne and Hiller. The three orchestras – of the Conservatoire, the Academy (Opéra) and the Italian opera (the Théâtre des Italiens) – were probably the best in Europe. The singers at the two opera houses included such legendary names as Giuditta Pasta and Maria Malibran, and when he went to performances of Rossini’s operas under the baton of the composer himself, Chopin felt he was hearing completely different works from those he had heard СКАЧАТЬ