Chopin. Adam Zamoyski

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      Chopin was reticent by nature and extremely guarded when it came to private matters. He was too lazy to keep a diary and too self-deprecating to write his memoirs. He left no wife or son who might fashion his image for posterity. This left the field open to acquaintances who, as is usual in such cases, adapted or invented in order to project the desired image of themselves. The majority of Chopin’s private papers were destroyed, in two world wars, a national insurrection and a personal vendetta. Biographers have therefore resorted to speculation and fantasy to fill the gaps, with every generation projecting its own aesthetics and desires on the blank canvas. It is only comparatively recently that historical discipline was brought to bear, and that the composer’s origins have been fully established.

      They lie with a family of indigent peasants by the name of Chapin who moved at the end of the seventeenth century from the village of Saint-Crépin in the Dauphiné region of France to the more prosperous duchy of Lorraine. By the mid-eighteenth century they were wine-growers and wheelwrights in the village of Marainville-sur-Madon in the Vosges, and their name had changed to Chopin. The Duchy of Lorraine was then ruled by King Stanisław Leszczyński, father-in-law of Louis XV, who had received it in 1737 as a consolation prize for losing his Polish throne, and it became home to many of his Polish supporters and courtiers. It was in Marainville that the composer’s father, Nicolas, was born in 1771, to François Chopin, the village administrator (though there was a persistent rumour, allegedly encouraged in later life by Nicolas himself, that he was the natural son of the local châtelain, a courtier of King Stanisław).

      In 1780 the château of Marainville was bought by a Polish nobleman, Michał Jan Pac. His estate manager, Adam Weydlich, also a Pole, was married to a middle-class Parisienne who, it seems, taught the young Nicolas Chopin to read and write, and possibly to play the flute. When, after the death of Pac and the sale of the estate in 1787, the Weydlichs returned to Poland, they took the sixteen-year-old Nicolas with them. In Warsaw, he was installed in the household of Weydlich’s brother Franciszek, who taught German and Latin at the Cadet School. He earned his keep by working for a couple of years as accountant at the Warsaw tobacco factory and, after it closed in 1789, acting as tutor to the Weydlich children. He was honest and reliable, and must have acquired a considerable degree of education, as well as well-placed protectors, as he then became tutor to the son of the mayor of Warsaw, Jan Dekert, and in 1792 to the children of the Dziewanowski family on their estate at Szafarnia.

      Two years earlier, an opportunity had presented itself to Nicolas to visit his family in Marainville, as someone had to go there in connection with Pac’s estate. But he did not avail himself of this, and indeed appears never to have sought to make contact with them again. He was also probably discouraged from going by the possibility of being trapped in revolutionary France and even drafted into the army. This did not shield him from war, which came in 1792, when Russian armies invaded Poland. After a brief campaign, the country lost a large part of its territory to Russia and a smaller one to Prussia, and was occupied by Russian troops. In 1794 a national insurrection broke out in an attempt to liberate the country from Russian control. Nicolas Chopin enlisted in the Warsaw militia, and was wounded in the Russian assault on the city, which effectively put an end to the insurrection.³

      Later that year or at the beginning of the next, he moved to the country estate of Kiernozia, to act as father-figure as well as tutor to the newly orphaned children of Maciej Łączyński (one of whom, Maria, was to become famous after her marriage to Anastazy Walewski as Napoleon’s mistress). Nicolas remained there until 1802, when he moved to a similar job in the household of Count Skarbek on the estate of Żelazowa Wola, where he looked after the Count’s four children. In 1806 the thirty-five-year-old Nicolas Chopin married Tekla Justyna Krzyżanowska, the reputedly beautiful and sweet-natured twenty-four-year-old daughter of an impoverished nobleman who had worked for Skarbek as an estate manager.

      The following year the Chopins had a daughter, Ludwika, and moved into one of the outbuildings of the manor, a spacious single-storey house with a thatched roof, in which they occupied a couple of rooms. It was in one of these whitewashed rooms with its clay floor that their son was born in 1810. He was christened Fryderyk Franciszek in honour of his godfather, the young Count Fryderyk Skarbek, and Nicolas Chopin’s own father, François. The baptismal register of the parish church of Brochów, near Żelazowa Wola, states that the child was born on 22 February, but the Chopin family and the composer himself always gave the date of his birth as 1 March. To complicate matters further, his age was consistently increased by a year whenever he was mentioned in the press or appeared in public as a child, giving rise to the impression, held by some of his friends, that he had been born in 1809. The parish register is not a record of birth, and the date mentioned would have been supplied by Nicolas Chopin or his wife. There is therefore no reason to favour either date, and one can only be thankful that the year, 1810, is certainly accurate.⁴

      The Chopins moved to Warsaw only six months after the birth of their son. The city and its surrounding area had been liberated from foreign rule following Napoleon’s victory at Jena in 1806, and in 1807 reconstituted as a new state, the Duchy of Warsaw. Politically a satellite of France, the Duchy was modelled on the French pattern, and the French language became more of a necessity than a luxury, which favoured Nicolas Chopin. He obtained a post teaching French at the Warsaw high school, the Lycée (Liceum), starting in October 1810, and later another at one of the military training schools.

      Warsaw was an unusual metropolis, whose aspect reflected its chequered past. There was a medieval walled city jostling for space on the escarpment overlooking the Vistula with the Royal Castle, by then sadly dilapidated. To the south of this stretched a few elegant eighteenth-century streets and, beyond that, a curiously rural city of palaces and villas, many with extensive grounds, interspersed with humbler dwellings and wooden hovels. One traveller likened it to a drawing room full of furniture, some of it very fine, which had never been properly arranged. Many of the palaces had become public buildings, while others had been divided up into apartments.

      The Lycée was housed in a redundant palace built by the Saxon kings of Poland, a grandiose eighteenth-century building with white stucco façades. As there was no accommodation provided for pupils from the country, teachers were encouraged to take apartments in one of the wings of the palace if they were prepared to take in paying boarders. The thrifty Nicolas Chopin seized on this opportunity to increase his income, and moved into the Saxon Palace with his family. He took in six boys, who slept in two rooms and took all their meals with the family.

      Nicolas identified himself entirely with his adopted country, and considered himself a Pole. In this he was not being eccentric. Most of his colleagues at the Lycée, from the Rector Samuel Bogumil Linde down, were of foreign origin, and sported names such as Kolberg, Ciampi and Vogel, but had become enthusiastically Polish in outlook. Nicolas Chopin always insisted on speaking Polish, and would not tolerate any other language in his home, even though he spoke it badly and had to resort to French when writing letters.

      He was a competent teacher, stern and literal, and was described by one of his pupils as ‘a rather ceremoniously grave personage with a certain elegance of manner’.⁵ He was not religious, and felt no reverence for the institutions of monarchy and aristocracy, but he was no revolutionary; he believed firmly in acknowledging the ruling power and accepting the limits imposed by the society he lived in. His attitude to art and music was prosaic, although he played the flute a little, until his baby son broke it, and later took up the violin.

      The only artistic influence in the household was provided by Justyna, who could play the piano well and sing quite respectably. In contrast to her husband, she was very religious. She was gentle and quiet, but although her role in the family was confined to that of mother and housekeeper, she stood out by her dignified bearing and social graces. Her presence was a considerable comfort to her son, providing as it did a counterbalance to his СКАЧАТЬ