Chopin. Adam Zamoyski

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СКАЧАТЬ opened up before him. When he returned to Warsaw in September, it was with his head full of these new harmonies.

      He had by now achieved such mastery of the keyboard that the Polonaises he turned out were far superior in technical terms to their Ogiński model. With the A flat major Polonaise, written in 1821 and dedicated to Żywny, he had moved on to writing in the so-called ‘brilliant’ style; it is a sparkling bravura piece designed to show off the virtuosity of the performer rather than to plumb the depths of musical expression. At the same time, he continued to seek the key to a deeper understanding of the language of music, following his own instinct and taking advantage of every opportunity to expand his knowledge.

      He was profoundly affected by the new Italian music, represented most notably by the operas of Spontini and Rossini, now fashionable in Warsaw. It was being promoted by the conductor and composer Karol Kurpiński, himself the author of several operas in a similar style. Chopin was struck by the melodic brilliance and the ‘singing’ quality produced by the Italian composers, and strove to bring some of these into his own playing.

      In his fourteenth year he began writing waltzes and Mazurkas (the Gallicised name of the mazur, the principal dance of the peasants of Mazovia) as well as Polonaises, often for more than one instrument. Lack of evidence precludes any serious analysis of his output, and the main source of information on the compositions of this period is the album of Countess Izabela Grabowska, which was fortunately described by a musicologist before it was lost in the war. The Countess was a cousin of Fryderyk Skarbek and an enthusiastic violinist, and as she lived not far from the Chopin apartment, the young composer spent a good deal of time with her.

      Most of the music in the album was written, possibly in collaboration with the Countess, around 1824. The book contained a large number of compositions for the piano, and quite a few for piano and violin. The musicologist who examined it thought many of these unremarkable and imitative of Hummel, and noted a lack of experience and a certain untidiness in the way the harmonies were developed. But he was also astonished by the number of passages which showed originality and seemed to announce Chopin’s mature work.⁶

      Chopin expanded his education and experience by taking part in a variety of musical events, most of them of an amateur nature. Documentary evidence is scarce, but we do know that he was closely involved in a series of musical performances put on by a friend of Nicolas Chopin, Józef Jawurek, the director of music of the Warsaw Evangelical church, which had a fine neo-classical rotunda with good acoustics. In 1824 and 1825 Chopin took part, along with his sister Ludwika and Jan Białobłocki, in performances of Haydn’s Creation and works by Elsner, and it is highly likely that he was involved in other similar events.⁷

      In April 1825 the capital prepared for an official visit from Tsar Alexander, and it was Chopin who was singled out by the Warsaw instrument-maker Brunner and the inventor Professor Hoffmann to show off their latest invention, the eolomelodicon, at a public concert. It was a sort of miniature organ, and Chopin played part of a Moscheles piano concerto and an improvisation of his own on it at a grand instrumental and vocal concert at the Conservatoire on 27 May. As the makers had hoped, both the instrument and the boy’s playing caused such a stir that the Tsar came to hear of it, and a special recital was organised for him. This command performance took place in the Evangelical church, with Chopin dressed in his Lycée full-dress uniform of blue tailcoat, breeches and stockings, pumps with silver buckles and white gloves. The Tsar was so taken with his playing that he presented him and the makers of the instrument with diamond rings.⁸

      This recognition coincided with the first commercial publication, on 2 June 1825, of one of Chopin’s works, the Rondo in C minor, op.1. The Benevolent Society managed to persuade all the artists who had taken part in the May concert to repeat their performance for charity on 10 June, and on this occasion Chopin played the newly published Rondo on the strange instrument, and then launched into a long improvisation, which earned him his first mention in the press outside Poland. The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung of Leipzig reported that ‘young Chopin distinguished himself in his improvisation by a wealth of musical ideas, and under his hands this instrument, of which he is a great master, made a deep impression’.⁹

      International acclaim was one thing, but the laws of the Chopin family were rigid, and as the boy only had a month left before his end-of-year exams, he was made to apply himself to his work. ‘I have to sit and sit, sit, still sit, and perhaps sit up all night,’ he wrote to his friend Białobłocki, who had now settled in the country, adding in a subsequent letter that he would at best scrape through the exams.¹⁰ In the event, he once again jointly topped his class, this time with his friend Julian Fontana. The next day he rushed out to buy himself a new pair of corduroy breeches and then climbed into a carriage with Ludwika Dziewanowska, who had come to take him and Dominik to Szafarnia.

      The summer of 1825 was so fine that Chopin hardly played any music. He spent his days out of doors with his friend, walking, riding, shooting, and occasionally going off on longer excursions with the whole house party. They visited various neighbouring estates, dropped in on Jan Białobłocki, who was ill with tuberculosis, and on one outing got as far as the city of Toruń. Chopin spent the day there admiring the Gothic churches, which impressed him by their age, sampling the celebrated local gingerbread, and visiting the house in which Copernicus was born. He was appalled by the condition of the house, and incensed that the room in which the great astronomer was born was now inhabited by ‘some German who stuffs himself with potatoes and then probably passes foul winds’.¹¹

      The climax of the summer was the harvest festival, which Chopin described at length in a letter to his parents. ‘We were sitting at dinner, just finishing the last course,’ he wrote. ‘We suddenly heard in the distance a chorus of falsetto voices; old peasant women whining through their noses and girls squealing mercilessly half a tone higher, to the accompaniment of a single violin, and that only a three-string one, whose alto voice could be heard repeating each phrase after it had been sung through.’¹² The two boys left the dinner table and went out to watch the column of peasants approaching, led by four girls carrying the traditional wreaths and bunches of harvested crops. When they reached the manor house, the harvesters sang a long piece in which there was a verse addressed to each of the people staying there. When Chopin’s turn came, they teased him for his weedy looks and his interest in one of the peasant girls.

      The girls carried the wreaths into the house, where they were ambushed by a couple of stable boys who drenched them with buckets of water. Barrels of vodka were rolled out, candles were brought onto the porch, and the violinist struck up a hearty mazur. Chopin opened the dancing with a young cousin of the Dziewanowskis, and carried on with other girls. He then took over from one of the peasants who was playing a double-bass, which was down to one string, and accompanied the flagging violinist. The warm, starry night was well advanced before Chopin and Dominik were called to bed and the peasants moved on to the village to continue their carousing. The whole evening made a vivid impression on Chopin, and left him a little wistful. His reminiscence of the jollity was tinged with a note of melancholy, and he had a vague foreboding that he would not be spending many more such carefree holidays in the Polish countryside.

      He returned to Warsaw in September to embark on his final year at the Lycée. His father had at last given him a room of his own so he could apply himself to his studies; it was dwarfed by his piano, and rapidly filled up with sheet music, piled on shelves, chairs and cupboards. The composers most in evidence, apart from Bach, Mozart and Hummel, were Friedrich Wilhelm Kalkbrenner, a renowned pianist who composed mainly for that instrument, and Ferdinand Ries, a pupil of Beethoven who also wrote principally for it.

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