Chopin. Adam Zamoyski
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Название: Chopin

Автор: Adam Zamoyski

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

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isbn: 9780007351824

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СКАЧАТЬ took up every available moment. Chopin took over from the organist of the Convent of the Visitation and played every Sunday at the Lycée and University Mass. With his sister Ludwika and other friends he sang in the choir of the Evangelical church. He was also often to be heard playing in drawing rooms around Warsaw. A contemporary diary gives the first detailed account of his playing, at a soirée given by Teresa Kicka. It describes how, after playing several works, he launched into an improvisation which he drew out for a very long time. This form of ad libitum playing revealed Chopin at his most poetic and inventive, and fascinated those fortunate enough to hear him. But the exercise visibly drained him as he played, and he began to look so pale and exhausted that the poet Niemcewicz eventually went up to him and pulled his hands away from the keyboard.13

      Chopin was much too energetic for his constitution. During the Christmas season, for instance, he was often at the opera, at a concert or at a party, with the result that he was rarely in bed before two o’clock in the morning. He was incapable of taking things easy, and always had to join in whatever was going on. In a witty versified account, he described one occasion when he spent half of a party playing dances on the piano for the other guests, and then started dancing himself, not staid Polonaises or Quadrilles, but energetic mazurs and other country dances, during one of which he slipped and crashed to the floor, twisting his ankle.14 At the beginning of 1826 he fell ill. The symptoms were an inflammation of the throat and tonsils, and he retired to bed with a nightcap on his head and leeches at his throat.

      His studies do not seem to have suffered from the illness, the active life he was leading or indeed from the now impressive volume of music he was writing. At the end of his final year at the Lycée, in July 1826, he once more managed to get through his exams, this time winning an honourable mention, along with Tytus Woyciechowski and Jan Matuszyński. This earned him a treat on the day after the exams: a trip to the opera to see the new production of Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra. But there was to be no month in the country that summer.

      His younger sister Emilia was suffering from tuberculosis, and the disease had reached a critical stage. Her parents had decided to try the last resort of a spa cure, and their choice had fallen on Bad Reinerz (Duszniki Zdrój) in Silesia. Chopin was to be taken along as well, on the principle that it could only do him good too, and at the end of July Justyna set off with the two of them.

      Life at Bad Reinerz was governed by a strict routine. The Chopins had to be at the spring by six in the morning for the first glass of mineral water. This was later complemented by draughts of whey, which were held to be good for the chest, and more glasses of mineral water at intervals during the day. A wheezing orchestra played while the clientele queued up for their glasses to be filled or walked up and down sipping the water. For Chopin, the only attraction of the place was the scenery: he had never seen anything more exciting than the flat Mazovian plain, and he was predictably impressed by the mountains in which the town nestled. He went for walks and enthused about the breathtaking views, but was depressed by the fact that he could not translate his sensations into his own medium. ‘There is something I lack here; something which all the beauties of Reinerz cannot make up for,’ he wrote to Elsner in Warsaw. ‘Imagine – there is not a single decent piano in the whole place.’15

      Nevertheless, when a couple of children were suddenly orphaned by the death of their father who had come to take the waters, Chopin offered his services to help them. A piano was found, and he gave a recital in the Kurhaus for their benefit.16 It was so warmly received by the visitors to the spa that he was persuaded to give another. Humble as it was, this acclaim from an audience who had no idea of who he was provided another small measure of encouragement to the boy. It was also a weapon to be used in the battle against his father’s wish that he should enter the University rather than the Conservatoire. Both Żywny and Elsner must have been persuasive allies, and by the time Chopin returned to Warsaw, a decision had been reached on his future. It was a compromise: he was to enter the Conservatoire, and at the same time to attend lectures on certain subjects at the University.

       THREE Musical Genius

      ‘I go to bed at nine; all tea parties, soirées and balls have gone by the board,’ a despondent Chopin wrote to Jan Białobłocki as he began his studies at the Conservatoire in the autumn of 1826. He was beset by a succession of minor ailments, such as toothache, neuralgia and digestive problems. ‘I drink emetic water on Dr Malcz’s orders and stuff myself with oat gruel like a horse.’1 It was hardly a propitious start to his hard-won musical studies.

      The Warsaw Conservatoire, founded in 1821, offered entrants a number of courses to choose from. The one selected by Chopin consisted of three years of musical theory and counterpoint, the last of which was to be devoted to practical work such as writing masses and oratorios to Polish and Latin texts, vocal compositions of various types, works for orchestra, and chamber music. But he seems to have created his own curriculum from the start. When he joined the Conservatoire in September 1826, he took six lessons a week in counterpoint from Elsner and spent the rest of the time working on his own. Elsner was an enlightened teacher, who saw his role as that of adviser. ‘When teaching composition, one should never provide recipes, particularly with pupils of obvious ability,’ he explained; ‘if they wish to rise above themselves, they must find their own, so that they may have the means of discovering that which has not been discovered yet.’2 But Chopin found even this relaxed discipline taxing.

      In accordance with the compromise reached with his father, he was also attending lectures at the University. Although the original idea had been that he should take a course in general subjects, he soon narrowed this down. The only course he seems to have followed seriously was that on Polish Literature given by the poet Kazimierz Brodziński, whose lectures covered a range of subjects, from aesthetics to folklore, which he was busily recording.3

      Chopin had been born into a society that was in the process of reinventing itself: the old Poland embodied in the Commonwealth had failed and been dismembered at the end of the eighteenth century, and patriots bent on the re-establishment of a Polish state were aware that they must create a new synthesis of nationhood on which to build it. This involved, amongst other things, cultural redefinition based on a reassessment of the past and the integration of the mass of common people into the national project. Wittingly or not, Chopin was, through his music, doing just that, by distilling the essence of the old chivalric ideals on the one hand and reaching into the soul of popular culture on the other to create a new national idiom immediately recognisable to all. In this, he virtually epitomised the zeitgeist of his generation. Yet in certain fundamental ways he stood apart from his peers.

      Given the accent placed in the Chopin household on education, and particularly on literature – his sisters Ludwika and Emilia had published poems and even a jointly written novel for children – Chopin could hardly fail to be aware that his generation was making literary history. Yet he failed to show any deep understanding of contemporary Polish writers. He did set to music some of the poems of the leading Romantic Adam Mickiewicz, as well as works by his friend the much lesser poet Stefan Witwicki, but he was far too down-to-earth in his approach to life to catch the spirit of exaltation that nourished the Romantic movement. He saw himself as a craftsman, focused exclusively on achieving greater skill and deeper knowledge in his chosen craft of music.

      And even in this chosen craft, Chopin remained remarkably aloof from contemporary trends. His reverence for Bach continued undiminished – more than a СКАЧАТЬ