GERMANY AND AUSTRIA were the homelands of early Romanticism in music, yet probably because of its position as Europe’s wealthiest capital city, Paris was its centre. And the presiding master of those Parisian salons where patrons gathered for entertainment was neither a German nor an Austrian, but a Pole, Frédéric Chopin, who was born in a village about 30 miles outside Warsaw 200 years ago today. The son of a Polish mother and a Frenchman who had moved to Poland in 1787 to avoid military service, Chopin, the poet of the piano, was by birth and sentiment a Pole.
His fascination for the keyboard emerged early as did his love for Poland’s rich folk tunes and dances. At the age of seven he had a polonaise published and gave recitals in the homes of local aristocrats. He took part in his first public concert shortly before his eighth birthday.
We think of him now as a consummate Romantic, his music is intimate and beautiful, yet Chopin was essentially a classical composer greatly influenced by Bach and Mozart, and an Irishman, John Field (1782-1837) who had cultivated the nocturne, a form Chopin would, along with the prelude, later make his own. Chopin’s early musical education began through his father’s work as a tutor. Having left France, Nicholas Chopin made use of his one natural asset, his native language. His ability to speak French put him in demand as a teacher. The Chopin family moved to Warsaw when the future composer was seven months old, and he would have three sisters, one of whom would later keep vigil at his death bed.
Once established as the professor of French in one of Warsaw’s leading schools, Chopin senior was able to provide for his family. It was an interesting turn of fate for a man who had fled France because of war and whose own father had been a wheelwright. Nicholas Chopin observed the polite behaviour of his aristocratic pupils and passed them on to his own children.
When he was 13 young Chopin went to study at the Lyceum where his father taught. The boy began to play the organ in the local church and also had private music lessons. A gentleman by inclination, his education and social contacts made him one. There were also invitations and extended stays at the country estates of many of his school friends. Frédéric Chopin not only learnt Poland’s folk music, he heard it being performed by country musicians.
That folk music was more than important to the Poles; it was a lifeblood during a time of constant political upheaval. The Polish aristocrats, proud of their politically thwarted but ancient families, were passionately nationalistic. While recovering from a severe chest cold at a spa in Silesia, Chopin gave his first solo recital. The performance was important, so too was the illness. It was the beginning of what would be the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him at the age of 39.
Back home, he entered the Warsaw Conservatoire. He studied, experimented in composition and also enjoyed himself on discovering cafe life. By his late teens he was aware that Warsaw offered little to an aspiring musician of his talent. He was 17 when Beethoven died, the year before Schubert. Chopin set off for what was a Holy City of music – Vienna. There he gave two free concerts and intrigued the Viennese with his delicate, graceful playing so unlike the physicality of Liszt.
Back in Warsaw, Chopin fell in love, but his father’s intervention resulted in him being dispatched elsewhere as a tutor to Price Radziwill’s two daughters. While in the prince’s service he composed the Polonaise for Cello and Piano.
In July 1830 Paris was in turmoil that was affecting the rest of Europe. Chopin’s father did not want his son to travel, however, Chopin was restless, and determined to leave Warsaw because his music needed more. So he returned to Vienna, but found attitudes there had changed. The fragile beauty of his playing, its subtle sound, was no longer a novelty. Now that he was a professional artist expecting to be paid, the concert-goers of Vienna decided they preferred a bigger, more virtuosic tone. But one thing the Viennese always loved was a waltz. Although often thought of, no doubt because of his tragic early death, as a dreamer who had been the passive partner in a traumatic relationship with novelist George Sand, Chopin was practical. He quickly saw the logic in adapting the waltz as an elegant performance form to suit the salons of Paris instead of the concert halls in Vienna.
It was in Paris, where he would spend most of the second part of his brief life, that Chopin flourished. But when he first arrived in 1831 he was but one virtuoso among many, all competing for engagements. For his concert debut the following year he performed his F minor piano concerto and Mozart Variations. Mendelssohn was present, as was Liszt. Both were impressed. Yet Chopin’s temperament was not that of a natural virtuoso. He gave only about 30 performances, most of which were recitals in private salons.
Unlike Liszt or Schumann, Chopin did not look to literary sources. Although his position as a Pole was complicated by having some Russian patronage, Poland remained his greatest inspiration. The four Ballades he composed are often linked to the poetry of his contemporary Adam Mickiewicz. Yet with Chopin, it is always the music, only the music. He took the polonaise, a Polish national dance written in triple time, and gave the form new defiance with an underlying melancholy. Artur Rubinstein’s recordings of his great countryman’s Mazurkas, based on another Polish national dance, display Chopin’s feel for mood shifts.
Thoughtfulness, grace, melancholy, passion and a subtle power shape the music of Chopin which will be celebrated by a six-concert series, devised by the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and beginning tonight at the National Gallery of Ireland, during which John O’Conor and others will perform the piano works of Poland’s most enduring artist.
Royal Irish Academy of Music is at 01-6764412 or www.riam.ie