Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
How ladies the swooned!
His piano playing was so stupendous it made his female fans faint. But Chopin’s private life was plagued by ill health – and by one very scandalous love affair...
We join the 21-year-old Chopin on his journey from Poland to Paris. He’s an established composer, having written some of the Etudes – complex piano pieces designed as both practice exercises and showcases for skill – that will make his name, and having achieved success in his home country. He hopes to repeat this in France.
10 SEPTEMBER 1831 I am in Stuttgart. News reaches us that Warsaw has fallen. The capital of my homeland, which had tried to wrest independence from Imperial Russia, has been crushed. The tragedy is beyond imagination. What crimes have those monsters inflicted on the beautiful city? I read in the papers that whole suburbs have been destroyed. My dear friends who stayed and fought, where are they now?
I should have fought. Instead, I am here in Stuttgart sitting alone, grieving at the piano, in despair. There is only one thing for it: Paris and that other world. Onwards.
28 SEPTEMBER 1831 Paris has everything and more. It is full of Polish emigrés, boulevards of beauty, slums, poverty, Montmartre (which I can see from my apartment), and pianists in every salon. There is competition here about who can dazzle most at the keyboard. I’m in awe of Friedrich Kalkbrenner, the German pianist. It is impossible to describe his enchanting touch and the mastery he reveals in every note – he is a giant who tramples underfoot all his rivals, and certainly me. I am already in love with this city, but I am about to run out of money.
9 DECEMBER 1831 Robert Schumann, the German composer and critic, has written a review of my variations in B flat major, saying, ‘Hats off, gentlemen! A genius!’ That is most kind and useful as I try to persuade Paris that I am a serious composer.
27 FEBRUARY 1832 I performed in public for the first time last night, or at least the first time in something larger than a drawing room. It was at the Pleyel Rooms, owned by the Pleyel piano makers, a popular concert venue, and was organised by Kalkbrenner. I played my piano concerto in E minor. All of Paris was there – or all that mattered, including Franz Liszt and Felix Mendelssohn [both hugely successful pianists and composers by this stage].
Friends say I was stupendous. I saw one or two ladies faint as I took a bow at the end, though this is all the rage among Parisians, so perhaps I should not let my head swell up too much.
I want them to appreciate my piano pieces as they do with Liszt. They call him a great ‘romantic’ because he conjures poetry and paintings into notes. But I want my music to stand
alone, for people to lose themselves in the notes of the keyboard.
3 MARCH 1832 The reviews have come out. One says that my concerto ‘astounded and pleasantly surprised the auditorium with its freshness of melody’. I have conquered Paris!
SEPTEMBER 1832 I’ve started teaching young women from wealthy families and am able to charge 20 francs an hour, the top rate in this city. When I told Liszt, who is now a dear friend, he was astonished, saying this was two weeks’ wages for a working man in Paris. Well, I need the cash. The price of good white gloves and a decent carriage here is astronomical. It’s imperative I look the part. Paris judges you on the cut of your collars and the upholstery of your landau as much as how well you play.
22 SEPTEMBER 1835 I am sojourning in Dresden, having spent a month with my parents in Karlsbad, and have bumped into the Wodzinski family, whose daughters I taught in Poland. Maria, the oldest, has grown into the most beautiful young woman, who can play the piano and paint with elan. The family has invited me to their estate.
25 SEPTEMBER 1835 Maria has painted my portrait. In return, I have dedicated to her my waltz in A flat major, a farewell piece to her. I hope to stir nostalgic thoughts in her breast. Liszt says I’m always trying to do that with my piano pieces, but is that so wrong? I spend a lot of the time yearning for Poland. I know what it is to have a heart filled with longing. I shall be so sorry to return to Paris; Maria and I have vowed to correspond.
NOVEMBER 1835 I am suffering from a cough that I cannot shake off. Frequently it contains blood. Maria is concerned at news from friends that I am gravely ill with tuberculosis.
JANUARY 1836 Mama writes to say rumours are circulating back in Poland that I have died. Dear God, all I did was fail to answer a few letters. Rumours spread so quickly.
MARCH 1836 My illness has returned. I just cannot shake off this cough. Kalkbrenner is complaining I have not shown my face in weeks.
29 JULY 1836 I’m staying at the White Swan Inn in Marienbad for a whole month with the Wodzinski clan.
9 SEPTEMBER 1836 Bliss a thousand times. Maria has accepted my marriage proposal, but has insisted it be a secret. She does not want me to ask her parents’ permission until my health improves. I shall get fit for her.
27 OCTOBER 1836 At a soirée at the residence of Countess Marie d’Agoult, I met George Sand, the female writer. She’s a celebrity in Paris, not just because of her novel Indiana, which everyone has read here, but also because of her insistence on dressing like a man and smoking tobacco. Everyone was flocking around her but I found her face unappealing. There is something repulsive about her louche manners.
5 NOVEMBER 1836 Tonight I hosted another soirée. I relish how I have become a pillar of Parisian society and that people want to listen to my music. Various Polish counts attended.
Liszt played and Mrs Sand was here too – Liszt insisted. He claims that over time I will see her attractions.
5 JANUARY 1837 Maria writes to complain that my letters have dried up. But I am so busy in Paris, and my health is rarely better. I doubt whether we’ll ever marry.
I’m revelling in a new piano I bought from Pleyel. It has helped me finish my Etudes. The technology improves every day. Each year t he sou nd is clearer, higher notes are less like a tin drum and more a beautiful bell. And Pleyel’s use of rabbit fur on the hammers gives a clearer sound than old pianos that use leather.
5 SEPTEMBER 1837 Mme Sand, who insists I call her Aurore, her real name, writes daily, summoning me to her country home in Nohant to perform, saying I make a single instrument speak a language of infinity. If this flattery continues, I shall succumb.
She is so different from any woman I’ve met. To be possessed of such confidence in her achievements and abilities, unshackled; it’s a tonic.
25 SEPTEMBER 1838 There’s no going back. We’ve committed what she calls the most serious act in life, the most sublime thing in the universe. I shudder to think what my family would say if they knew that I had, unmarried, slept with a woman separated from her husband. The scandal is too much. I hoped to be respectable.
18 OCTOBER 1838 Aurore has left Paris today for Majorca with her children, Maurice and Solange. I am to join them in a few days; she’s convinced the heat will improve my cough.
To finance the trip I’ve sold my Preludes in advance to Camille Pleyel, the piano maker and concert promoter, for 2,000 francs [£16,000 today], which will keep me going for many months.
But I must keep this trip secret. If Paris society finds out I’m spending winter with a woman separated from her husband, I will be unwelcome.
15 NOVEMBER 1838 I’m in Palma, amid palms, cedars, cactuses, oranges, lemons, aloes, pomegranates. The sky like turquoise, sea like azure, mountains like emerald, air like in heaven. During the sunny day, everyone walks as if it were summer; at night, guitars and song for hours on end. I’m living more. I’m better. 18 NOVEMBER 1838 My piano has arrived and I can set to work on the collection of 24 Preludes I have promised Pleyel. Each will be very short and in a different key: 12 in the major keys, 12 in the minor keys. They will encompass every human emotion: hope, love, fear, despair, blackness, light, dark. A pair of hands, some ivory keys, and all of the human condition.
Today, I’m chiselling away at A major, in the style of a mazurka [a Polish folk dance]. I hope it conveys the peace of walking through orange groves in Majorca.
22 NOVEMBER 1838 I am ill. Again. I’m in the darkest of places, between the rocks and the crashing sea.
28 NOVEMBER 1838 The weather has turned. The glorious autumn sun has been replaced by lashing rain, making my cough as bad as ever. Aurore calls me ‘her little invalid’ and treats me like her children. They, in turn, are most solicitous, especially Solange, who is ten years old but has a patience and a saintliness her mother does not. 15 DECEMBER 1838 The walls are running with water and the braziers we have lit to dry the place out make my cough worse. The doctors want to bleed me; I’ve refused to let the barbarians anywhere near with a lancet.
The doctors believe my tuberculosis is infectious, the ill- educated imbeciles [it is, in fact, contagious]. So we’ve been banished from Palma. We’ve found a Carthusian monastery up a mountain in Valldemossa, which has rented us some rooms.
2 FEBRUARY 1839 I must get off this beastly island. The locals shout at Aurore that she is a pagan because she refuses to attend mass. This trip has not been a success. But I finished the Preludes. We will return to France.
4 AUGUST 1843 Aurore continues to mother me, insisting I start the day with hot chocolate. In the evening we play charades, then I’m sent to bed at the same time as Solange and Maurice, while she writes late into the night.
25 JUNE 1846 Aurore’s latest novel Lucrezia Floriani is being serialised in the Courrier Francais magazine. It’s about an actress who falls in love with the younger, moody Prince Karol, who condemns and then adores her, but is beset by ill health. It is magnificent, but my friends Liszt and Eugène Delacroix [the French romantic painter], who have come to stay with us at Nohant, are appalled and claim Aurore has used aspects of my character in Prince Karol to humiliate me.
APRIL 1847 Solange is marrying an oaf of a sculptor called Auguste Clésinger. Aurore is set against the match. She can’t stand the man.
1 MAY 1847 Solange has asked to borrow my carriage to go to Paris for her wedding. I said, after all she had done to look after me, it would be an honour. Aurore discovered this and is in a fury, vowing never to speak to me again, saying I’ve behaved despicably by siding with Solange. Why is everything such a battle with her, such a drama? I can no longer stand her rages.
4 MARCH 1849 My tour of Britain last year, to recover from escaping the grip of George Sand, has finished me. London’s smoke is in my lungs. I drive around Paris with Delacroix, but I can’t work. Boredom is a torment.
18 JUNE 1849 I’m comforted by a stream of visitors: Jenny Lind, the Swedish opera singer, came to my apartment. But I rarely leave my bed.
1 OCTOBER 1849 I fear the end is near. My unfinished work is to be thrown on the fire. I do not wish for unworthy works to be published after I’ve gone. He died later that month.