Chopin sails home from a miserable Majorcan break
On 13 February 1839, Fryderyk Chopin and George Sand came to the end of a winter break on the island of Majorca that they would never forget. On paper, the two were hardly a match made in heaven. Chopin was a natural introvert, whose emotional restlessness and passionate intensity were unleashed in his music rather than his personal life. Physically frail, the early signs of tuberculosis, which played a major role in hastening his death just ten years later, were already apparent. ‘Feeble, pale, coughing a great deal, he o en took opium with sugar,’ one of his pupils reported, ‘or drink a tincture and rub his forehead with eau de cologne.’
Sand (nom de plume of novelist Aurore Dudevant), on the other hand, was one of the most colourful characters on the French artistic scene. She could already boast a string of affairs and was renowned for masculinising her appearance by wearing men’s clothing, taking snu and smoking huge cigars. When Chopin first met her in 1836, he was fascinated and repulsed in equal measure – ‘What an unattractive person La Sand is,’ he confided to pianistcomposer Ferdinand Hiller; ‘is she really
a woman?’ For her part, Sand seemed equally unsure about her attraction for the mild-mannered Pole. In a letter, she described herself as ‘confused and amazed at the e ect this little creature has on me’. Yet by August 1838 she was able to report to the painter Eugène Delacroix of the ‘delicious exhaustion of fulfilled love’.
Intended primarily as a health restorative for both Chopin and Sand’s 15-year-old son Maurice – as well as to facilitate Sand’s escape from jilted former lover, playwright Félicien Mallefille – the trip to Majorca failed miserably on virtually all counts. Planned as a two-year adventure in a bracingly exotic location, a er little more than three months Chopin, Sand and her two children couldn’t wait to get away. Sand immortalised the doomed trip afterwards in her colourful 1841 travelogue, Winter in Majorca.
The deeply conservative Majorcans didn’t take to their celebrity visitors from the start. Chopin’s constant coughing and pale appearance led the islanders to avoid him (literally) like the plague, while Sand’s amorous liaisons, widely reported in the press, were an inevitable source of malicious gossip. Unable to find suitable or willing hotel accommodation in Palma, they ended up in a draughty monastery in Valldemossa where the persistent rain and blustery winds lowered everyone’s spirits. Having such a clearly irreligious and unmarried couple live in such accommodation only added fuel to the local scandal. Chopin promptly caught a cold, and had to wait for his specially ordered Pleyel upright piano which was delayed in transit. Weeks later it finally arrived, having barely survived the perilous journey by cart inland.
Chopin’s health swiftly deteriorated, and the local doctors did little to raise his spirits. In a letter to his friend Julian Fontana, he despaired: ‘The first said I was going to die, the second that I was dying, and third that I am already dead.’ Yet, whereas Sand never felt entirely comfortable in the monastery and its surroundings, Chopin, inspired by a treasured copy of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘48’ Preludes and Fugues, went into creative overdrive.
If Chopin’s Majorcan sojourn had provided him with the idyllic peace and solace he urgently sought, things may have turned out very differently.
Yet there is no mistaking the profound impact the island getaway had on his music, most strikingly the galvanising C-sharp minor Scherzo, the C minor Polonaise and the 24 Preludes. That said, it would seem the nickname ‘Raindrop’, later given to No. 15, could not have been inspired directly by the sound of gently falling rain (as suggested fancifully by Sand), as the cell Chopin worked in was insulated from all external noises.
There is no mistaking the impact the island getaway had on Chopin’s music