Chopin

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.

Music-making 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.

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