CHAPTER I

GENEALOGY OF CHOPIN

1738-1810

THE name of Chopin has been a household word for the last hundred years; it will continuc to be so for the next hundred, and will remain unchallenged as long as the art of music lives. Chopin's genius was immediately recognized, and not only did he quickly achieve fame - an accomplishment unusual for a composer - but his fame has continued to increase. The beauty of his melodies, the richness of his harmonies, the depths of passion revealed, the elegance of line, the charm so simply expressed in the fioriture, the dignity and refinement so characteristic of the Polish race, the fervour and the undying patriotic faith that are the backbone of nearly every composition all these produced on his amazed hearers an irresistible effect which they could not forget; nor are we, musicians and public alike, any less amazed a century later. Although some of his harmonies may have struck harshly on contemporary ears, the originality of his writing enabled the hitherto banal and ugly pianoforte to be raised to the level of a true musical instrument;for no-one had conceived such tone-colours before.?

Some will say that Chopin's lasting fame can be attributed to his uhhappy existence, to the illness that held him in bondage for most of his adult life and eventually killed him, to the torment he suffered for the Poland that he worshipped, and to the chagrin of an incomplete life - for he never achieved the domestic happiness that he yearned for. Though these causes give grounds for such assertions, and unquestionably have won the sympathy of the feminine world, only the qualities of the music itself could have placed him amongst the greatest composers. His music is more popular and more necessary now than ever it was.?

Others who belittle Chopin's genius maintain that his sentimentality is more fitted for the sick-room, the school-room and the boudoir than for the concert-room and the study, that its appeal is to the slighter and more mundane feelings rather than to the intellect and the grander emotions. But Chopin wrote little that can be labelled weakly sentimental, and very much that is heroic. These cavillers only think of the Nocturnes and of a few other salon pieces, remembering certain exaggerated performances; they fail to remember the ardour of the Polonaises, the élan of some of the Mazurkas, the poetry and passion combined in the Preludes, the exaltation of the Ballades, the fire of the Scherzi, the consummate genius of the Etudes, the patriotism of the F minor Fantaisie, the exquisiteness of the Barcarolle. If they would only devote a short time to examining some of these major works of Chopin they would discover the falsity of their accusation and perhaps gain a few moments of unexpected bliss. Even if this is denied them, they will be forced to admit the originality of his genius, for if they are sincere and their knowledge is secure they will see that his methods, whether technical or colourful, are entirely his own and entirely novel.

This is not the place intimately to discuss or diagnose the aspects of Chopin's art, for a second volume will be devoted to his work as composer, pianist and teacher; but in passing a word should be said about him as an innovator. Chopin may have been influenced by Hummel in his youth, by Field in his early manhood; but the moment he felt that his own legs were strong enough to support him, that his technical equipment could sustain his desire for self-expression, he pursued his own course, which was unlike that of anyone else, and created and fashioned a technique both of pianoforte-playing and of composition which has affected every subsequent composer and school. The influence of Bach, of Beethoven, or of Wagner has not been greater in the evolution of music, although Chopin wrote almost exclusively for the pianoforte. In many respects he can be called the founder of modern music. He may not have discovered chromatic harmony -J. S. Bach had written the Chromatic Fantaisie ninety years before Chopin was born but no earlier composer had been bold enough to enrich his harmonic palette by such free use of chromatic colours. He himself began by being afraid of them, but his fear did not last long. Soon we find him moving these dangerous chords with the freedom of a Protestant contrapuntist, and setting the fashion for their universal adoption. Did not Wagner admit thepower of these progressions and continue developing them almost to their extremity? Liszt, who is generally credited with being the founder of the modern orchestra, of the tone-poem, of many developments in musical evolution, was astute enough to recognize the strokes of genius in the early works of this frail young Pole, and was able to turn them to his own advantage. It is not only in the pianoforte writings of Liszt that we find the influence of Chopin; it permeates almost all his works. On the other hand, try as we may, we shall discover no other style in Chopin's music but his own, melodically, harmonically, pianistically or colourfully. His greatness lies in his absolute individuality. I will even assert that Chopin was the most original of all the great composers.

Although he never had to wait long for an inspiration, he nearly always had to work exceptionally hard to bring it up to his fastidious standard of perfection. He would prune and chisel with the utmost laboriousness, with a patience like that of Leonardo da Vinci, before disposing of his manuscript; and often this would be altered and re-shaped, as was Balzac's wont, when the proofs arrived for correction. This accounts for the lack of uniformity in the various editions. All through his life Chopin was a most indeterminate creature, and nowhere was this trait more pointedly shown than in the revisions of his works. His was a curious nature - a mixture of a marked sense of jnferjority in all matters concerning others, and a selfconfidence that insisted on succeeding in the face of every difficulty. This will to succeed enabled him to develop in musical stature, and each fresh composition showed a continuity of growth. Notwithstanding his personal vanity he was extraordinarily timid and shy, diffident and taciturn to an exasperating degree; devoted to his family and to his few Polish friends, passionately adoring his country and everything pertaining to it. But this very adoration was so vehement that it prevented any close attachment to foreigners, and among his innumerable circle of acquaintances and admirers he made, apart from his countrymen, very few intimate friends. Whether his malady was the cause, or his frequent disappointments in his affairs de caur(?), or his bitter fight to earn money (he cannot have earned much more than 25,000 francs during his whole life), one cannot say; but he was a miserable man in more ways than one. He was too self-centred to interest himself in the affairs of others; nor did he shine in his dealings with his publishers and other men of business. He was not a stoic, for, though his sufferings were great, he was evidently a most distressing patient. But for his music he will be forgiven everything. He will always be counted amongst the greatest, because he was a poet, an artist, and a genius with the divine gift of inspired melody.?

M. Edouard Ganche has at last elucidated the mystery of Chopin's ancestry. The numerous biographers had each given their versions and mentioned other problematical theories, until it was impossible, out of such a conglomeration, for any student to form more than a hazy idea of Chopin's origin. Now, thanks chiefly to M. Ganche's efforts, we are no longer in doubt. Throughout his life Nicolas Chopin, the father of Frédéric, divulged nothing concerning his family or his youth. He admitted having been born near Nancy in Lorraine, France, and the date of his birth was believed to be August 17, 1770. With the knowledge that Lorraine had been annexed by France and that Louis XV had offered the dukedom of thé new province to his father-in-law, the twice exiled King Stanislas Leszczynski of Poland, the general conviction of the various Chopin biographers was that Nicolas had Polish blood in his veins. They romantically pictured him as being the son of one of the courtiers in the Duke's entourage, and imagined that it was only natural for him to wish to visit the land of his people. But all these romances and fancies have been shattered by the discovery among some old documents in Russia of a dossier relating to the services of Nicolas Chopin to Poland, at that time under Russian rule. When Nicolas sought to retire from his professorship at the Military School in Warsaw, it was necessary for him to fill in certain facts as to the names of his father and mother, and the date and place of his birth. From this source the following information was obtained: his father was Fran?ois Chopin, and his mother Marguerite, and he was born in the tiny village of Marainville (Vosges) on April 17,1770.

Once his birthplace was known, it was comparatively easy to probe into his ancestry. The register of births and deaths is carefully kept in France, and genealogical facts are not difficult to tracc. The certificates were found and examined, and agreed in every detail except one - the date of birth - with the Warsaw declaration. Nicolas was born on the rsth and baptized on the r6th April. 177I, his father Fran?ois Chopin being described as a charron (wheelwright) and his mother as Marguerite Deflin. It was then discovered that Nicolas had two sisters, one older and one younger than himself. The elder, Anne, who had married Joseph Thomas, died on March 22, 1845, aged 75; the younger, Marguerite, widow of Nicolas Bastien, died twelve days earlier, aged 69. As Nicolas himself had only died the previous year at the age of 73, the family could be called healthy and long-lived. Further proof of stability can be found in the fact that Nicolas's father, Fran?ois, born on November 11, 1738, remarried at the age of 62 after the death of Margucrite, and died on January 3I, 1814, at the age of 75; his second wife, Marguerite Laprévote, was also 62 and was the widow of Fran?ois Mortefer. After his second marriage Fran?ois Chopin forsook his calling of wheelwright, and became a vigneron (vine-grower) like his father. Many years later, after his retirement, Frédéric's father in Warsaw fondly cultivated the vine, and wrote with enthusiasm to his son of his success in rearing fruit which the family enjoyed;his hereditary instincts were not obliterated. According to M. Ganche, whosc important article appeared in the review La Pologne on January 15, 1927, it has not been possible to tracc farther back than Frédéric's great-grandfather, Nicolas Chopin, who married Elisabeth Bastien. But this is sufficiently far for France to be able to claim half the credit for the great musician. The family was absolutely French. What then was the reason that Nicolas, after migrating to Poland, never referred to his family, never communicated with them, and apparently never told Frédéric of their existence? Was he ashamed of his birth? He became a respected citizen of Warsaw, and rose from the position of a humble teacher of French to that of a professor of literature. Perhaps he was afraid of his Polish friends hearing of his peasant origin? Not once was he known to have expressed a wish to revisit France, even to see his idolized son. It has been suggested' that as he ran away to Poland about the beginning of the French Revolution, served in the Polish army, and later accepted posts under the Polish government, he might be considered a renegade in the country of his birth. It would be interesting to know whether Frédéric was ever aware that his father was a full-blooded Frenchman, or whether he suspected, when he was the idol of fashionable Paris, that he had two old aunts living in obscurity in Lorraine.Nothing remains to us of the early life of Nicolas but the fact that at the age of about seventeen he left France for Poland. He had been offered the chance of a livelihood, for a French friend had promised him a book-keeping post in a tobacco factory at Warsaw. The taking of snuff had become fashionable, and the manufacture of tobacco was flourishing as a consequence. The Frenchman's business was expanding, and his first thoughts were towards his youthful countryman who had already shown an aptitude for figures, and who, having lived in close proximity to the exiled Polish colony in Lorraine, would undoubtedly be a material help. The Duke of Lorraine, Prince Stanislas Leszczynski, born in 1677, had been King of Poland from 1704 to 1709, and his daughter Marie married Louis XV of France in 1725. Stanislas was at that time a fugitive from Poland and virtually a prisoner in France, having been driven out by Peter the Great to make room for Augustus II of Saxony; but he was re-elected King of Poland in 1733. He occupied the throne for even a shorter period than before, abdicating it in January 1736. By the Treaty of Vienna, which followed the War of the Polish Succession, Lorraine, which had belonged to Austria, was annexed by France.Louis XV, anxious to please his indulgent father-in-law (for Marie's two sisters had been numbered among his many mistresses), offered Stanislas the dukedom, which he accepted and retained until his death at Lunéville in 1766.Stanislas Leszczynski was a patriot, even if he had been unfortunate as a king; and he surrounded himself at Nancy with a court of nobles, headed by the Czartoryskis, which was to become the nursery of the new radicalism, the breeding-ground of the future culture of Poland.

?This distressful country had rarely had one of her own blood as a ruler: and if one studies her history one cannot fail to notice that it was during the reigns of two Polish kings, Stanislas Leszczynski and Stanislas Poniatowski, that intellectually and artistically she made the biggest strides. During the reign of the latter king, 1764-1795, when politically she diminished from a powerful country to complete extinction, she reached her finest artistic period;it was the best era for architecture, some of her finest painters were building up a national school, and the years of her catastrophe were followed by the advent of the great exiled Romantic poets, A. Mickiewicz, J. Slowacki and S. Krasinski. Leszczynski had been dead for five years before the birth of Nicolas Chopin, but his memory was deeply cherished by the large Polish community which remained, even though, at the Duke's death, Lorraine had become an integral part of France. He had been a splendid ruler - a patriot, kind, generous, and full of encouragement for his downhearted fellow-exiles. He was a man of culture, and was the chief force in sowing the seeds of education in his lands. He founded an Académie Stanislas at Nancy, from whence educationists, researchers in science and social reformers could return to Poland and spread their knowledge. The first impressions of Warsaw on the young Nicolas Chopin could not have been very inspiring. He must have known of Poland's troubles, and of her unhappiness caused by the loss of about one-third of her territory by the First Partition in 1772; but he could not have expected such obvious signs of discontent, of anarchy, of suppressed tension as everywhere prevailed. He may have been excited and thrilled by the thronged streets, by the strange mixture of almost every nationality; for Warsaw was a cosmopolitan city in the true sense and exhibited many types of peoples and costumes. It must have been strangely picturesque, very amusing, and wonderfully interesting; but it had not the right note of optimism.This curious medley of European and Oriental was not gathered there for the good of the country. The crowd knew that a turbulence bordering on anarchy existed throughout the land, and that a further crash was imminent; and it wanted to share in the wreckage and partake of the spoils. Poland was ever a battle-ground, and there is always a motley crew who will follow an army like vultures hovering over a Parsee tower, waiting' to seize on anything they see. They belong to the dregs of humanity and are not apt to diffuse much culture.Whatever his first experiences were, whether pleasing or disheartening, it was not long before Nicolas was conscious of the rocks ahead. He began to study Polish, and to understand the life and manners of the people. He interested himself in the methods of government and no doubt was disgusted with the ridiculous weapon, the liberum veto, which more than anything clse was the cause of Poland's downfall. The country was run entirely by the nobles, and one dissenticnt voice could upset any decision, prevent the passing of any law, even the election of a king. A member of the Diet had only to pronounce in Polish the cquivalent of 'I do not allow' for the cancellation of that particular law or statute to follow.Nor can the physical appearance of the country itself have given Nicolas much consolation. According to contemporary writers, Poland was in a statc of decay. Her farms were unattended, her live-stock barely existing, being reduced in size and numbers through lack of sufficient food; the farmers themselves were living in abject poverty, miserable and underfed;the houses were tumbling down, and full of lice and vermin. After 1772 the Poles had tried to rebuild their country, tried to maintain their status as a nation that would still count in the affairs of Europe; but that bugbear, the liberum veto, thwarted them at every turn. In 1788 a special Diet'was called and various reforms proposed, particularly the emancipation of the peasants, which would automatically weaken the powers of the nobles. The whole nation was inspired with a fresh impetus. The nobles, or at least the morc sensible ones, were willing to renounce their unfair privilcges, and were flocking to the capital. Enthusiasm prevailed. Stanislas Poniatowski, their king, whom Catharinc II of Russia had placed on the thronc, a man of the highest culture and refinement, was hailed with joy as the deliverer of the people. Russia was at war with Turkey; and Prussia, with her eyes and mouth open for Danzig and Thorn, had no objection to these Polish reforms. She even proposed an alliance which was ratified by the Diet of 1788, and signed in 179o. The sun was beginning to shine upon Poland. But the astute Catharine, one of the two ablest women who ever sat on a throne, was not so pleased.

The Diet met for the last time on May 3, I79r, when Poniatowski scored the greatest triumph of his reign, disclosing the plan of a new Constitution which had freedom as its basis.This famous Act of Constitution, which should have laid the foundation of a firmer, securer, sounder Poland, dispersing all fears of anarchy and consolidating all the disgruntled factions, was Poland's undoing. Catharine II would have none of it. It would mean the end of her dreams of stretching westward into Europe, and would help to build up a powerful Prussia. Russia declared war on Poland and invaded her territory the following year. Prussia stood aside, forsook her alliance, and was repaid for her trcachery by sharing with Russia in the second Partition of Poland in 1793During these fretful years, with war-clouds constantly on the horizon, business houses were suffering. The tobacco factory felt the slump, and finally had to close down; Nicolas was out of a job. He tricd to return to Lorraine, but a severe illness prevented him. After his recovery his thoughts were occupied only with the liberation of his adopted country. Poland was now very little more than a province of Russia, being only one-sixth of her former size, and naturally could not remain tranquil under the yoke of the grasping and adamant Russian Empress. Poniatowski was a catspaw in her hands, and the Poles were losing all faith in him. A young leader, Kosciusko, appeared, assumed powers amounting to a dictatorship, and instantly set the patriotic Poles ablaze with thoughts of insurrection and vengeance.Nicolas Chopin joined the army, quickly rosc to the rank of captain, and fought in the fierce battle of Macicjowicc where Kosciusko was wounded and takcn prisoner. How very near the Poles were to winning in this Revolution is known to students of history. Fortunately for himself and for the world ever since, Nicolas and his company were relieved just before the terrible battle for Praga, a suburb of Warsaw, after which occurred one of the world's worst massacres. The Russian General, Suvaroff, ordered annihilation, and the soldiers, with