‘Chopin is all sadness,’ Liszt wrote to his mistress in September 1834. ‘Furniture is a little more expensive than he had thought, so now we’re in for a whole month of worry and nerves.’1 It was true. At the end of the summer he had decided to move to a more elegant apartment in the same street, the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, not far from where the Opéra now stands. The rent was high and the furnishings he selected were in keeping with his reputation as the most elegant musician in Paris.
Chopin’s slightly precious and unconventional taste manifested itself strongly in his choice of décor. The fashion of the times was for heavy fabrics, deep colours and ornamented furniture, but he covered his walls with pale grey paper, his chairs with plain dove-coloured material, and the windows and bed were curtained in voluminous swathes of white muslin and silk. There was not much furniture, but what there was tended to be fussy, and while there were few pictures, there was a collection of exquisite objects and bibelots of one sort or another distributed around the rooms. A young English girl who visited him thought his drawing room ‘such a bijou of a room’.2 One of his pupils commented, rather less flatteringly, that ‘he lived like a woman, almost like a cocotte’.3 Matuszyński, who had moved with him, made a contribution to the rent, but his new apartment’s size shows that Chopin was by now earning a great deal of money, mainly from teaching.
This might appear curious, given that he had never had regular instruction from a proper piano teacher. Yet just as he was a born pianist, so he turned out to be a born teacher. ‘It was with real joy that he devoted all his strength to teaching for several hours a day,’ remembered Karol Mikuli, one of his professional pupils; ‘a holy artistic zeal inflamed him, and then every word from his lips was a stimulation and a source of enthusiasm.’4
He took great pleasure in teaching pretty young ladies, but he never taught talentless aristocrats; he was in a position to accept only genuinely gifted pupils, and he enjoyed leading them along towards the discovery of their own talent. ‘Liszt cannot equal Chopin as a teacher,’ wrote one pupil. ‘I do not mean that Liszt is not an excellent teacher; he is the best possible until one has had the good fortune of knowing Chopin, who is, in terms of method, far ahead of all other artists.’5
This method was idiosyncratic. Where others advocated a long apprenticeship, and gave their pupils arduous exercises to develop their technique, Chopin strove in the first place to open the world of music to them, regarding technique as no more than a means of unlocking their powers of expression.
In theory, his lessons lasted between forty-five minutes and an hour, but in practice they often ran on to a couple of hours with the most gifted pupils. Chopin would spend most of that time speaking and illustrating what he meant. The pupil would sit at the Pleyel grand piano, while Chopin either stood or sat making remarks or corrections, sometimes going over to the upright in the same room to demonstrate or accompany. He insisted on what, by the standard of most of his contemporaries, was a low seat, the elbows level with the white keys. He wanted the player to be able to reach all the notes at the extremities of the keyboard without leaning or moving his elbows; the complete antithesis of Liszt’s way of playing, which gave observers the impression that his whole body was climbing over the keyboard.
Chopin taught that all suppleness and intelligence should be concentrated in the fingers themselves. He believed that every finger had different attributes, and that these must be developed to the full. All possible finger movements were permissible – passing one finger over the other, and playing the black keys with the thumb included. The whole point of this method was to develop the touch, which to him was the beginning and end of piano-playing. Fingers should fall, not strike, and caress rather than hit the keys. And the same key should be touched in different ways in order to produce a variety of tones. That was why he favoured the Pleyel piano. An Érard produced a perfect rounded note when a key was struck, but the Pleyel required coaxing and caressing, and was therefore more capable of nuance if played well. He discouraged the use of the pedal until a pupil’s touch had been perfected, for he believed that tone must be created through the fingers, and not by the artificial agency of the pedal, which could then be used to additional effect.
For him, the key to expression was phrasing – for music was only a language. He likened poor phrasing to someone reciting a poem he knows by heart in a language he does not understand. According to Chopin, some musicians betrayed through their playing that music was not their native language, merely a skill they had picked up. ‘One should sing with the fingers!’ he used to say.6 The style in which they should sing was that of the Italian bel canto, and when pupils did not understand what he was driving at, he used to tell them to go to the Italian opera and listen to the Italians using their voices – his ultimate model in this respect was the soprano Giuditta Pasta.7 ‘You must sing if you wish to play the piano,’ he told one pupil, and he actually made another take singing lessons.8 He discouraged them from practising very much, but he was strict on questions such as time: he always used a metronome himself, and told his pupils to do likewise.
Chopin taught his pupils to analyse a work for its inner structure, and to understand its logic and meaning before attempting to play it. He did not mind if they played it differently from himself; he gave his own works a different expression each time he played them. ‘Forget that anyone is listening to you,’ he said to one pupil, ‘and always listen to yourself.’9 The choice of music he made them play was dictated by this insistence on their learning to recognise the inner structure of a work: Bach Fugues; Clementi’s Gradus ad Parnassum, Preludes and Exercises; and works by Cramer, Handel, Scarlatti, Hummel and Mozart. He did sometimes set more modern works by Beethoven, Weber, Field or Moscheles, but on the whole avoided those of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Schubert.
Chopin enjoyed teaching, and he was usually patient, gentle and polite with his pupils, but his mood could change, particularly if he was feeling unwell. He could become highly irritable, and then he would pace the room breaking pencils or nervously tugging at his hair. He was even known to fling scores across the room, and once broke a chair in his irritation.10 This sort of behaviour was usually limited to his professional pupils; he demanded more of them and they were more prepared to take it from him than his aristocratic young ladies.
Chopin was not lucky with his professional pupils. His first, Caroline Hartmann, died in 1834. In the same year he took in another, Adolf Gutmann, who was to become a lifelong favourite, but never struck anyone else as having a great talent. Karl Filtsch and Paul Gunsberg also died young, while Emilie von Gretsch and Friederike Streicher gave up playing professionally. The only pupils who made any kind of career were Thomas Tellefsen, Georges Mathias and Karol Mikuli. Some of the best pianists he left behind him were in fact aristocratic amateurs.
Chopin was so busy with lessons that he had little time for composing. He therefore dug into his stock of manuscripts and pulled out the Grande Polonaise for Piano and Orchestra and the G minor Ballade, both of which he had written in Vienna. He now wrote an Andante Spianato to precede the first of these and sold it to Schlesinger, and polished up the Ballade. But he did manage to write four new Mazurkas (op.24), two Polonaises (op.26) and two Nocturnes (op.27), and was working on the second set of Études and some of the Preludes.
He had now created the forms which would permit him to fulfil his aims. The two Polonaises of op.26, for instance, effectively brought into being a new genre distinct from that of the earlier Polonaises, one that allowed him to make the more political patriotic statements he felt impelled towards now he was in exile.
While his days were heavily booked with lessons, his evenings, particularly with the start of the season, were taken up with social or musical events of one sort or another. On 1 December 1834 there was a private concert given by Delfina Potocka. On 7 December he played a movement of his E minor Concerto and the new Andante Spianato sandwiched in between Harold in Italy and the King Lear Overture at Berlioz’s concert in the Conservatoire. On 25 December he joined Liszt at the Salle Pleyel to create what must have been a unique musical experience: the two pianists sat down together and played a Moscheles duo for four hands and then one by Liszt.
Beside these public performances, he also played at many private soirées. He would usually hold back from playing, only to be seduced into doing so very late. ‘A small circle of select listeners, whose real desire to hear him was beyond doubt, could alone determine him to approach the piano,’ recalls Berlioz. ‘What emotions he would then call forth! In what ardent and melancholy reveries he loved to pour out his soul! It was usually towards midnight that he gave himself up with the greatest abandon, when the big butterflies of the salon had left, when the political questions of the day had been discussed at length, when all the gossips had exhausted their supply of stories, when all the snares were set, all the perfidies consummated, when one was thoroughly tired of prose, then, obedient to the mute petition of some beautiful, intelligent eyes, he became a poet and sang the Ossianic loves of the heroes of his dreams, their chivalrous joys and the sorrows of the absent fatherland, his dear Poland.’11
Chopin was highly sensitive to atmosphere, and if there was someone vulgar or irritating in the corner of the room, he could only play shorter works such as Waltzes and Nocturnes. He needed concentration to start on one of his improvisations, and this did not come until the company had dwindled to a select few. As Legouvé records, Chopin was a good pianist until midnight, when he became sublime.12
Sublime it clearly was, but the physical strain of playing, and particularly of improvising, was immense. In spite of Matuszyński’s attempts to keep him at home in the evenings that winter, Chopin managed to exhaust himself thoroughly. In March 1835 he caught the influenza which had half of Paris in bed, developed bronchitis, and by the middle of the month was coughing up blood. Matuszyński was worried about Chopin’s lungs and prescribed the waters and baths of Enghien, just north of the capital, followed by waters in Germany in the summer. But before he could think of his health, Chopin had to pull himself together for three end-of-season events.
One was the Herz brothers’ concert at the Salle Pleyel on 22 March, which he and Hiller had promised to take part in. Another was a Polish charity concert to be held on 5 April. He had suggested this as a means of raising money for the Benevolent Association of the Polish Ladies in Paris, founded in the previous year by Princess Czartoryska, of which Grzymała, Matuszyński and the Platers were active members. He now found himself lumbered with the task of organising it.
As usual when Chopin tried to arrange something, everything started going wrong, particularly when it came to finding singers, but after concerted efforts and some help from Grzymała and a musical friend of theirs called Aleksander Jełowicki, the programme at the Théâtre des Italiens was one that many a charity could envy.
Habeneck conducted, while Chopin played one of his rare performances of the E minor Concerto with full orchestra.13 The renowned tenor Adolphe Nourrit sang Schubert lieder and duets with Madame Falcon, who also performed a couple of Rossini arias. Hiller played a piece of his own, and the evening ended with a duet played by Liszt and Chopin on two pianos. It appears that Chopin’s playing of his concerto was poorly received, but the event was a financial success; even after Liszt and Hiller had been presented with diamond rings, Habeneck and Nourrit with snuff-boxes and tie-pins and Madame Falcon with a bracelet, the profits were considerable.14
Hardly had he recovered from the exertion and nervous strain of this performance than Chopin had to return the favour to Habeneck and take part in a concert at the Conservatoire on 26 April, where he played the Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise. The reviews made no mention of his playing, which suggests that he failed to shine on this occasion as well. He must have felt so himself, as this appearance marks the end of his career as a concert pianist.15
Whether Chopin did take the waters of Enghien that summer is not known, but fate led him to a different spa just as it was drawing to a close. He received a letter from his parents saying they had left for Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary), and, grasping the chance to see them again, decided with uncharacteristic speed to join them there. After a few days and nights spent in the mail coach, he arrived in Karlsbad on 15 August. It was late in the evening, and since cursory enquiries informed him that his parents had not arrived yet, he went to bed. At four o’clock in the morning he was woken by Nicolas and Justyna, who had been there all along and had learnt of his arrival. They fell into each other’s arms, and later that morning wrote a joint letter to the rest of the family in Warsaw. ‘Our joy is indescribable!’ wrote Chopin. ‘We don’t stop telling each other how many times we have been thinking of one another.’16
They spent a month together in the fashionable spa, and Chopin eagerly absorbed all the parental affection he had missed so much. ‘We drink, eat together, hug each other, reproach each other; I am at the height of my happiness!’ he wrote. But they did not entirely ignore other people. The little town was full of Poles, and there were other acquaintances, such as Count Franz Thun-Hohenstein with his two sons, who had taken lessons from Chopin in the previous year. The time passed in walks through the surrounding hills, picnics, soirées and musical evenings, in which Chopin was joined by the cellist and composer Jozef Dessauer, who was also staying in Karlsbad.
The Thuns were insistent that Chopin should come and stay with them when they returned to their castle at Tetschen on the Elbe, particularly as Josephine, one of the Count’s daughters and also a former pupil of Chopin, was pining to see him and hear him play again. Since Tetschen was vaguely on the way back to Warsaw, he decided to take up the invitation and accompany his parents thus far on their homeward journey. They left Karlsbad in the second week of September, and after a few days at Tetschen, Nicolas and Justyna departed for Warsaw, leaving their son to stay on in the picturesque castle. But much as Chopin enjoyed the surroundings, as well as the company of his former pupil Josephine, to whom he gave the manuscript of a Waltz, he was eager to get back to Paris, and on 19 September he left, accompanied by one of the young counts who was going to Dresden.
Alighting from the mail coach that evening in Dresden, Chopin unexpectedly met a former boarder of his father’s, Feliks Wodziński, who was staying there with his family. Politeness demanded that Chopin call to pay his respects, and when he did so, the pleasure of renewing an old acquaintance was completely overshadowed by the effect the eldest daughter, Maria, made on him. He had last seen her as an eleven-year-old girl in Warsaw, and now beheld a striking young woman of sixteen with a slightly swarthy complexion, black hair and magnificent eyes which had already set more than one heart on fire.
Instead of hurrying back to Paris as he had intended, Chopin spent two weeks in Dresden, mainly in the company of the Wodzińskis. Maria was a very good pianist, with an enchanting touch, but she was no beauty – the poet Juliusz Słowacki, who had met her the previous year, described her as ‘very ugly’ before going on to fall in love with her.17 Chopin copied a waltz into her album and gave her a little card bearing the first bars of one of his Nocturnes and the inscription ‘soyez heureuse’, hardly signs of passion. Yet, according to some of the other Poles in Dresden, it was obvious that he was in love.18
What Maria felt can only be deduced from the letter she wrote after he had left Dresden on 3 October, in which she let a certain amount of feeling slip through the bounds imposed by convention. ‘On Saturday, when you had left us, we all wandered about sadly, our eyes filled with tears,’ she wrote, going on to describe just how sad first one brother, then the other, then her father, and finally her mother had been, her mother who was missing her ‘fourth son Fryderyk’.19
Chopin had promised Mendelssohn that he would stop in Leipzig for a few days on his way back to Paris. Mendelssohn had alerted Schumann, who was staying in Leipzig with his future in-laws, the Wiecks, and they all awaited him avidly. ‘Tomorrow or the day after, Chopin is arriving here from Dresden, but he will most likely not appear in a concert, for he is a great idler,’ wrote Wieck, who was deeply suspicious of all the praise he had heard of him.20
Chopin reached Leipzig on 4 October. ‘He did not want to stay for more than a day, so we spent it together, without parting, and made music,’ Mendelssohn wrote to his sister. His reaction to Chopin’s compositions had originally been one of bewilderment and slight distaste. Only in February that year he had told Moscheles in London that ‘a new book of Mazurkas by Chopin and other new pieces of his are so mannered they are hard to stand’, and a couple of weeks before Chopin’s arrival he had written again denigrating his playing.21 But now he was impressed by the mastery Chopin had attained, and was ‘glad to be with a perfect musician again’. While he acknowledged the fundamental differences between them, he claimed that he could ‘understand Chopin perfectly’. ‘It was an unusual evening, that Sunday,’ he reminisced. ‘I played my Oratorio at his request while curious Leipzigers silently slipped in, eager to see Chopin; and when, between the first and second parts, he played his new Études and his new concerto in very quick time to the astonished Leipzigers, and I followed with the rest of my [oratorio] St Paul, it must have sounded to them as though an Iroquois had met up with a Kaffir for conversation.’22
Having made Mendelssohn change his mind, Chopin then managed to placate the irate Wieck, who had spent the whole day at home waiting for him with Schumann. He played himself, to Schumann’s and Clara Wieck’s delight, and then listened to her play. Afterwards he declared her to be the only woman in Germany who could play his compositions properly.
After promising Mendelssohn that he would be back in Germany in the spring (he had already made plans to join the Wodzińskis then), Chopin set off on the next day for Heidelberg. But the travelling and the autumn weather, not to mention the excitements and exertions of the last two months, told on his health, and he fell ill on arrival. The severe bronchitis of that spring had been a warning he felt he could ignore, and indeed people like Matuszyński and his parents, who had not seen him since, all found him stronger and healthier than when he had left Poland. If he did indeed have tuberculosis, he had been in a state of remission since 1827, with only one partial relapse, in Vienna in 1831. But this second attack, which was so severe it started a rumour in Germany that he had died, suggests that the exertions of the last year had undone all the previous years’ success in building up his constitution.
Chopin limped back to Paris at the end of October. He had to look to both his health and his finances, which was not made any easier by the arrival of Maria Wodzińska’s elder brother Antoni, a scatterbrained and restless character whom both mother and sister begged Chopin to look after. ‘Antoni is thoroughly good-natured, in fact too much so, for he is always being taken in by others,’ wrote Maria. ‘Besides he is careless and never gives a thought to anything, or at least very rarely…’23 Mainly out of a desire to earn some credit with the Wodzińskis, Chopin acquitted himself honourably, taking Antoni from opera to theatre to concert, and giving him dinner in the finest restaurants.
He had only just finished playing host to Antoni Wodziński when he found himself obliged to help the violinist Karol Lipiński, who had come to Paris in the course of a concert tour of Europe. He was a fine virtuoso, and Chopin willingly arranged a musical soirée and introduced him to the right people. But Lipiński had a difficult character, prone to intrigue, and they quarrelled when the violinist refused to help Chopin with a Polish charity event.24
This included a ball and a small concert, and, just before Christmas, a charity bazaar, which gave Chopin a good deal of trouble.25 He was better placed than most to collect ‘jumble’, as he knew most of the artists in Paris and could also ask his lady pupils to give or make things for the sale. The result was a collection of books, drawings, pictures, embroidered purses and knick-knacks, with the odd manuscript by Chopin and Liszt thrown in. This was sold in an elegant shop lent by an obliging tradesman in the Chausée d’Antin, on stalls served by a pride of princesses and duchesses, while Chopin played the piano for hours at a time during the three evenings of the sale. Not surprisingly, the whole of Paris had to be there, and the jumble sale made an enormous profit.26
Notwithstanding Matuszyński’s protests, Chopin rarely passed up an invitation and was out every evening, while his friend’s attempts to make him wear thick boots during the winter were thwarted by his dandyism. Nicolas Chopin’s admonitions on the same subject, heavily larded with hints that if he did not look after his health and his pocket, his plans regarding ‘certain persons’ would come to nothing, were not heeded either, and in March 1836 Chopin again fell ill.
The rumour of his death occasioned by his illness in Heidelberg had reached Warsaw at the beginning of December 1835, and persisted in spite of various mentions of his appearances in the Paris press, so much so that the Warsaw papers had to publish a denial of it at the beginning of January.27 It had, amongst other things, brought a worried Mr Wodziński to pay an apparently casual call on the Chopins in Warsaw. Although nothing had been stated openly, Chopin’s parents knew that their son was in love with Maria and intended to meet the Wodzińskis in Dresden that summer. He had even suggested that Justyna accompany him to Dresden. While they remained non-committal, the Wodzińskis paid several calls on the Chopins in Warsaw and gave every sign of encouraging the familiarity.
For some reason, Chopin abandoned his original plan of going to Germany in the spring. This is the more surprising, in that Paris quietened down considerably with the end of the season. In March, Hiller had left in order to settle in Frankfurt, Berlioz had gone off earlier, and Liszt was in Switzerland with his mistress. Antoni Wodziński had gone to Spain to fight in the Carlist War, and Delfina Potocka was selling up in Paris, having decided to go back to her husband in Poland. At Easter, which came early in April, Chopin gave the traditional Polish dinner for a group of compatriots at his own apartment, and then went to stay at Enghien. Whether this was dictated by his health, and with whom he was staying, are questions it is impossible to answer. They are the more tantalising, as a year later, when driving past the place with Chopin, a friend recalled: ‘He turned my attention to the wide lake, and, on its edge, the little villa in which he had spent the previous summer. His face became suffused with the pleasantness of the memory; it must have been a very happy period in his life.’28
One person who made him welcome in that part of the world was the marquis de Custine, whom he had met at the Czartoryskis’ and elsewhere during that season. Custine was the last scion of an ancient family. His father, a distinguished Revolutionary general, and his grandfather had both been guillotined during the Terror. His mother, the celebrated Delphine de Sabran, had lived on to become the mistress of Chateaubriand, father of the French Romantic movement. Custine had been brought up by her in exile, and after his return to France in 1815 had married and had a child, but the death of both wife and child had precipitated a crisis which brought to the surface his latent homosexuality. In 1824 he had been beaten up and dumped in a ditch, naked and half dead, by a group of soldiers, with one of whose comrades he had arranged a tryst. This affair had resulted in his banishment from the boulevard Saint-Germain and had forced him to create a world of his own, based on his literary and artistic interests.
The new order ushered in by the Revolution of 1830 made such social incongruity more acceptable and his position on the Parisian scene unassailable. The dinners he gave at his apartment in the rue de la Rochefoucauld were among the most exclusive in the city, and apart from the old habitués like General Junot’s widow the duchesse d’Abrantès (who wanted to marry him), and his uncle the old comte de Sabran (an ancien-régime leftover of poetry and wit of whom Chopin was particularly fond), regular guests included Chateaubriand, Madame Récamier, Heinrich Heine, Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, Meyerbeer and Berlioz.
Custine’s Paris apartment was only a pied-à-terre; his main residence was at Saint-Gratien, on the other side of the lake of Enghien, where he had ‘a beautiful Florentine Villa arranged in the English manner’, filled with exotic objects collected on his travels, and furnished in a taste rather similar to Chopin’s, with white predominating.29 The house stood in a fine park bordering the lake, and was one of the most informal residences in France, its doors permanently open to a chosen group of intimates. ‘Perfect house. Delightful room,’ wrote Stendhal after his visit; ‘everything that is most perfect about the country at only 1¾ hours from the Opera.’30 The literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve took a different view, describing the house as ‘a perfect Sodom and Gomorrah’.31
Custine did live with a young Englishman, and had recently extended his protection to the eighteen-year-old Count Ignacy Gurowski, but he was no rampant homosexual. A large man of forty-five with a plump, somewhat womanish face, his manners were impeccable, his conversation witty and full of charm. He had an emotional nature and cultivated deep and enduring friendships with persons of both sexes. His loyalty towards people like Gurowski, even after he got married, was exemplary.
Chopin became the object of some of these sentiments, but there is no reason to believe that they went beyond a deep appreciation of him and his music and the same avuncular tenderness which Chopin sought and encouraged in others. ‘You know that you are the only person who can come whenever he likes, knowing that you will always give pleasure,’ Custine wrote to him in March. ‘Once and for all then, do not ever ask whether you can come, just come when you feel like it.’32 Chopin certainly availed himself of the invitation that spring and summer.
He loved the area to the north of Paris and spent many happy days on excursions to Chantilly and Ermenonville, and in the park of Montmorency, just outside which lived the old poet Julian Niemcewicz. Niemcewicz’s diary records one occasion on which Chopin arrived for lunch with him and the Napoleonic veteran General Kniaziewicz, who lived with him. They were unexpectedly joined by the poet Adam Mickiewicz, and after lunch, during which Chopin had everyone in stitches with his impersonations, they went off to the village of Montmorency and joined in a country festival.33 It was a perfect antidote to the sometimes overpowering intensity of the artist’s life in Paris.
At the end of May Liszt turned up in Paris, hoping to catch Thalberg, who had given a couple of concerts and been acclaimed as the greatest pianist in Europe, for he longed to challenge his rival and defeat him. Thalberg had left, but Liszt nevertheless gave a concert in which he impressed Chopin by the progress he had made in the past year. Liszt then gave a dinner, at which the guests included Meyerbeer, the tenor Adolphe Nourrit and the painter Eugène Delacroix, whom Chopin had not met before.34 At the beginning of June Liszt returned to his mistress in Switzerland and Chopin went back to Enghien, to await news of the Wodzińskis’ movements.
In the first days of July he heard that they were in Marienbad and promptly set off himself, arriving there at the end of the month to find Mrs Wodzińska alone with her two daughters. He put up at the same hotel and settled down to spend the month of August with them. He must have been deeply in love with Maria, to spend so much time in one place doing very little, considering how restless he was by nature. The Wodzińskis and their Marienbad acquaintances were not the most exciting people to be with for one used to the company Chopin kept in Paris. As Custine, who turned up with Gurowski in mid-August, remarked, apart from Chopin ‘there was nobody in Marienbad’, except for ‘a few very second-rate Poles’.35
The benefits of taking the Enghien cure had been offset by the exertion of his comings and goings, and Chopin was in poor shape. There were fewer picnics and walks in the hills that year, and more sitting around with the Wodzińskis at the hotel. He taught Maria to play his new Étude and composed a song for her to a poem by Witwicki, while she painted a watercolour portrait of him and sat embroidering a pair of slippers. Nothing was said, although it was obvious to all around that the two were in love. Before the end of the month the Wodzińskis travelled to Dresden, on their way back to Poland, and Chopin went with them. After putting it off from day to day for two weeks, he proposed to Maria at the ‘grey hour’ of dusk on his last day in the city. Maria seems to have been delighted, and her mother was immediately informed. It could have come as no surprise: allowing her daughter to spend six weeks almost entirely in the company of a young man who was visibly in love with her was tantamount to encouraging him.
On the next morning, before his departure, Chopin talked the matter over with Mrs Wodzińska, who was slightly absentminded and suffering from toothache, and could therefore not ‘give sufficient attention to the subject of the grey hour’, which had already become the code phrase for the proposal. What she did say was that, without her husband present, she could not promise anything definite; for the time being the matter must remain secret. She enjoined Chopin to look after his health. ‘Everything depends on that,’ she wrote, and added, after instructions about going to bed early and wearing warm socks, that ‘you must realise that this is a trial period’.36
Chopin left Dresden that afternoon, and arrived in Leipzig on 12 September, to the astonishment of Schumann, who had just written a letter to him and did not expect to see him walk through the door. ‘My joy was great,’ Schumann wrote to a friend, and described how Chopin presented him with a copy of his new G minor Ballade, saying that of all his own works it was the one closest to his heart. As for Chopin’s playing, Schumann declared that it was ‘complete perfection, mastery which does not even seem to be aware of its own worth’.37 ‘Imagine an aeolian harp that had all the scales, and that these were jumbled together by the hand of an artist into all sorts of fantastic ornaments, but in such a manner that a deeper fundamental tone and a softly singing higher part were always audible, and you have an approximate idea of his playing,’ he wrote after hearing Chopin play his Études.38
Schumann’s fanciful yet solemn approach, and his evident consciousness of undergoing an artistic experience, annoyed Chopin as much as his review of the La ci darem la mano Variations had done four years earlier. Schumann kept trying to explain his works and place them in context. In his review of the F minor Concerto earlier that year, he had written that it was obvious Chopin had been principally inspired by Beethoven, which was clearly not the case. He claimed him as a truly Romantic composer, seeing rebellion in his work, and had recently written that ‘if the powerful autocrat of the North [the Tsar] knew what a dangerous enemy threatens him in the works of Chopin, in the simple melodies of those Mazurkas, he would banish this music. The works of Chopin are like cannons hidden beneath flowers.’39
The two musicians later called on Wieck – Mendelssohn was away from Leipzig – and then on Henriette Voigt, a pianist much admired by Schumann, for whom Chopin played.40 On this occasion Schumann complained of Chopin’s ‘dreadful habit of passing one finger quickly over the whizzing keyboard at the end of each piece, as though to get rid of his dream by force’.41 As he is the only person ever to have mentioned this habit, one is led to suspect that Chopin did it on purpose to annoy the ponderous enthusiast.
On his return to Paris, Chopin found a letter from Mrs Wodzińska confirming what she had said and reminding him of his promise to look after himself. The slippers embroidered by Maria had also arrived – one size too big, so he would have to wear thick socks with them. Chopin settled down to observe the rules he had set himself: working in the morning, giving lessons all afternoon, dining at six, then going out, but always coming home by eleven, and above all ‘playing of the grey hour’.
Letters were now coursing regularly between Chopin and Maria and her mother. Maria spoke of her sadness at parting and her longing to see him again in ‘May or June at the latest’, and although her letters are rather naïve and non-committal, and a little too full of requests for music, novels and for a Pleyel piano he had promised to choose and ship for her, there is no doubt that she was committed to the idea of becoming his wife.
The surviving correspondence yields no hint that she might be considering a move to Paris. It is difficult to see how Chopin could have supported the two of them there, not to mention possible children and a marital ménage, on his earnings – and whatever dowry she might come with would not have sufficed. It seems rather that what was being contemplated was his return to Poland, which raises the question of how he envisaged this. In the heady atmosphere of Marienbad he would not have given it too much thought, but back in Paris he could not have failed to ponder the issue.
Despite his French parentage, Chopin never thought of himself as a Frenchman. He was entirely Polish in his outlook, he identified with the Poles, and his letters and behaviour make it quite clear that he saw himself as living in a foreign land. But he loved Paris as a city, he loved it for the quality of his life there, and he loved it for being the musical capital of Europe. A move to Warsaw, let alone the Polish countryside, would have spelt misery for him, and it is hard to believe that he ever considered the possibility seriously. It is more likely that he did what he usually did when faced with a dilemma: that he avoided confronting the issue and transposed it onto a theoretical plane. He probably even dwelt on the pleasant or romantic aspects of a return to his homeland, and conjured visions of birch trees shimmering in the summer breeze. But it is tempting to suspect that he was subconsciously undermining his own plans: his good resolutions about staying in at night and looking after himself did not last.