The year 1848 began in France under the clouds of a political storm that had been brewing for some time, and there was a widespread feeling that it would not end without civil unrest. The conservative prime minister François Guizot sought to forestall this by banning political meetings organised by a growing liberal opposition, but this only served to channel it down the road to revolution.
The possibility of this breaking out was probably not far from the thoughts of Thomas Albrecht, Camille Pleyel, Auguste Léo and the comte de Perthuis when they called on Chopin one day towards the end of January and suggested he give a concert. He raised every conceivable objection, but they dismissed these and promised to take all the arrangements on themselves. It seems likely that they were prompted not only by the desire to hear him, but also by the concern that as his health deteriorated he would have to cut down on giving lessons and his income would dwindle as a result, and that he would need a cash reserve with which to face the difficult times that might lie ahead.
A brief announcement appeared in the press to the effect that the public might expect a concert by Chopin in the near future, and Pleyel’s offices were instantly flooded with letters and callers applying to reserve tickets. By the time a date had been fixed, some two weeks before the night itself, all three hundred tickets had been sold, and there was a waiting list of six hundred people trying to obtain seats for a possible second concert. Pleyel was keen that he should take advantage of this, but Chopin had no intention of complying, declaring that one concert was ‘quite enough of a bore’.1 ‘I am amazed by this enthusiasm,’ he wrote to Ludwika, ‘and now I shall have to play if only out of gratitude, although I feel that I play worse than ever.’2
At the beginning of February he was ill for a few days, but he came to life once more as the event approached. A few days before the date set, 16 February, he held a small rehearsal at Delfina Potocka’s before the Czartoryskis, Maria Kalergis, Delfina’s sister the princesse de Beauvau and the Zaleskis. The event itself was to be hardly less courtly. There were no posters, no programmes, and the tickets were stiff cartons printed like invitations: Monsieur Frédéric Chopin requested the presence of whoever it was at a musical evening at Monsieur Pleyel’s salons. Pleyel filled the hall with flowers, while Jane Stirling saw to its being warm enough, yet not too stuffy. ‘I shall be completely at home and see only familiar faces,’ Chopin assured Ludwika, and on the night he was surrounded by friends: on the dais itself sat Grzymała, Custine, the Czartoryskis, Delacroix and Zaleski. All this has given rise to the impression that it was not a public concert at all, and that the whole audience had been carefully selected by Chopin.3 This was not the case. It was simply that his friends, who knew of the impending event sooner, put their names down first, while he reserved some seats for others among them who applied late.
Chopin played a Mozart Trio with Franchomme and the violinist Delphin Alard, and the last three movements of his Sonata for Piano and Cello with Franchomme. The rest of the evening he filled on his own, playing the Berceuse, the Barcarolle and the D flat major Waltz (op.64). Despite his fears, his increasing frailty did not impair the quality of his playing. He had been weakening so gradually over the years that he had had time to substitute technique for force. Already in 1842 one of his pupils had commented that ‘his pianissimo is so delicate that he can produce the greatest effects of crescendo without requiring the strength of the muscular virtuosi of the modern school’.4 An English pianist who was present at the concert was astonished to find the emaciated Chopin capable of playing with force.5
The audience were in raptures. The Revue et Gazette Musicale stated that one would need Shakespeare’s pen to describe Chopin’s playing, and the other papers echoed its paean of praise. Le Ménestrel called him ‘the sylph of the piano, the ineffable artist, attached to this mortal world by the merest touch of a finger and nourished by dreams from on high’, and compared his playing to ‘the sighing of a flower, the whisper of clouds, or the murmur of stars’.6 Perhaps the most fitting comments on the concert and on Chopin’s position in general were made by Custine, who sent him a little note afterwards. ‘You have gained in suffering and poetry; the melancholy of your compositions penetrates still deeper into the heart; one feels alone with you in the midst of a crowd; it is no longer a piano, but a soul, and what a soul!’ he wrote. ‘Preserve yourself for the sake of your friends; it is a consolation to be able to hear you sometimes; in the hard times that threaten, only art as you feel it will be able to unite men divided by the realities of life; people love each other, people understand each other in Chopin. You have turned a public into a circle of friends; you are equal to your own genius; that says it all.’7
Chopin must have been persuaded to change his mind about giving a second concert, as Pleyel announced one for 10 March. But on 22 February revolution broke out in Paris, and with the barricades up in the streets there could be no question of such an event taking place. Chopin was feeling ill, and lay in bed listening to the fighting that engulfed the capital for two days, at the end of which King Louis Philippe and his family fled and made for the coast, whence they took ship for England. As soon as the fighting had subsided, Chopin tried to resume his normal life, but it was difficult getting about, since the cobbles had been torn up and some of the barricades were not cleared away for weeks, and most of his pupils, while not directly affected by the events, were not inclined to come for their lessons.
The court that had patronised Chopin was gone, and friends like the comte de Perthuis with it, but on the whole there was little for his pupils and friends to fear, particularly as most of them were either foreigners or musicians, and Poles were more popular in Paris than ever. Nevertheless, outbreaks of street violence were a hazard, and it was impossible to tell what course events would take. There were disturbances over the border in Germany, and much talk of Europe-wide revolution. The climate of instability frightened Chopin as well as threatening his livelihood, and the prospect of spending another summer in Paris was not one to which he looked forward. He again considered the possibility of meeting some of his family in Germany, but most of that, too, was in a state of political ferment. Jane Stirling on the other hand hotly advocated the idea of his visiting England and taking in the London season.
There certainly seemed to be nothing left to keep him in Paris. In the first days of March he had a letter from Solange, announcing that she had had a baby. The news delighted Chopin, who felt the event might provide a bridge for reconciliation between mother and daughter. A vague hope lingered in his mind that George Sand might get over the ‘kind of madness’ which he saw as the explanation for her behaviour, and relent in her attitude towards him as well, though he was not optimistic on that score.8
The fall of the July Monarchy, which she had despised, brought George Sand to Paris, as several of her friends were in the provisional government, and she herself wanted to play an active part. Chopin did not know this, for she had long before given up her apartment at the Square d’Orléans, and now took rooms elsewhere. On 4 March he went to dinner, as he still often did, at Charlotte Marliani’s. As he was leaving with the French traveller Edmond Combes, he came face to face with George Sand, who was just on her way in. They greeted each other politely, and then Chopin asked whether she had heard from her daughter recently.
‘More than a week ago,’ she replied. ‘You did not get a letter yesterday, or the day before?’ asked Chopin. ‘No.’ ‘In that case I must inform you that you are a grandmother; Solange has a daughter, and I am happy to be the one to tell you of it.’ With these words, he went on down the stairs, but reaching the bottom, realised that he had not mentioned Solange’s condition. As he could not climb the stairs himself, he begged Combes to run up and tell her that Solange was well. George Sand came down the stairs with Combes and eagerly asked for details, after which she enquired after his own health. He said it was good, and, bowing, called to the concierge to open the door.9 ‘I pressed his trembling and icy hand, I wanted to speak to him; he fled,’ she later reminisced. ‘It was my turn to say that he no longer loved me. I spared him that suffering…’10 Combes walked Chopin home, and noted that he was very sad and depressed.11 He was never to see her again.
Revolution in France had produced aftershocks across Germany, starting a chain reaction of unrest and revolution – in Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Milan, Venice and Madrid. Inevitably, Poland was affected too, and the Prussian-occupied part, the Duchy of Posen, briefly achieved a measure of autonomy. Many of the Parisian exiles, including Prince Adam Czartoryski, set off for the Duchy in the expectation that it would become a springboard for the liberation of the whole country. Some of the poorer ones borrowed money from Chopin for the journey, but to Fontana, who had written from America saying he wanted to go and fight for Poland, Chopin replied advising him to await further developments. He found it difficult to share the sanguine hopes of some of his compatriots.
His own instincts were conservative, and he was appalled at the prospect of more violence. At the same time he could not repress a surge of patriotic feeling. ‘It won’t come without horrors,’ he is alleged to have written to Fontana, ‘but at the end of it all, there must be a great, a magnificent Poland; a true Poland.’12 The idea must have seemed vaguely comforting as he sat in Paris watching his own world collapse around him. ‘My public career is over,’ he said to another who was setting out for Poland. ‘In your village you have a little church; you can give me a little bread for the rest of my life, and I shall play hymns to Our Lady on the organ.’13
Watching others spring into action made him feel more redundant than ever – even Princess Belgiojoso had left her Paris salon and was rallying patriots on the streets of Milan. And Chopin was anxious; in the helpless condition to which his illness had reduced him, upheaval of any kind was a frightening prospect. The only place in Europe that seemed immune to disturbance was England. In the end he gave in to Jane Stirling’s blandishments, and decided to join her in London.
He left on 19 April and arrived in London the following day, which happened to be Maundy Thursday. He found the city ‘quiet and dreary’, but the coal smoke made an immediate impression on his lungs.14 Jane Stirling and her sister, Mrs Erskine, had provided him with an apartment in Bentinck Street off Cavendish Square, and had done everything to make him comfortable, including providing his favourite drinking choc olate and notepaper with his monogram on it. But the rooms were expensive and did not suit him, so he mobilised Major Szulczewski, the London agent of the Czartoryskis, to look for more suitable ones.
Over the Easter weekend he drove down to Kingston-upon-Thames to see the exiled French royal family and their entourage. Otherwise he kept to himself during the first ten days, as he did not feel well and could not face starting his calls. At the end of April he moved into new rooms in Dover Street, off Piccadilly. ‘At last I have a room – fine and large – in which I shall be able to breathe and play – and today the sun has visited it for the first time,’ he wrote to Franchomme on 1 May.15 His Pleyel piano was unpacked, and since Érard and Broadwood both insisted on lending him instruments, he had three in his large drawing room; but, as he wrote to Gutmann, ‘What use are they, since I have no time to play them?’16
He had begun paying calls on acquaintances and on those to whom he had been given letters of introduction. He visited the Chevalier d’Orsay at Kensington Gore; went to Cheyne Row to see Thomas Carlyle, dined with Ralph Waldo Emerson, met Charles Dickens and Lady Byron, ‘with whom, apparently, I have great affinity – we talk like a goose to a pig, she in English, I in French’. ‘I’m not surprised she bored Byron,’ he added.17 At the opera, he was impressed by the figure of the young Queen, more so still by ‘Wellington in the box below the Queen’s, like an old monarchist watchdog sitting in a kennel beneath his crowned lady’.18
One thing that Chopin had not expected to find in London was the swarm of musicians, which included Berlioz, Thalberg and Pauline Viardot, who had also fled the uncertainties of the Continent. An unexpected pleasure was the possibility of meeting the acclaimed Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, who had also taken refuge in England. He found her voice astonishing and the character of her singing fascinating. ‘Yesterday I went to dinner at Jenny Lind’s, who then sang Swedish things for me until midnight,’ he wrote to Grzymała on 13 May. ‘They have a very special spirit, just as our music has. We have something Slavonic, they something Scandinavian, and they are completely different, but we’re closer to each other than an Italian is to a Spaniard.’19
But the surfeit of musicians did have practical and financial implications. ‘Will the British capital be able to maintain so many exiles?’ wondered an alarmed Berlioz.20 Chopin, who badly needed to make his mark with a wider public, started off with what might have been an extremely unwise move. He was paid the compliment of being asked to play one of his concertos with the Philharmonic Society, an honour recently denied to Charles Hallé and Kalkbrenner. He refused this offer, explaining to Grzymała that ‘their orchestra is like their roast beef or their turtle soup – strong, pungent and nothing more’.21 What actually put him off was the fact that there was no possibility of a rehearsal with the orchestra before the public performance, and he was growing fussier than ever about getting things right. Another consideration was that he would not be able to muster the requisite strength. With solo works he could lower the volume, thereby making it possible to produce powerful crescendos at the appropriate moments, but if he lowered the volume of the piano part when playing with an orchestra, it would be completely drowned out. It was for this reason that he had not played one of his concertos with a full orchestra for well over a dozen years.
Chopin was determined to make his mark in his own way. ‘When I have played before the Queen, I shall have to give a matinée musicale in a private house for a limited number of listeners!’ he explained to Gutmann.22 One point that he had overlooked was that the director of the Philharmonic Society was the man responsible for arranging concerts at court, and he was not pleased when Chopin turned down his offer of a concert. Chopin did get an opportunity to play before Victoria, though not at court. It was on the occasion of the christening of the Duchess of Sutherland’s baby, to whom the Queen stood godmother, at Stafford House (now Lancaster House) on 15 May. The party consisted of some eighty people, including the Queen and her Consort, the future William I of Prussia, the Duke of Wellington, and ‘everything that is most Garter’, as Chopin put it in a letter to Grzymała.23
He played a few short pieces of his own, and then some Mozart for two pianos with the English pianist Julius Benedict. The Parisian singers Mario, Lablache and Tamburini also performed, but Chopin felt he had made an impression on the Queen, who ‘addressed a few gracious words’ to him afterwards. He seems to have been taken in by the regal good manners, because the entry in her diary for that evening reads: ‘There was some pretty music, good Lablache and Tamburini singing, and some pianists playing.’24
Chopin earned a respectable sum of money from playing at soirées at the Marquess of Douglas’s, the Duchess of Somerset’s, the Duchess of Cambridge’s, Lady Gainsborough’s and the homes of ‘many other Ladies, whose names go in one ear and come out the other’.25 ‘They don’t talk while I play, and apparently they all speak well of my music, but it is above all the hopelessness of my local colleagues, who are in the habit of being pushed around, which is the reason why they consider me a sort of amateur,’ he reported to Grzymała. ‘I shall soon become a grand seigneur, because I have clean shoes and don’t carry about cards saying: “Will give lessons at home, available for evening parties, etc.”’26
The English were apparently less squeamish of talking about money than their French counterparts. On one occasion, Lady Rothschild approached Chopin and, on hearing how much he asked for playing, said that, to be sure, he played ‘very prettily’, but that the price was wanting in ‘moderation’.27 Another lady, whose daughter took two lessons a week at half a guinea each from another pianist, wanted her daughter to take some from Chopin, but on hearing that he charged a whole guinea a lesson, decided that one per week would do just as well in his case.28
Expensive as he was for the English market, Chopin did not lack pupils. ‘They all look at their hands and play the wrong notes with feeling,’ he quipped.29 By the middle of the season he was giving up to five lessons a day, and since there was no shortage of demand for him to play at soirées, he was doing well financially. In a letter to Grzymała, he claimed that he would be able to save a considerable sum if the season lasted long enough. But the season was short and hectic, and he did not have the energy to fall in with its pace. He complained that he could not get up before eight in the morning, and that much of his time and energy was being taken up by Jane Stirling and her sister, who insisted on dragging him from one acquaintance to another.
On 23 June he gave the first of his public concerts, at the house of Adelaide Sartoris in Eaton Place. The daughter of the celebr ated actor Charles Kemble, she had made a name for herself as an actress and singer, and had met Chopin when she was singing in Paris. She had fallen under the spell of his playing, and was one of his warmest advocates in England. The audience was restricted to 150 people. Among them was the novelist Thackeray, who had come to hear the ‘very pretty music’ – some way from Balzac’s vision of ‘a soul expressing itself in lyricism’.30 As far as Chopin was concerned, the main attraction of the event was the financial gain, which at 150 guineas was considerable. Two weeks later, on 7 July, he followed it up with a matinee concert at the house of Lord Falmouth, an amateur violinist of eccentric ways. ‘In the street you’d give him threepence, but his house is full of servants – dressed better than him,’ Chopin wrote.31
While Broadwood was arranging the concert, Pauline Viardot heard of it and offered to take part. She sang her own arrangements of his Mazurkas, which were her pièce de résistance, much in demand wherever she appeared. Chopin himself played mostly short pieces, with the exception of the B flat minor Scherzo. The audience was again small but the takings large, and this time he felt that he was getting through to his listeners.
This is corroborated by the reactions of Jane Welsh Carlyle, whose eyes were opened by the first concert, to which she went with her husband. ‘I never heard the piano played before – could not have believed the capabilities that be in it,’ she recorded.32 She went to the matinee alone, as Thomas Carlyle was visiting Stonehenge with Emerson. ‘I never liked any music so well,’ she wrote to Jane Stirling, ‘because it feels to me not so much a sample of the man’s art offered “on approbation” (the effect of most music for me) but a portion of his soul and life given away by him – spent on those who have ears to hear and hearts to understand. I cannot fancy but that every piece he composes must leave him with many fewer days to live.’33
The matinee was extensively reviewed in the press, and while Chopin’s old enemy Davison (who had written the vituperative review of some Mazurkas in 1841) reviewed his playing unfavourably in ‘The Teims’, as Chopin insisted on spelling it, most of the notices were favourable.
The Daily News, for instance, praised his ‘original genius as a composer and his transcendental power as a performer’. ‘His music is as strongly marked with individual character as that of any master who has ever lived,’ it went on. ‘It is highly finished, new in its harmonies, full of contrapuntal skill and ingenious contrivance; and yet we have never heard music which has so much the air of unpremeditated effusion. The performer seems to abandon himself to the impulses of his fancy and feeling, to indulge in a reverie, and to pour out unconsciously as it were, the thoughts and emotions that pass through his mind.’34
All this led Chopin to consider the possibility of staying on and even settling in England. There were several arguments against this. ‘These English are so different from the French, whom I have grown to accept as my own people,’ he explained to his family. ‘They are so pound-conscious in everything, liking the arts above all because they represent luxury; they are kind people, but so weird…’35 More to the point was what Chopin saw as their attitude to music. To Grzymała he explained that the English middle classes only wanted things fantastic or mechanically exciting; he was always being asked to play the little Waltzes with their pearly passages, and then being told that ‘it sounds just like water’. The aristocracy, though discerning and cultivated, were brought up to treat music as background noise: there was music at every social function, whether it was a flower show or a dinner, and the local musicians allowed themselves to be treated as servants. London was full of ‘Czechs and Savoyards’, according to Chopin, and they would play whatever was expected of them, without demanding anything in exchange except their fee.
‘If you say you’re an artist, the Englishman will think you’re a painter, a sculptor or an architect,’ he wrote to Grzymała; ‘no musician will be called an artist in word or print, because in their view it is not an art but a profession.’36 He nevertheless thought he might be able to break the mould. When he stopped playing after someone had started talking at the Duchess of Kent’s soirée in July, it was the Duchess herself (she was Queen Victoria’s mother) who called for silence and then begged him to resume.37 ‘If I could still spend my days calling on this one and that one, if I had not been spitting blood for the last few days, if I were younger, if I did not have my head full of attachments, as I have, then I would perhaps start life all over again,’ he wrote to Grzymała.38 To his family, he put it more practically: ‘If London were not quite so black, the people not quite so heavy, and if there were no smell of coal and no fog, I would probably start learning English.’39 The climate was the crucial factor. ‘Often in the morning I think I’m going to cough up my very soul,’ he wrote at the beginning of June, and although Mrs Grote, the eccentric wife of a Whig MP who had introduced him to Jenny Lind and helped him in various ways, thought that ‘the climate rather suits him, because it is cool and fresh this season’, he was almost perpetually ill.40
As usual with Chopin, dejection followed in the wake of physical collapse. He was often in ‘a fit of spleen’, and felt lonely in London, brooding ceaselessly over the events which had washed him up there with nobody close to talk to. Major Szulczewski provided a comforting presence, as did Chopin’s former pupil Tellefsen, now working in London, and Broadwood, ‘the most wonderful and genuine friend’.41
Broadwood was full of delicate attentions. When he heard Chopin had slept badly, he had good pillows and a mattress sent round to his lodgings; when, later, he was arranging Chopin’s journey to Scotland, he booked the seat opposite, so the composer could stretch out his legs. But this could not make up for the absence of friends like Grzymała, Franchomme or Delacroix. As Chopin himself observed, ‘20 years in Poland, 17 in Paris – it’s not surprising I don’t feel happy here.’42 Just as in Vienna seventeen years before, he was surrounded by kindness and goodwill, but felt sorry for himself. ‘I no longer know how to be sad or happy about anything any more,’ he wrote, ‘– I have exhausted all my feelings completely – I’m just vegetating and waiting for it all to end soon.’43
A minor, but for Chopin powerful, irritant was the fact that the Italian servant he had taken on after his arrival was inefficient, lazy and dishonest. By now he often needed to be carried up stairs and helped with many functions, some of them intimate, and he therefore required a servant with whom he could have a rapport. This one was unsympathetic and threw Chopin’s money around, which, combined with the composer’s own profligacy and the expense of life in London during the season, meant that his sizeable earnings were whittled down to some two hundred guineas after all the bills had been paid.
By the end of the season he was exhausted and at a loose end. Most of the revolutionary movements of the spring had been put down, and the radicals in France had been suppressed during the bloody June Days. But the political situation on the Continent remained highly charged, and the threat of further upheaval lingered. The resulting insecurity Chopin felt, and the hysteria attendant on his state of health, drove him to agonise over his future, and even to express extreme views on occasion. When the pianist Ignacy Krzyżanowski, who had settled in London and visited him regularly, questioned the Pope’s need to preserve his temporal power, which was under attack from Italian revolutionaries, Chopin exploded. He rounded on his friend, telling him he was a fool who should not presume to talk about things he knew nothing of, and all but threw him out.44
For the time being, England seemed the safest place for him. He had accepted a booking to give a concert in Manchester at the end of August, but had no idea of how he would fill up his time before and after that. He had invitations to stay in the country, but could not muster enough enthusiasm to take them up. It was only at the persuasion of Jane Stirling that he left London at all.
In the first days of August he went to Edinburgh, where he spent a day sightseeing, and thence to Calder House in Midlothian, to stay with her brother-in-law, Lord Torphichen. ‘The park here is beautiful, the host very excellent – and I am as well as I can be,’ Chopin wrote to Franchomme, but this was not very well: after a week or so he was again coughing badly and spitting blood. Had he been able to rest at Calder for some time, his health might have improved, but after a couple of weeks he was on the move again.45
He arrived in Manchester towards the end of August, and was put up at Crumpsall House, just outside the city. This was the mansion of Salis Schwabe, a German Jew who had settled in England thirty years before and amassed great wealth. The widely travelled and cultivated Schwabe had a brother in Paris, whom Chopin knew. (Coincidentally, another Mancunian, and one of those responsible for attracting Hallé to the city, was Hermann Leo, the brother of Chopin’s friend Auguste Léo.)
Chopin was astonished to find that ‘in this smoky place there is the most charming music room imaginable’, although he found himself face to face with one of the largest audiences he had ever played to, twelve hundred people.46 The pianist Osborne, who had returned to settle in England a few years before, was accompanying one of the singers taking part in the concert, which took place on 28 August, and Chopin begged him not to listen to his own playing. ‘You, my dear Osborne, who have heard me so often in Paris, will you not remain with those impressions?’ he pleaded. ‘I know that my playing will be lost in such a large room, and my compositions will be ineffective. Your presence will be painful to both you and me.’47
As the critic of the Manchester Guardian noted, Chopin ascended the platform with ‘an almost painful air of feebleness in his appearance and gait, but once he was seated at the piano, this vanished’.48 Osborne felt that Chopin’s prediction had been right, for ‘his playing was too delicate to create enthusiasm, and I felt truly sorry for him’.49 Charles Hallé, who was also present, felt that Chopin had been ‘little understood’, and this was borne out by one of the critics, who found him inferior to Thalberg and Herz.50 But Chopin himself was delighted with the event and with the money he had earned, and did not dwell on whether he had been understood or not.
A couple of days after the concert Chopin left for Edinburgh, where instead of staying at a hotel he put up with Dr Łyszczyński, a Pole who had settled in the city in 1831. ‘I don’t know what I shall do next – I shall choke and I shall cough, that is certain, and I shall love you as much as ever,’ he wrote to Thomas Albrecht.51 His indecision was once again resolved by the appearance of Jane Stirling, who took him off to stay with one of her sisters, Mrs Houston of Johnstone Castle. There was a large house party at the castle, but this did little to cheer Chopin, who found himself stuck indoors all day with the old and infirm, while the younger guests were out shooting grouse. ‘The conversation is invariably genealogical,’ he complained to Grzymała.52
In the first week of September, while he was out for a drive, the horses bolted and the carriage smashed into a tree. Chopin emerged unscathed but profoundly shaken. He realised how helpless he would have been had he been seriously injured, for while he loved attention and needed it, he resented being made to feel like an invalid. ‘I’m angry and sad, and people irritate me with their exaggerated care,’ he wrote. ‘I cannot rest and I cannot work. I feel alone, alone, alone, although I am surrounded by people.’53
He had not written a single piece for over six months, and could not get into the mood for it. ‘Not one musical thought,’ he complained to Franchomme. ‘I am out of my rut, I feel like a donkey at a masked ball, or a violin bow trying to play a double bass.’54 For someone whose whole existence had been devoted to the creation of music, this was worse than any physical suffering. ‘We are like two old harpsichords on which time and circumstance have played out their wretched trills,’ he wrote to Fontana, ‘– the belly is excellent, only the strings have snapped and some of the pegs have fallen out. The trouble is that we were built by some famous old craftsman, some Stradivarius sui generis, who is no longer around to repair us. We cannot give out new sounds under poor hands, and we stifle inside us everything that, for lack of a good craftsman, nobody will ever manage to draw out of us. I’m hardly breathing, je suis tout prêt à crever…I don’t know why I suddenly find myself thinking of poor dead Jasio and Antek, and Witwicki, and Sobański! Those with whom I was in the closest harmony have died; even Ennike, our best tuner, has drowned himself. So I can never again have a piano tuned just as I want it. Moos has died, so nobody will ever make me a comfortable pair of boots again. If another four or five go to St Peter’s gates, then my whole life would really become more comfortable in the other world…’55
Another concert had been organised for Chopin in Glasgow on 27 September, but instead of resting beforehand at nearby Johnstone Castle, he travelled all the way to Strachur to stay with Lady Murray, a former pupil. And he had not been there long before he was off again. The reason was that he had received a letter from Princess Marcelina Czartoryska, who had arrived in Edinburgh with her husband. ‘I breathed again in their Polish spirit,’ he wrote to Grzymała, ‘and it gave me enough strength to play in Glasgow.’56
The Glasgow concert was held under the patronage of the Duchess of Argyll and most of the local aristocracy, and was well attended as a result. Chopin played a selection of Études, Nocturnes, Mazurkas, and the ever-popular Waltzes of op.64. The longest works he played were a Ballade and the Berceuse. By now he tended to avoid longer pieces or those, like the Polonaises, which required greater strength. The audience were delighted, and all the reviews were very favourable. A Glaswegian amateur musician who was there gives some idea of the event:
I had frequently seen Thalberg sitting with serene countenance banging out some air with clear articulation and power, in the midst of perpetual coruscations the most magnificent fioriture. Liszt too I had often beheld, tossing his fair hair excitedly, and tearing the wild soul of music from the ecstatic keys. But the manner of Chopin was different. No man has composed pianoforte music of more technical difficulty. Yet with what consummate sweetness and ease did he unravel the wonderful varieties and complexities of sound! It was a drawing room entertainment, more piano than forte, though not without occasional episodes of both strength and grandeur. He took the audience as it were into his confidence, and whispered to them of zephyrs and moonlight rather than of cataracts and thunder. Of the whirl of liquid notes he wove garlands of pearls. The movements and combinations were calculated to excite and bewilder.57
After the concert the Czartoryskis accompanied Chopin back to Johnstone Castle for dinner, during which he seemed happier than he had been for a long time. But when they left he relapsed into his former languor. He had invitations to stay at Inverary Castle and other great houses, but could not muster the enthusiasm to go, and had it not been for Jane Stirling’s insistence, he would have gone nowhere at all. She took him off to Keir House to stay with another member of her family. ‘Everywhere received with the most cordial kindness and boundless hospitality, I find excellent pianos, beautiful pictures and choice libraries; there are also shoots, dogs, dinners that never end and cellars, of which I take less advantage,’ he wrote to Gutmann from Calder, where he arrived once more in mid-October.58 But even the comfort and the easy-going atmosphere of these house parties were exhausting.
‘The whole morning, until about two o’clock, I am now completely useless – later, when I’ve got dressed, everything makes me uncomfortable, and I sit there panting until dinner time – after which one has to sit for two hours with the men at the table and look at them speaking and listen to them drinking,’ he wrote to Grzymała. ‘Bored to tears (thinking of other things, in spite of their attentions and the attempts at conversation in French at the table), I then go to the drawing room, where I need all my strength of mind to come to life a little – because then they usually want to hear me play – after that my kind Daniel [his new Irish servant] carries me up the stairs to my bedroom, undresses me, puts me to bed, lights a candle, and leaves me to pant and dream until morning, when it all starts over again. As soon as I get a little more used to some place, I have to move to somewhere else, because my Scottish ladies won’t leave me in peace, and keep coming to fetch me in order to drive me round their family.’59
At the beginning of October he returned to Edinburgh once again to give a recital that had been arranged by Jane Stirling. He again stayed with Dr Łyszczyński, being put up in a tiny nursery and spending most of the day sitting with his feet almost in the fire, shivering. The unfortunate Mrs Łyszczyńska found him an awkward guest, for ever complaining that his laundry was not white enough and his boots not clean enough, but he did occasionally atone for everything by sitting down at their little piano.60 On 4 October he managed to pull himself together enough to give his recital in the Hopetoun Rooms, where he played alone for two hours. The reviews were satisfactory, but Chopin cared more for the fee he had earned. Instead of resting from the exertion, he went to stay with Lady Bellhaven at Wishaw, then to Calder once again, and finally spent a few days at Hamilton Palace before returning to Edinburgh and the care of Dr Łyszczyński.
He was by now desperate to leave Scotland, and not just on account of the cold weather. Mrs Erskine had decided to convert him to the Church of Scotland, and drove him mad with Bible readings, while her sister Jane Stirling revealed more mundane intentions. Chopin was used to being pampered by women, and had therefore allowed her to insinuate herself into his life, not realising that she was in love with him. When it became obvious that she was, he told her firmly that he had no intention of going beyond friendship, but this does not seem to have put her off. ‘My Scottish ladies are kind, but such bores, God help me!’ he wrote. ‘Every day I get letters from them, I don’t reply to a single one, and the moment I go anywhere they come running along after me if they possibly can.’ Jane Stirling had to drag her sister about with her as a chaperone, but even so tongues wagged and rumours reached Paris, whence an alarmed Grzymała wrote to enquire the truth. Chopin answered that he was ‘closer to the grave than the nuptial bed’.61
The ridiculous notion that he might begin a new life with someone else only served to highlight his real condition. He was convinced that he was spent, that his life was over, and that his body only needed time to expire. ‘Where has my art gone?’ he wrote to Grzymała. ‘And where did I lose my heart? I can hardly remember how they sing back in Poland. This world seems to be leaving me behind; I’m losing myself; I have no strength left…’ The physical suffering and the artistic barrenness of his life during this period made him long for release. ‘Why does God not kill me straight away, only bit by bit,’ he complained, and in his despair he could not prevent his thoughts from drifting back to George Sand. ‘I have never cursed anyone, but life is so unbearable now that I am beginning to think that I might feel better if I could curse Lucrezia. But she must be suffering too…’62
At the end of October he returned to London, where he promptly fell ill. For the next three weeks he did not leave the rooms Szulczewski had found him in St James’s Place. He sat in front of the fire in his overcoat, because he had to keep the windows wide open so he could breathe in the small room. Princess Marcelina, who was installed in his old rooms in Dover Street two hundred yards away, took charge. She called in Dr Mallan, the leading homeopath in London, and the Royal Physician, Sir James Clark, who was an authority on tuberculosis and had treated Keats in Italy. There was little they could do except suggest that he leave London as soon as he was strong enough.
But before he did, and despite Dr Mallan’s entreaties, Chopin felt he had to fulfil a debt of honour and play in public one last time. The occasion was the ‘Annual Grand Dress and Fancy Ball and Concert in aid of the Funds of the Literary Association of the Friends of Poland’, held at the Guildhall on 16 November. He insisted on lending his support not only because Princess Marcelina was involved in organising the event, but also because the Polish cause, for long highly popular in Britain, particularly in Whig circles, had recently come under attack from City interests and socialists: the ball, originally scheduled for May, had been cancelled after a fierce campaign led by The Times and the Morning Post. Chopin was determined to contribute to the success of this second attempt.
The evening began with a concert; Chopin played and his former pupil Lindsay Sloper conducted a small orchestra. This was followed by the ball, for which he did not stay. The event was deemed a great success, but Chopin’s playing was somewhat wasted. ‘The concert went off very well,’ Princess Marcelina reported to her uncle the next day. ‘Chopin played like an angel, much too well for the inhabitants of the City, whose artistic education is a little problematic.’63 Chopin was delighted, and his appearance caused the predictable sensation amongst the Poles present, but on his return home he could not sleep, and he felt weak for the next few days.
The second half of November brought fog and cold weather, and Chopin began to panic at the prospect of spending the winter in England. His desire to leave was reinforced by the arrival in London of Jane Stirling and her pious sister. ‘One day longer here and I won’t just die – I’ll go mad,’ he wrote to Grzymała. ‘My Scottish ladies are such bores that God preserve me – they’ve latched on so tight that I cannot get away. Only Princess Marcelina is keeping me alive, and her family, and good Szulczewski.’ He asked Grzymała to prepare his rooms in the Square d’Orléans, and to place a bouquet of violets, his favourite flowers, in the drawing room. ‘At least I can have a breath of poetry when I return, as I pass through on the way to my bedroom, where I shall probably lie down for a very long time.’64
On 23 November, Chopin and his travelling companion Leonard Niedźwiedzki (another Czartoryski agent) were driven to the station by Broadwood, who brought last-minute gifts, settled Chopin into the compartment he had booked, and recommended him to the conductor of the train. Princess Marcelina, her husband and her son also came to see them off. As the train pulled out, Chopin suddenly had a seizure: a cramp on the right side below his ribs. As the terrified Niedźwiedzki looked on helplessly, Chopin unbuttoned his coat, waistcoat and trousers and started massaging himself, explaining that this often happened. The cramp passed, and they continued their journey uneventfully as far as Folkestone, where they had a lunch of soup, roast beef and wine. This was subsequently ‘taken away’ by the sea during the crossing, Chopin being copiously sick into a bowl held by Niedźwiedzki. After a bad night at Boulogne, the two travellers took a train to Paris.65 No sooner had his cab rolled into the Square d’Orléans than Grzymała, Franchomme and Marie de Rozières appeared to greet him. He was home at last.