Chopin’s relief at getting back to Paris was not accompanied by any improvement in his health. Dr Molin, who had the secret of alleviating his sufferings, had died, and he was replaced by a succession of doctors in whom Chopin had little faith. ‘They poke about but do not bring me any relief,’ he wrote to Solange in January 1849. ‘They all agree on the need for a good climate, calm and rest. I shall have the rest one day without their help.’1 They annoyed him with their diets and by ordering him to drink no coffee, only cocoa, which he claimed made him sleepy and ‘stupid’. Nevertheless, he felt confident that he would revive, and wrote to Solange that ‘the spring sun will be my best doctor’.2
Much had changed in Paris while he had been away. The radical republicans who had toppled Louis Philippe had themselves been pushed aside, and two weeks after Chopin’s return Louis Napoleon Bonaparte would be elected President of the Republic in a huge swing of public opinion in favour of law and order. While revolution and war continued to rage in parts of Germany, Italy and Hungary, France settled down to a new regime.
The only friend left in the Square d’Orléans was Alkan; the Marlianis had left Paris, many of Chopin’s aristocratic French friends were still lying low, and even Grzymała was kept away by a combination of financial and political problems. Most of Chopin’s French pupils had left, and he was now limiting his lessons to those who were advanced and therefore less demanding, and who were prepared to put up with last-minute cancellations on account of his health. These included Princess Soutzo, Maria Kalergis, Delfina Potocka, the baronne de Rothschild and, from March, Princess Marcelina.
Although he could go out only rarely that winter, Chopin did not suffer too much from the loneliness he dreaded. A small group of friends, including Franchommme, Legouvé, Princess Obreskoff (Princess Soutzo’s mother), Baron Stockhausen, Thomas Albrecht, Charles Gavard and Marie de Rozières, conspired to keep it at bay. Delacroix too used to call on ‘my poor great dying man’, as he referred to him. He would often come to the informal evenings at the Square d’Orléans, where Delfina Potocka and Maria Kalergis sang and Chopin played. Otherwise he would drop in late in the day when he knew Chopin would have finished giving lessons, and the two would talk for hours about life, art and George Sand. Sometimes he accompanied Chopin on the drives he began to take with the arrival of spring. On a typical afternoon, at the beginning of April, the two friends climbed into a cabriolet and set off along the Champs-Élysées, chatting about art and music. Delacroix questioned Chopin at length on the theory of music, and asked him to explain what constituted logic in musical thought. ‘He enlightened me on the meaning of harmony and counterpoint,’ the painter noted in his diary, ‘explaining that the fugue is what one might call the pure logic of music, and that therefore to be a master of the fugue is to be familiar with the elements of all reason and all development in music.’3 They went on to talk of Mozart, Chopin giving reasons why he considered him superior to Beethoven, and after stopping at the Étoile for a drink they trundled back to the Square d’Orléans.
On other days, Delacroix would find Chopin ‘hardly breathing’ and unable to move. ‘His health is declining gradually, with passable days when he can drive out and others when he has fits of coughing that choke him and he spits blood,’ Pauline Viardot reported to George Sand. ‘He no longer goes out in the evenings, but he still manages to give some lessons, and on his better days he can be quite merry.’4 He did in fact go out occasionally, and in mid-April he dragged himself to the first night of Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète. He had been looking forward to hearing Pauline Viardot in the leading role and to seeing the elaborate sets, the rising of an electrical sun and a fire contrived with gas on stage, all much publicised. But the music horrified him, and the vaunted production failed to fill him with the same enthusiasm as had that of the same composer’s Robert le Diable in his first days in Paris almost eighteen years before.
On better days he also tried to compose, but the effort involved was daunting, and he found it difficult to concentrate. The fruits of these labours, the Mazurkas no.2 of op.67 and no.4 of op.68, bear the mark of this. Probably at the instigation of Delacroix, Chopin also began to put his ideas on music down on paper, but this was an even greater challenge. He nevertheless produced some notes for a theoretical method for the piano. His own rather irregular instruction as well as his undisciplined literary style must have made it difficult for him to formulate thoughts on the subject, and the notes remained just that.
One thing that all the doctors treating him agreed on was that it would be madness for him to remain in Paris during the summer months, when the heat and the dust would make it difficult for him to breathe. Other considerations were that a cholera epidemic was spreading, and that the forthcoming elections were expected to be accompanied by violence. As a result, it was decided that Chopin should move out of the city, and his friends duly found him an apartment in Chaillot, a quiet place more or less where the Trocadéro now stands. The apartment was expensive, but half the rent was secretly paid by Princess Obreskoff, and Chopin wondered at the cheapness of it. He moved towards the end of May, and his spirits rose. He liked the spacious main room and the magnificent ‘Roman view’ afforded by the five windows of the apartment, which took in the Tuileries and the Chamber of Deputies, Notre Dame, the Pantheon, Saint-Sulpice and the Invalides. The fresh air and the fact that he had stopped taking medicine altogether improved his appetite, and after a few weeks he felt much better, although he still could not work.
June passed pleasantly enough, and he was not as isolated as he had feared. Cholera, which had just carried away Kalkbrenner and the singer Angelica Catalani, who had given Chopin a gold watch in Warsaw thirty years before, was chasing everyone from the capital. Delfina Potocka moved to Versailles, while Princess Obreskoff retired to Saint-Germain, and they visited him frequently. In the case of the ‘Scottish ladies’, who had reappeared on the scene, it was clearly too frequently. ‘They will drive me into my grave,’ Chopin could not help complaining to Grzymała.5 Delacroix had left Paris for the summer, wondering sadly whether he would ever see Chopin again. But Franchomme and Gutmann often visited him at Chaillot, as did various members of the Czartoryski family, who supplied him with one of their nannies as a night nurse, and early in June he had a pleasant surprise when Jenny Lind came to see him. Although she was only in Paris for a few days, she came back for a small musical evening he arranged, during which she and Delfina Potocka took turns to sing.
In the last week of June he started haemorrhaging dramatically and his legs began to swell up. The night nurse alerted Princess Sapieha, who called in Dr Jean Baptiste Cruveillher, the greatest authority on tuberculosis in France, who had treated Talleyrand and Chateaubriand. The symptoms of persistent diarrhoea and swelling of the legs were consistent with the final stages of tuberculosis, and from the drugs Cruveillher prescribed, Chopin deduced that he had diagnosed as much (it is worth noting that these symptoms are also common in the terminal stage of cystic fibrosis). He must have realised that the end was near, for while he made brave noises about going to Poland the following spring, he began to make desperate appeals for Ludwika to come to Paris. ‘I am very weak, and no doctor can help me as much as you can,’ he wrote, telling her to bring her needle and thimble, for there would be much sitting at his bedside.6 For some two months both Princess Marcelina and Delfina Potocka had been using their influence and connections to obtain a passport for Ludwika, so there must have been a secret plan afoot earlier to bring her to Paris.7 Her husband, Kalasanty, would take much persuading, and Ludwika had to borrow the necessary funds.
The month of July passed slowly and wretchedly; Chopin was lonely and bored, and had given up all attempts at keeping himself occupied with work. He still gave a few lessons, but could only play the piano with the greatest difficulty. A niece of Prince Adam’s and former pupil of his, Eliza Brzozowska, moved into the apartment above his with her husband and children, which meant that she could play to him to dispel his boredom. It also meant that the Prince and his mother-in-law, Princess Sapieha, called more often, supplementing the faithful Franchomme and Charles Gavard, who would sometimes read to him in the afternoons. He occasionally went for a drive in the Bois de Boulogne, and once even drove as far as Passy to take tea with the Zaleskis.
At the end of July his life was disturbed once more by the antics of his ‘Scottish ladies’. One day he had apparently complained to Franchomme that he had little money left, and Franchomme mentioned the fact to Jane Stirling, whom he knew to be wealthy and devoted to Chopin. Hearing this, she made a great show of surprise and announced that she had sent him the staggering sum of 25,000 francs as recently as March. Quizzed on this point, Chopin stated that he had never received any such sum, and would have sent it back if he had. Jane Stirling then got hold of the man who had allegedly delivered the packet to Chopin’s concierge, and sent him to see a renowned clairvoyant by the name of Alexis, who promised to solve the mystery, but said he needed something belonging to the concierge to help him think. Chopin was induced to persuade Madame Étienne to come all the way from the Square d’Orléans, and to invent a stratagem to get her to give him a lock of her hair. This was duly delivered to Alexis, who then announced that the packet had been handed to Madame Étienne and placed by her behind the clock on her mantelpiece in a moment of distraction. There it was found, to the astonishment of the concierge, who could remember no such packet being delivered, and would certainly not have treated a sum of money of this order with such nonchalance.
Chopin trusted Madame Étienne implicitly, and was convinced that the farce had been arranged by Jane Stirling out of a desire to cover up some self-imputed neglect of his needs. ‘There’s a good heart behind it, but also a lot of ostentation,’ he wrote to Grzymała. The whole business worried and irritated him so much that he could not sleep at night and his efforts to get to the bottom of it induced migraine. He refused the gift, but eventually accepted 15,000 francs as a loan.8
By early August he was feeling very weak, and was beginning to despair of Ludwika. ‘I pant and cough and feel sleepy; I don’t do anything, I don’t want to do anything,’ he wrote to Grzymała, who only visited him fleetingly in Chaillot, since the police were trying to round up and deport members of the Polish Democratic Club, of which he was one.9
On 9 August, Ludwika arrived with her husband Kalasanty and their daughter. Chopin was happy as could be; at last he had someone to talk to, and not just during the day, for he suffered from insomnia and grew anxious on his own. ‘He liked to talk at night,’ Ludwika later wrote, ‘to tell me his sorrows and to pour into my loving and understanding heart all his most personal thoughts.’10 Kalasanty soon got tired of sightseeing and returned to Warsaw, but Ludwika was determined to see her brother through his illness, still deluding herself that he might survive it.
Chopin himself alternated between anticipation of death and denial of the severity of his condition. States of euphoria have been noted as a symptom of the terminal stage of tuberculosis. He now pathetically nourished the delusion that he might go and meet Tytus, who was travelling across Germany. He also wanted to take up Delfina Potocka’s invitation to spend the winter at her villa in Nice, whither she had gone herself. But on 30 August Cruveillher, who had been in attendance every couple of days, called in two other eminent doctors and held a consultation. They declared that travel was out of the question, and that if he was to survive the winter at all he must be found a warm and sunny apartment in central Paris.
While his friends set to work looking for the right place, rumours began to spread that Chopin was dying. Even George Sand wrote to Ludwika asking for news. But the tone of the letter was ill-judged and jarring in its assumption of motherly rights. ‘One can be deserted and forgotten by one’s children without ceasing to love them,’ she wrote, which was not only pompous, but also insulting, since it was for voicing a very similar sentiment that Chopin had been expelled from her life two years before.11 The letter went unanswered.
The Polish poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid was among those who, alarmed by the rumours of Chopin’s rapid decline, came to pay their last respects. ‘I found him lying on his bed fully dressed, his swollen legs encased in stockings and pumps,’ recorded Norwid. ‘He had, as always, something in even the most casual of his movements that was accomplished, monumental…something the Athenian aristocracy might have made into a rite at the height of the Hellenic civilisation…In a voice interrupted by coughing and choking, he began to berate me for not having called on him recently. Then he teased me in the most childlike way for my mystical tendencies, to which, as it evidently gave him pleasure, I readily lent myself. After that I talked with his sister. There were more fits of coughing. Finally the moment came to leave him in peace, so I started taking my leave. Pressing my hand, he brushed the hair back from his forehead and said: “I’m leaving this…” and was interrupted by coughing. Hearing this, and feeling that it was good for him to be contradicted, I assumed the usual false tone, and, embracing him, said, as one does to a healthy man: “Every year you say you’re leaving this world, and yet, thank God you’re still alive!” But Chopin, finishing the sentence interrupted by his coughing, said “I’m leaving this apartment and moving to another in the Place Vendôme.”’12
The apartment which had been found for him consisted of five rooms on the entresol of No.12 place Vendôme, the house in which Thomas Albrecht had his office. The rooms were warm and sunny, as the windows faced south onto a small courtyard, rather than onto the square. The rooms in the Square d’Orléans were re-let and the furniture and effects brought to the place Vendôme, where, along with the things from Chaillot, including the mahogany grand piano still on loan from Pleyel, they filled the five rooms.13 Chopin moved in at the end of September, and although he was once or twice well enough to wander about the apartment, he never left it. He soon took to his bed, and by 12 October Dr Cruveillher was so certain of impending death that he suggested the Last Sacrament be administered.
Chopin’s spiritual preparedness for death had been worrying many of his Polish friends for some time, as he had not practised his faith for years. Princess Sapieha, Norwid, Zaleski and others tried, without success, to make him address the matter and make his peace with God. But he would simply ask them to pray for him and listened with devotion when they did so at his bedside.14
At this point, Chopin’s old acquaintance Aleksander Jełowicki, who had since taken Holy Orders, turned up in Paris and made a more determined onslaught. He came on 12 October and begged Chopin to make a full confession and accept the Last Sacrament, but Chopin replied that while he would gladly confess his faults to him as a man whom he respected, he found it impossible to believe in the act as a Sacrament. This has the ring of truth. ‘I have never known a more atheistic poet, or a more poetic atheist,’ George Sand would write to a friend shortly after Chopin’s death. ‘He thought he believed in some kind of divinity and a fantastical afterlife, but at bottom it was no more than inspired vagueness and an abeyance of reflection.’15
Jełowicki returned the next day, and claims he found Chopin in an altered mood. In his probably embellished account, Jełowicki relates that the dying man made his confession and received the Last Sacrament, after which he gave the sacristan an enormous sum of money instead of the usual token gift. When Jełowicki protested at this, Chopin is supposed to have answered: ‘It is not too much, because what I have received is priceless!’ adding: ‘Without you, my friend, I would have died like a pig.’16
Death was closing in fast, and his friends knew it. Aside from Ludwika, who had moved into the apartment with him, he was attended by Solange, who had come up to Paris specially; Princess Marcelina, who had taken rooms in the same square; and one or two others, including Thomas Albrecht and Gutmann. They looked after Chopin and kept him company, talking to him, reading to him and praying with him.
While his condition continued to deteriorate, he hung on with astonishing determination and refused to let himself go to pieces. Although he was choking much of the time, he was entirely lucid and admitted to his bedside many of the friends and pupils who came to say farewell. He took his leave of them bravely, thanking some, encouraging others. Dozens of others simply called in at the apartment as a mark of respect, which gave the gossips their cue.
‘He had in his ante room I know not how many princesses, countesses, marchionesses, and even a few bourgeoises, who, on their knees, awaited the hour of his last agony,’ wrote Jules Janin fancifully.17 Pauline Viardot, who was not one of them, wrote to George Sand, with a note of sourness, that ‘all the grandes dames of Paris felt obliged to come and faint in his room’.18 George Sand developed the theme with unquestioned authoritativeness in a letter to Étienne Arago. ‘My poor sick friend died in the arms of priests and pious women,’ she wrote, adding that they made him kiss relics while he thought only of the music to be played at the funeral.19
Chopin did indeed attend to such details, and gave careful instructions about his affairs. He asked that all unfinished musical manuscripts in his portfolio be destroyed, and that only complete pieces be published. He bequeathed his notes on the proposed piano method to Alkan as a mark of respect for his revolutionary piano technique. He even remembered to leave Madame Étienne, the concierge at the Square d’Orléans, the princely sum of a thousand francs. He begged that his body be cut open (out of a widely shared horror of being buried alive) and his heart sent to Warsaw, and asked for Mozart’s Requiem to be sung at his funeral. A lifetime’s self-discipline in the face of tormenting pain permitted him to hide the true extent of his suffering in front of others, but it would become evident when they left. ‘The evenings spent with him were enough to break the hardest heart,’ recalled Solange. ‘His gasping breaths were hardly more than pitiful stifled cries, horrifying sobs.’20
On 15 October, Delfina Potocka arrived from Nice, a gesture of loyalty that must have moved Chopin. He begged her to sing for him one last time, and, the piano being duly rolled up to the bedroom door, she obliged. Throughout his last illness he craved music, particularly that of the human voice, and he seemed to draw strength from it. The following day he kept asking for music, even though he was in agony. The piano was again wheeled up to the doorway, and Princess Marcelina and Franchomme played him some Mozart. He then asked to hear his own Sonata for Piano and Cello, but after a few bars of this he began to suffocate, and they stopped.
By this time it had become obvious that the end was close. Most of the callers had gone, leaving only intimate friends. ‘The whole evening of the 16th was spent reciting litanies; we gave the responses, but Chopin remained silent,’ relates Charles Gavard. ‘Only by his strained breathing could one tell that he was still alive. That evening two doctors examined him. One of them, Dr Cruveillher, took a candle and, holding it before Chopin’s face, which had become quite dark with suffocation, remarked to us that his senses had ceased to act. But when he asked Chopin whether he was suffering, we quite distinctly heard the answer: “No longer!”’21
As the night wore on, more people went home, leaving only Ludwika, Princess Marcelina, Gutmann, Solange and Thomas Albrecht.22 The end came at about two o’clock on the morning of 17 October. Ludwika had fallen asleep, but Chopin lay awake and Solange sat beside him, holding his hand. ‘Don’t stay here, this will be ugly. You must not see it,’ he suddenly said to her. He appeared to have a seizure, and the terrified Solange called Gutmann, who took Chopin in his arms. ‘We wanted to give him a drink, but death prevented us,’ wrote Solange. ‘He passed away with his gaze fixed on me, he was hideous, I could see the tarnishing eyes in the darkness. Oh, the soul had died too!’23
The following morning, Clésinger turned up to make a death-mask, having already started work on a project for the gravestone. The mask was so painfully eloquent of the agonised death throes of the composer that he put it aside and produced a doctored version. The painter Teofil Kwiatkowski spent the whole day drawing Chopin’s face, also endowing it with an ideal beauty and an expression of youthful serenity. Dr Cruveillher carried out an autopsy, which revealed that Chopin’s heart had been in very poor condition and may have been the immediate cause of death. The heart itself was removed and preserved separately, to be sent to Warsaw in accordance with the dead man’s wishes. The body was taken to the crypt of the Madeleine, and the apartment was sealed up by the French authorities.
Ludwika had removed Chopin’s private papers for fear of potential prying on the part of the Russian Consul, and set about sorting them out. She found all George Sand’s letters to him neatly wrapped in a little casket which contained all his money and treasured possessions. There was more money than anyone had expected, and she was able to settle most of the outstanding debts immediately, as well as his various legacies.24
The funeral proved far from easy to arrange. As Mozart’s Requiem was to be performed, special dispensation had to be obtained from the Archbishop of Paris to permit women to sing in the Madeleine. Since it was bound to be well attended, invitation cards had to be issued in order to control numbers. The ceremony eventually took place almost two weeks after Chopin’s death, on 30 October 1849. By then, he was already being immortalised.
The composer’s death had been proclaimed to the world in lengthy obituaries, from the pens of eminent musicians such as Hector Berlioz and poets such as Théophile Gautier. They mostly underlined what, for want of a better word, might be termed his ‘political’ importance. And it is not difficult to see why.
The language Chopin’s music speaks is perhaps the most intimate in the whole canon of Western music. It transcends everything we know about the man and draws the listener into a world of the spirit which is the very essence of the Romantic artistic experience. And taken as a whole, his life itself epitomises the notion of the Romantic artist – of the ethereal exile from heaven, half man half angel, who comes into this life to inspire mankind, but does not belong here and suffers the torments of a creature out of its natural element.
Few of the obituaries were as moving as that by the poet Norwid. ‘He knew how to divine the greatest mysteries of art with astonishing ease – he could gather the flowers of the field without disturbing the dew or the lightest pollen,’ he wrote. ‘And he knew how to fashion them into stars, meteors, as it were comets, lighting up the sky of Europe, through the ideal of art. In the crystal of his own harmony he gathered the tears of the Polish people strewn over the fields, and placed them as the diamond of beauty in the diadem of humanity.’25
The reference to the Polish people is significant: Chopin was the quintessential national composer. Not in the same sense that a Dvořák, a Bartok, a Tchaikovsky or a Rimsky-Korsakov were. Far from embellishing folklore and historical imagery, Chopin created a musical idiom that transcended music, an idiom that in many ways actually helped to mould and condition the nation itself. That is why he is so central to the national narrative: along with the poets and artists, he helped compose it.
Ultimately, however, Chopin’s reputation must rest on the artistic value of his musical oeuvre, and this stands out in a number of respects. It is often said that there are three composers who never wrote a bad piece of music – Bach, Chopin and Debussy. This is verifiably so in Chopin’s case, as even his earliest works are characterised by a satisfying completeness that results from his working and reworking of a piece until it made perfect musical sense. Pretty tunes aside, Chopin’s works are not easy listening: they are highly intelligent harmonic exercises exploring depth and range of sound, and they are all characterised by complete intellectual and artistic integrity.
‘Composition, to speak frankly, has come to an end,’ wrote the virtuoso pianist Anton Rubinstein in 1890. ‘Its parting knell was rung when the last incomparable notes of Chopin died away.’26 His is not an isolated view, and it was not inspired by nostalgia for a lost form or a defunct fashion. On the contrary, what people like him valued in Chopin was the ability to use his profound knowledge and understanding of the classical canon of past ages to stretch the boundaries of music and break new ground.
The slight Polish pianist who worshipped Bach and thought Beethoven sometimes vulgar was, in effect, a real revolutionary. ‘That sweet evening star that shone only for a moment,’ as Saint-Saëns described Chopin, ‘revolutionised the art form and opened the way for all modern music.’27 He profoundly influenced not only the likes of Debussy, Scriabin and Rachmaninov, but also composers as different as Brahms, Wagner, Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev. And that is why, although his works speak to all, Chopin is the ultimate musician’s musician. Those who study or play his works endlessly discover new things in them and find themselves being led along by the composer’s ordered musical intelligence.
Similarly, while his music is deeply rooted in Polish tradition and folklore, it is universal, and Chopin has a greater following in places as distant as Japan, China, India and Africa than most classical composers.
Yet behind these works of genius, tantalisingly elusive, hovers the spirit of the man himself. ‘The story of a life is as secret as life itself,’ commented the novelist Elias Canetti. ‘A life that can be explained is no life at all.’28 Although Chopin could be extremely down-to-earth and sometimes startlingly matter-of-fact in his approach to life, and although one can have a sense of getting close to understanding him as one reads his delightful letters, there is a part of him that remains utterly out of reach, and almost other-worldly. Delacroix, who missed both the man and the artist perhaps more than anyone else, and who to his dying day kept in his bedroom a little drawing of Chopin, felt this very strongly as he considered ‘the incomparable genius for whom heaven was jealous of the earth, and of whom I think so often, no longer being able to see him in this world, nor to hear his divine harmonies’.29 In those words he summed up so much of what his generation felt about art, and why Chopin was so emblematic of the Romantic vision.
‘The soul of an angel, cast down upon earth in a tortured body in order to accomplish some mysterious redemption,’ was how Solange remembered him. ‘Is it because his life was a thirty-nine-year agony that his music is so lofty, so sweet, so sublime?’ she wondered.30