The Case of the ‘Chopin –Potocka Letters’
Chopin’s early biographers, some of whom, like Liszt, knew him personally, relied not on documents, but on their own reminiscences, those of others, and a certain amount of hearsay and gossip. The world of the 1840s was a small one, in which artists, aristocrats and professional people met each other across frontiers and knew a great deal about each other. It is therefore significant that not one of his early biographers dropped the slightest hint about the existence of any intimate link between Chopin and Delfina Potocka. Her other affairs were known throughout Europe, as was his with George Sand, but as far as his contemporaries were concerned, she was just another of the great ladies who, like Marcelina Czartoryska and Maria Kalergis, held a special position in his life because they were amongst the most gifted of his pupils, because they were grandes dames and because they were Polish. The published and unpublished correspondence of the period, including that of such renowned gossips as Balzac and Dumas, of the vindictive comtesse d’Agoult and of others who prided themselves on knowing everything that went on in Paris (and no regular affair could go on for long without everyone knowing about it), make no allusion, suppose nothing.
But in the last quarter of the nineteenth century a new kind of biography became popular: one which looked at artists in particular through the prism of their emotional lives. This worked well with a Liszt, but made Chopin’s biography challenging, since there was so little to go on. It was at this moment that certain writers began to look for evidence to fill in the emotional lacunae in his life. An indeterminate affair was ‘discovered’ to fill his adolescence, a young Czech girl was dredged up to enliven the Bad Reinerz holiday, and then one of the most famous of all Polish historical gossips, Ferdynand Hoesick, hit on Delfina Potocka to add zest to the first few years in Paris. He hinted and suggested, found people who had been alive at the same time as Chopin, interviewed them and prompted them, and finally let fall that he knew of the existence of a batch of letters from the composer to the Countess allegedly kept under lock and key by puritanical ‘descendants’. Others took this up, and soon a tradition had been created. The Countess herself began to come to life with the publication during the 1920s and ’30s of much contemporary correspondence, particularly that of her celebrated lover, the poet Krasiński.
In 1939 a woman called Paulina Czernicka approached Radio Wilno, saying that she had several unpublished letters of Chopin’s to Delfina Potocka, around which she could build a programme. With the outbreak of war, the plan came to nothing, and no more was heard until 1945, when the same lady, now resettled in western Poland, approached Radio Poznań, and broadcast extracts from letters allegedly written by Chopin. This naturally aroused enthusiastic interest, heightened by the fact that archives and collections throughout Poland had been methodically destroyed by the Germans during the war. But the enthusiasm waned as more extracts were published by Czernicka, with their overtly erotic content. A debate started up as to whether Chopin could or would have written such stuff, and whether he had or had not had a sexual relationship with Delfina Potocka.
The newly founded Chopin Society asked Czernicka to supply the originals so that they could verify them and publish this valuable find. She signed an agreement with them, promising to supply manuscripts and originals. A few months later, however, she stated that the originals were ‘temporarily lost’, but that she would produce photographs of them. She then explained that she had given some of the originals to a French officer in Wilno in 1939, and that these were now in France, but that others were hidden in Poland, and would be produced shortly. On the day she was supposed to bring them to Warsaw, the Chopin Society received a telegram from her saying that, as she was waiting for the train, the briefcase containing the originals had been grabbed by a thief employed by descendants of Delfina’s family, who did not wish to see the compromising letters published. She fed the Society with various other stories, claiming on one occasion that the originals were in Australia, and on another that her aunt had them in America, and on a third that they were in France, but nobody has to this day seen any such originals. Paulina Czernicka committed suicide in 1949.
The provenance of the letters was no more probable than were their mystifying peregrinations. Czernicka claimed that she had obtained them from a relative who was a member of the Komar family, but although the name was the same, this particular Komar family had no traceable relationship in the last three hundred years with that into which Delfina was born, and lived in a completely different area of the country. Moreover, Delfina’s Komars had died out, and her heirs were a Countess Tyszkiewicz and a Countess Raczyńska, neither of whom had the faintest recollection of any such correspondence existing. Furthermore, none of Czernicka’s relatives had ever heard a word about any such letters.
Much has been written on Paulina Czernicka herself, and all the evidence from people who knew her points to her being a psychopath with a troubled emotional life. There was a strong vein of madness in the family (both her brothers and her mother also committed suicide), and she had from early life nurtured a cult of Chopin, avidly collecting every publication on the subject.
It was not until many years after her death that her papers were found and a full compilation made of the texts, which had hitherto been broadcast or printed only fragmentarily. It then became possible to look at the fundamental issue: whether or not these texts were genuine transcripts from letters written by Chopin.
A cursory reading of the texts, which include two full letters, one of them dated, and a hundred or so fragments, varying in length, will strike anyone who knows the authentic correspond ence of Chopin in two ways. The first is that the style is indeed very ‘Chopinesque’, so much so in fact that one begins to wonder after a while at the abundance of turns of phrase, neologisms, puns and jokes which seem familiar. They are in fact familiar because they all occur in different forms or contexts in the authentic correspondence, though far less frequently. If this is indeed the real Chopin writing, he is trying to show off. The second thing that strikes one is the fact that this collection of texts provides, already made up into perfectly quotable passages, everything that the biographer and the historian vainly struggle to find in Chopin’s real correspondence. This betrays little about Chopin’s emotional life, let alone his sexual habits; here they are described in staggering detail. The authentic correspondence makes no judgements on other musicians or composers, and gives no clue as to how Chopin considered his music or how he felt about creating it. Czernicka’s texts talk of nothing else: one is overwhelmed by the judgements on Liszt, Schumann, Berlioz, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach; by Chopin’s statements about certain pieces of his own; by his observations on playing the piano, on the theory of music and just about anything related to it. The authentic correspondence also leaves one guessing at his relationship to the Polish Romantic movement in general and the poets, Słowacki, Mickiewicz and Norwid in particular. Czernicka’s texts are full of vignettes and conversations which fill this gap too. Were these texts to be genuine, they would make the biographer’s task much easier.
All the evidence points in the other direction. A historical examination of the texts reveals serious faults. The only dated letter is written from Chopin in Paris to the Countess in Paris, regarding a tryst for that evening. It is known that Delfina spent the whole of the year in question in Naples, having a torrid affair with Krasiński. Some have argued that Czernicka could have written down the wrong year when transcribing the original, but research has shown that in no year in which this letter could have been written were both Chopin and the Countess in Paris in the month given, which, written out in full, is unlikely to have been copied wrong. Several meetings are described which could never have taken place, and there are small mistakes, such as the fragments in which Chopin mentions sending Delfina books by Mickiewicz, Witwicki and Krasiński, in spite of the fact that when the letter purports to have been written Krasiński had only published one book, and that so anonymously that nobody in Paris knew who the author was.
In these texts Chopin talks much of the young poet Norwid, and refers to him in the same way as, and with greater respect than, he does to Mickiewicz. Mickiewicz was a national figure, generally regarded in Paris, by Frenchmen as well as Poles, as the spiritual cousin of Byron and Goethe. Norwid was a little-known young man in his twenties, who had published pieces here and there in periodicals and did not achieve full recognition in Poland until the beginning of the twentieth century, and did not become fashionable until the 1930s. Another curious point is that the erotic passages reveal a distinctly post-Freudian association of sexual libido and artistic creativity which does not fit in with either the atmosphere or the psychological make-up of the society in which Chopin lived in the 1830s and ’40s.
Finally, there is the evidence provided by a linguistic examin ation of the texts. Apart from the fact that the person writing one of the erotic passages gets his or her own gender mixed up at one stage, there are many examples of words which did not appear in Polish until the twentieth century, or else changed their meaning, and are used in the twentieth-century and not the nineteenth-century meaning. The texts are also full of word-endings and usages common to Galicia and Volhynia in eastern Poland, wholly different to those used in Warsaw and Mazovia, as in Chopin’s authentic correspondence. Some of Chopin’s own neologisms are here repeated with a different gender to the one they have in the authentic correspondence. There is also an avalanche of words such as ‘art’, ‘artistic’, ‘creativity’, ‘work of art’, ‘inspiration’, which are absent from the authentic correspondence and which, moreover, did not acquire their present meaning in the Polish language until after Chopin’s death.
It is worth noting that amongst Paulina Czernicka’s papers there are books on Chopin with underlined passages which can be recognised, only slightly amended, in her texts, and there are whole lines in her texts which are taken directly from statements by Chopin’s pupils, published later, and from his own notes for a piano method. Her own manuscript texts are full of crossings out, of phrases added in different inks with a different pen, which suggests confection rather than copying.
There can be no doubt that these texts are forgeries, probably made during the 1930s, and that the forger was almost certainly Paulina Czernicka. One or two Chopin enthusiasts, however, have carried on championing the cause of their authenticity, and they had a field day in 1964 when a few photocopies, purporting to be of the originals, mysteriously appeared amongst the papers of the deceased composer Tadeusz Szeligowski. They came into the possession of his brother-in-law, living in England, Adam Harasowski, who for reasons which are not altogether clear did not publish them until 1973, in the periodical Music and Musicians, to support his view that some of the letters were genuine, while others were forgeries. The Warsaw Chopin Institute showed the photocopies to an expert graphologist, who declared them to be forgeries. A fierce champion of the authenticity of the letters, M. Gliński, showed them to another expert, who declared them to be copies of original letters written by Chopin. The Institute then handed them to the forensic department of the Polish Police, who carried out extensive and well-documented photographic tests which revealed that the photocopies were made by juxtaposing photographs of lines, words and expressions from facsimiles or photographs of authentic letters, and even traced from which publications certain words had been photographed. Who concocted these photocopies is not known, but they must be regarded as irrelevant to the issue. The entire body of ‘letters’ must be treated as forgeries, and the happy compromise that ‘some of them are genuine’ cannot be accepted. Nothing short of the discovery of original letters in Chopin’s handwriting can alter the balance of the facts, which all testify to the whole story being an enormous and squalid hoax.