Music: Immortality Has Begun

One hundred years ago this week Composer Frederic Chopin died in Paris, aged 39. For the great man’s funeral in the Madeleine, admission was by card only: 3,000 crowded into the chapel. Theophile Gautier wrote his epitaph: “Rest in peace, beautiful soul, noble artist! Immortality has begun for you . . .” History has confirmed Gautier. This week, on the centenary of Chopin’s death, the western world honored him on a scale matched only by the plaudits he knew in his lifetime.

In Manhattan, thousands packed the Metropolitan Opera House to hear his foremost living interpreter and Polish compatriot, Artur Rubinstein, play Chopin’s incomparable mazurkas, polonaises, preludes, nocturnes and waltzes in a commemorative concert. In Paris, Pianist Alexander Brailowsky prepared for a similar recital at the Sorbonne. In London, BBC had Pianist Claudio Arrau in an all-Chopin program and Albert Hall had Robert Casadesus. In Chopin’s native Warsaw, the great Chopin international piano competition was just winding up, and a new complete edition of Chopin’s works, edited by Ignace Paderewski before his death, was coming off the press. Meanwhile, four new. books on Chopin’s life and music (the best: Polish Poet Casimir Wierzynski’s The Life and Death of Chopin—Simon & Schuster; $3.95) had appeared in U.S. bookstores.

“My Solid Ground.” The object of such honors, perhaps more concentrated than any other composer living or dead has ever received on a single occasion, was a man of whom one Parisian wrote: “Chopin can best be denned as a trinite charmante. His personality, his playing and his compositions were in such harmony that they could no more be separated than can the features of one face.”

He was a composer who discovered his special niche at the keyboard at seven, with his first polonaise, and seldom strayed from it. His family and friends implored him to write operas, symphonies, oratorios. But he called the piano “my solid ground; on that I stand the strongest.” His compositions, with their poetry, fire and freshness, never came easily: “Before I have said my last word, I must go through horrible pangs and tribulations, with many tears and sleepless nights.”

He could not tolerate pianists who took liberties with what he wrote. Once, after Sigismond Thalberg had embroidered one of his nocturnes, Chopin congratulated him, then asked coldly, “Whose composition was this?”

Of young Robert Schumann, who was busily praising him from afar (“Hats off, gentlemen, a genius”), Chopin said, “I am constantly afraid that … he will write something that will make me ridiculous forever.” He complained, “Why did I not live when Bach and Mozart were living? I would burn all my trash if they considered it unworthy.”

Alabaster & Antipathy. Never married, he was always in love. When he first met the tiny, cigar-smoking and betrousered George Sand sulking at a soiree, he exclaimed, “What an antipathetic person … Is it really a woman? I am inclined to doubt it.” He claimed she was his mistress for less than a year, but he lived with her and depended on her care and solicitude for almost the rest of his life. When her children finally forced them apart, he was lost without her.

He had long suffered from tuberculous hemorrhages. One day in 1849 ne was visited by a former schoolmate, a priest, who found his face “cold as alabaster . . . Bubbling with wit and exceedingly kind, he seemed to belong only in slight degree to earth. But, alas, he was not thinking of heaven.” Chopin told his friend, “I should not like to die without having received the sacrament, because I don’t want to bring grief to my mother. But I cannot take it, because I don’t understand it in your way.”

Five months later, nonetheless, after more hemorrhages, Frederic Chopin quietly took the sacraments, said his prayers, and died. His last requests were that the Mozart Requiem be played at his funeral and that his heart be taken to Warsaw.