Music: Tragic Pole

Because Frederic François Chopin was ethereally pale and consumptive, because his music has always had a romantic appeal for ladies, the tendency has been for many a layman to regard him as a little man of music, a sentimentalist whose place is in the parlor. Chopin acquires great stature when played by great musicians. An unreserved admirer is British Pianist William Murdoch who this week tells Chopin’s story in a good detailed biography.*Many a writer has made Chopin seem doomed from boyhood. According to Pianist Murdoch, his early days were easy compared to those of most composers. His parents were not rich but neither were they poor. They realized his genius but they refused to exploit him. Trouble developed after he attempted to make his own way in the world. Audiences were accustomed, then, to pianists who pounded in heavy Germanic fashion. Chopin’s style was delicate and subtle, more suited to his own music than to the Titans he sometimes tried to interpret. Vienna refused to recognize him when he went there at 20. Next year his first Paris concert failed to pay expenses.

In the midst of black despair, Chopin’s fortune changed. Baroness de Rothschild invited him to play at a soiree. Instantly he was Society’s pet, besieged by highborn ladies who begged him to give them lessons. Then, like a villain in a play, George Sand strode into his life, flaunting her male attire, puffing at a black cigar. According to Author Murdoch, that bestselling novelist was “an odd mixture of vulture and vampire.” Once a lover was discarded, she used him cruelly for copy and the disguise was thin. In 1838 Chopin and Sand acknowledged their liaison by going together to the Island of Majorca where Chopin almost died of his first tuberculous attack. His mistress was his nurse for eight years. Then she tired and wrote Lucrezia Floriani, in which she appears as a motherly protectress and Chopin as an exquisite who was often jealous and rude. The break was Chopin’s destruction. With Sand he had done his greatest work, courageously defying disease. Without her he was lost in body and spirit. Two years after she deserted him he was too weak to walk alone. His color was like parchment, his eyes sunken beyond recognition. When Death was near his one dread was that he might be buried alive. When Death came in 1849 his body was, as he wished, opened. His heart was sent to Poland, his body buried in Paris.

*CHOPIN: His LIFE—Macmillan ($3).