CHAPTER II
The Childhood of Chopin
On the first of October of that same year, Nicolas Chopin was made professor of French at the Warsaw High School, and the whole family moved to the capital. They were immediately absorbed into the urban life and never returned to the country. Warsaw was indeed a fertile soil where one quickly took root among its Italian palaces and its wooden huts. Its swarming population mingled Asiatic pomp with the filth of Esquimaux. Here were to be met the bearded Jew, the nun, the young girl in a silken cloak, and the mustachioed Pole, in caftan, with belt, sword, and high red boots.
M. Chopin bestirred himself to increase his income, because his family had grown. After Louise and Frederick, Isabelle and then Emilie were born. In 1812 he became professor at the School of Artillery and Engineers and in 1815 obtained the same post in the Preparatory Military Academy. Finally he turned his own home into a small boarding-school for the children of the rich.
It is not difficult to imagine the surroundings, the manners, and the customs among which Frederick grew up in this united and busy household. A somewhat rigid modesty and the domestic virtues of the family protected him from rough contacts with reality. It was thus, said Liszt, that “his imagination took on the velvety texture of plants which are never exposed to the dust of the highways.”
Here, then, was a child, very gentle, very pale, sprightly, with the sensibilities of a little girl, and dominated by two passions: his love for his mother and his love for the piano. He had been placed before the keyboard at a very early age and had returned to it of his own accord, drawn by the keys. Music drew tears and cries from him. It became at once a necessary evil. He was also very fond of his sisters, and chose four friends among his father’s pupils: Fontana, Titus Woyciechowski, and the Wodzinski brothers.
To celebrate his eighth birthday, he played at the benefit of the poet, Niemcewicz. He had been dressed in the English fashion, with a velvet coat and a large turn-over collar. And when his mother, afterwards, questioned him about his success, asking what the audience had liked best, he replied with pride, “My collar.”
The Polish aristocracy, and even the Grand Duke Constantin himself, the Governor of Warsaw, became interested in the child. He was commanded to appear before this redoubtable prince—and played for him a march of his own composition.
“Child,” asked the brother of the Tsar, “why do you always look upwards?”
But is it not heavenward that poets look? Chopin was “neither an intellectual prodigy nor a little thinking animal,” writes one of his biographers, “but a simple, modest child who played the piano as naturally as the birds sing....”
He had teachers. First Zywny, a venerable gentleman of over sixty, a native of Bohemia, a violinist and a good teacher. He was absorbed in the cult of Bach, a passion which he instilled in his pupil; and the depth of such childish enthusiasms is well known. Then, in 1824, at the time when Frederick was sent to college, his father replaced Zywny by Elsner, a Silesian professor who taught him harmony and composition. Without being a very famous musician, Elsner was something of a personage, a composer of operas, symphonies, masses, and a Director of the Conservatory. He had the virtue of never suppressing Chopin’s personal gifts: “Let him alone,” he said. “If he leaves the main road and the traditional methods, it is because he has his own ways, and some day his work will show an originality that no one possesses to-day. He follows a unique path because his gifts are unique.”
One can applaud this happy prophet. Elsner was a retiring man. He lived in two cells in an old monastery in the rue des Jésuites. His pupils saluted him on the right shoulder, according to the Polish fashion, and he responded by a kiss on each cheek. In his annual report to the Conservatory he writes: “Chopin, Frederick (3rd year pupil), astonishing capability, musical genius.”
Chopin worked well at college also, and took prizes; in short, he was a fluent and charming youth, and gay to the point of clownishness, like many melancholics. His comrades adored him, above all because of his talent for mimicry and imitation, which showed to what a point he felt the grimaces of souls. He acted plays with his sisters, who wrote comedies for the children. He edited a paper.
These minor events enamelled the surface of a life without scratches. Three facts alone should be remarked. In May and June, 1825, in two concerts at the Conservatory, Chopin played an _Allegro_ of Moschelès’ and improvised for the Emperor Alexander, who gave him a ring. During the course of the same year, he published his _Premier Rondo in C minor_ (op. 1), dedicated to Mme. Linde, the wife of the Head of the school. Then, the next summer, he was invited to the Château d’Antonin by Prince Radziwill.
Playing in public had already lost its novelty. On the other hand, publishing his music was a new joy, which he tasted with naïve ardour. And if the piece was neither very profound nor very scholarly, it had at any rate his personal imprint. “A lady,” said Schumann somewhat later in speaking of this little work, “would find it most delicate, most charming....” Note how already they hasten the advent of the ladies! Such is the first blossom of this chaste soul.
The stay at the Château d’Antonin, in the summer of 1826, revealed to Chopin the pleasures that can come from material plenty and refinements of the spirit, when these are linked together by skilled hands. This was precisely what the young aristocrat needed to awaken his æsthetic response. It is a luxury which the strong scorn; but a sensitive heart would have difficulty in dispensing with a judicious distribution of these amenities, ranging from perfect food to works of art, from physical luxury to the subtleties of the mind, and subduing this heart, despite itself, to the domination of the delicious. I myself should think it very interesting to know all about the furnishings, the pictures, the guests, the conversations to be seen and heard during the summer of 1826 at Prince Radziwill’s. Unfortunately, these details cannot be known with any degree of certainty. After all, it may be sufficiently enlightening that Chopin called Antonin “a paradise” and that he found the young princesses “divine.” But it is certain that from that time on his nostalgia for that perfect harmony derived from the union of fatherland, a sumptuous dwelling and radiant young beings, shattered his transport into invincible regrets.