In Warsaw, Chopin’s only close friends were Jan Matuszyński, who was pursuing medical studies, and Julian Fontana, who had now, after finishing his studies at the Conservatoire, taken up law at the University. Along with Witwicki, they formed a small group which often met at the house of their friend the poet Dominik Magnuszewski. The latter lived with his grandfather, a former judge who seemed to embody the spirit of pre-partition Poland, still dressing in the traditional costume of the Polish nobility. Chopin and his friends loved to listen to him talking about that past which now seemed so distant. The atmosphere of the old Poland had been superseded by the more modern and secular spirit of the 1820s, and Chopin was strongly drawn to what was heroic and elegant about it – it was this he was attempting to capture in the rhythmic and melodic gestures of the more sophisticated Polonaises he was beginning to write.
The atmosphere at Magnuszewski’s house was congenial, and here he could let himself go with abandon. ‘Everyone always wanted him to improvise,’ Magnuszewski’s sister recorded. ‘He never tried to wriggle out of this, but first he would ask my sister Klara, who had a beautiful voice, to sing something, and it was only afterwards that he would start. We would sit in silence for hours, listening to that music which fired our young souls, and afterwards we would usually start dancing. At that point the dreamy improviser would turn into a lusty player and start thundering out Mazurkas, Waltzes and Polkas until, tired of playing and eager to join in the dancing himself, he would cede the keyboard to a humbler replacement, Fontana, who played fluently and beautifully.’35
By mid-September, Chopin was trying out various movements of his new E minor Concerto in quartet or other forms, and on the twenty-second he arranged a full performance of the work in the Chopin apartment, again with a select audience of music-lovers, amongst whom were Count Skarbek, Grzymała and Witwicki. It was they who reviewed the event in the press and prompted a public clamour for Chopin to make himself heard. His travel plans had again been put off. He therefore agreed to give a concert, and what is more, invited Konstancja and her fellow pupils to take part in it. This entailed obtaining permission from the Minister of the Interior, which was not difficult, and also getting Kurpiński, who had a natural right to be the conductor, to cede his place to Soliva for the evening, which was a more delicate matter. This activity woke Chopin from his lethargy, and he was now seriously planning his departure as well. ‘A week after the concert at the latest I shall have left Warsaw,’ he wrote to Tytus, who had agreed to accompany him.36 Chopin was, for once, decided; he had bought a trunk and clothes, and was writing out the scores he would need on his travels.
The concert which took place on 11 October 1830, his last in his native country, went off perfectly. He played his E minor Concerto and the Fantasia on Polish Airs. The concerto benefited from the conducting of Soliva, who took it slowly and did not let the over-excited Chopin get carried away. ‘I was not the slightest bit nervous, and I played as I play when I’m alone,’ he wrote to Tytus. Konstancja sang an aria as never before and looked seductive, the other performances were good, and the Fantasia, which he played at the end, delighted him and the audience. ‘This time I understood what I was doing, the orchestra understood what they were doing, and the public understood as well,’ he wrote. ‘It seemed to me that I had never been so much at ease when playing with an orchestra.’37
Chopin was delighted with every aspect of the evening, but it is worth noting that the hall, with only seven hundred people in the audience, was not quite full, and that notwithstanding the deafening applause, there was only one review of the concert, and that a short one.
Chopin himself was convinced that the theatre had been full, and was probably relieved by the silence in the press. He was by now busy with the preparations for his departure, and had to pay farewell calls on all his acquaintances, many of whom gave him letters of introduction to friends and relatives in Vienna. On 25 October he called on Konstancja in order to take his leave.
At some stage in the course of the previous weeks Chopin had at last given her some intimation of his feelings, and he had apparently met with a good reception. Rings were exchanged and Chopin was allowed to write to her, through the discreet agency of Matuszyński. At this last meeting, she wrote a little verse into his album, which ended with the lines:
Others may value and reward you more.
But they can never love you more than we do.
[At some later date, Chopin added, in pencil: ‘Oh yes they can!’]38
On the evening of 1 November, a party of friends organised a farewell dinner attended by Nicolas Chopin, Żywny, Magnuszewski, Fontana and others. They sang, danced and played late into the night, after which they walked Chopin back to his house. The next morning he made his last farewells while Ludwika finished copying some of the scores he was taking with him, and in the afternoon the family accompanied him to the coaching station. Neither the young man nor his worried family knew how long he would be away or how he would fare alone in the world.
The coach trundled away, through the dingy western suburb of Wola, but was stopped just after passing the city gates. It was surrounded by a group of men, who turned out to be Elsner with a small male choir. To the accompaniment of a guitar, they performed a cantata which the old man had composed for the occasion. It exhorted Chopin to remember his motherland, and to keep its harmonies in his soul wherever he might find himself. There was something prophetic, both in the words and in the emotion with which Elsner embraced his pupil, as though he never expected to see him again. After the last tearful embrace, Chopin climbed back into the coach, which rolled away, bearing him off from his native land for ever.
Chopin was not alone for long. At Kalisz, the first halt, he was joined by Tytus, whose company quickly banished the sorrows of leave-taking. Together they went on to Breslau, where they spent four days. One afternoon they wandered idly into the Merchants’ Hall to find a rehearsal for the evening’s concert in progress. During a break, Chopin sat down at the piano and started showing off. The local pianist who was billed to play at the concert heard him and immediately renounced his role in terror, with the result that the unsuspecting public were that evening treated not to the Moscheles concerto advertised, but to Chopin playing two movements of his E minor Concerto as a solo.
From Breslau they travelled to Dresden, which Chopin knew already. He revisited the art gallery, its main attraction for him. ‘There are pictures there at the sight of which I hear music,’ he explained to his parents in one of the very few references he ever made to the other arts.1 Chopin liked the beautiful eighteenth-century city, with its large Polish colony surviving from the days when Poland and Saxony had been united under one crown, but he was less keen on the traditional form of transport, the sedan chair, which made him feel foolish as he was carried to a soirée.
He called on the principal musical figures in the city, some of whom suggested that he give a concert before moving on. But he refused. A concert in Dresden would have earned him some money and would certainly not have done his reputation any harm, but he was in such a sanguine frame of mind that he thought it a waste of time; he was in a hurry to reach Vienna. He felt he knew Vienna and that Vienna knew and valued him, and it was in high spirits that he arrived there on 22 November 1830.
‘How happy I am to have reached Vienna, where I shall make so many interesting and useful acquaintances, and where I may even fall in love!’ he wrote to Matuszyński the moment he and Tytus had settled into their rooms at