Chopin. Adam Zamoyski

had been marked by violent battles, as the supporters and opponents of Victor Hugo resorted to physical as well as literary weapons. This had created an atmosphere congenial to anyone with a new idea, and the city attracted artists of every kind. It was, as Heine pointed out, the artistic capital of the Western world.

      ‘I’m delighted with what I have found here,’ Chopin wrote to Kumelski. ‘I have the best musicians and the best opera in the world.’⁴ With Beethoven, Weber and Schubert dead, and the next generation of great composers not having yet made a significant impact (Mendelssohn was twenty-two, Schumann and Chopin twenty-one, Liszt nineteen, Verdi seventeen and Wagner eighteen), the musical establishment of Paris, consisting as it did of a handful of venerables like Cherubini (Director of the Conservatoire), Paër and Lesueur; renowned opera composers like Auber and Hérold; and above all the two lions of the moment, Rossini and Meyerbeer, was indeed the most brilliant in the world.

      Paris also boasted the finest collection of performing musicians. In the concert halls, Chopin heard the pianists Herz, Liszt, Osborne and Hiller. The three orchestras – of the Conservatoire, the Academy (Opéra) and the Italian opera (the Théâtre des Italiens) – were probably the best in Europe. The singers at the two opera houses included such legendary names as Giuditta Pasta and Maria Malibran, and when he went to performances of Rossini’s operas under the baton of the composer himself, Chopin felt he was hearing completely different works from those he had heard in Vienna or Warsaw. The scale of the productions overawed his critical faculty, and when he saw Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable, with its cast of hundreds, its pyrotechnics and stage machinery, he termed it a ‘masterpiece of the new school’, and declared that ‘Meyerbeer has immortalised himself’, strong words from someone as reserved in his praise as Chopin.⁵

      Chopin had taken rooms on the fourth floor of a house in the boulevard Poissonière, a newly built-up area on the northern fringe of the city. He soon got used to this part of Paris, and as with most things to which he got used, he would not stray far from it over the next seventeen years. ‘You wouldn’t believe what a nice apartment I have,’ he wrote to Kumelski; ‘a small room beautifully furnished in mahogany, a little balcony overlooking the boulevards, with a view stretching from Montmartre to the Pantheon and embracing this whole beautiful world.’⁶ And it was not an alien world, like Vienna.

      There were strong historical links between Poland and France, the most recent being those forged on battlefields all over Europe by Polish soldiers who had fought for their country under the banners of Napoleon. All but the most conservative saw the two nations as standing for the same values against the tyrannical order embodied by the Russia of Nicholas I, and French society at every level felt sympathy for the Poles and their cause.

      Paris itself had long been a cultural magnet for the Poles, and there had been many living there before 1830. Some, like Countess Kisselev, a member of the Potocki family separated from her Russian husband, were well-known figures and kept salons frequented by some of the most interesting people in Paris. Others, like the Komar family or Count Ludwik Plater and his brood, had left Poland before or during the insurrection and settled in Paris. They were soon joined by others fearful of Russian reprisals or merely unwilling to live under Russian rule.

      From September 1831 on, a stream of defeated insurgents began to trickle into the French capital, and Chopin was reunited with schoolfriends such as Kazimierz Wodziński, and his Conservatoire colleagues Antoni Orłowski and Julian Fontana. The latter soon left for London, where he hoped to make a living, but was to reappear in Paris a few years later. The presence of these combined with the goodwill and hospitality of the Parisians to make Chopin feel at home, and the sense of not belonging which had spoiled his stay in Vienna did not trouble him here.

      When he arrived in Paris, Chopin had only a letter from Elsner to Lesueur and one from Malfatti to Paër, the master of the royal music, but the musical world of the city was so tightly knit that within a couple of weeks he had met all the most prominent musicians, including the eminent pianist Kalkbrenner, whose works he had so often played in Warsaw. Chopin could not get over the impression Kalkbrenner’s playing made on him. ‘You won’t believe how anxious I was to hear Herz, Liszt, Hiller, etc, but they’re all zeros next to Kalkbrenner,’ he wrote to Tytus. ‘If Paganini is perfection itself, so is Kalkbrenner, but in a totally different way. It is difficult to describe his composure, his enchanting touch – unbelievable evenness and mastery are evident in every note of his – He is a giant who tramples underfoot all the Herzes and Czernys, and, by the same token, myself.’⁷

      Kalkbrenner listened while Chopin played through his E minor Concerto. He complimented him by saying that he played like Cramer with Field’s touch, but declared that he ‘lacked method’ and would never be able to play or compose properly until he had acquired this. He also put a red pencil through the manuscript of the Adagio, arguing that it was too long and repetitive. In spite of this, and of reservations on the part of others (the forty-five-year-old Kalkbrenner, who was dubbed ‘the mummy’ by Heinrich Heine, was not popular with most of the younger musicians in Paris), Chopin liked him, and persisted in thinking him ‘the first pianist in Europe – the only one whose shoelaces I am not worthy of untying’.⁸ Kalkbrenner himself was anxious to turn Chopin into his own idea of a superior pianist and agreed to teach him, suggesting a course of three years. Chopin was minded to accept, although the length of time and the expense worried him, and he informed his parents of the plan.

      The Chopins were puzzled by the idea that he still needed to learn to play, and Elsner, who was also informed, was furious. ‘I can say with pride and self-congratulation that I was able to give you a few lessons in harmony and composition,’ he wrote, but the idea that anyone thought they could teach Chopin to play the piano was preposterous. He saw in it a trick of Kalkbrenner’s to eliminate competition. Elsner also took the opportunity to say that Chopin was too obsessed with the idea of being a pianist, which he considered to be only the first step in a musical career. He argued that Beethoven’s and Mozart’s piano concertos had been forgotten, while their symphonies and operas lived on, and that Chopin should seek immortality through the operatic form, which would allow him to take his place between Mozart and Meyerbeer.⁹