Frederic Chopin and Clara Wieck Schumann

Robert Schumann’s critical praise introduced the name Fryderyk Chopin to Europe. His wife Clara’s performances secured a place for Chopin’s music in the piano repertoire. In return, Chopin had very few kind things to say about Robert’s compositions. But he described Clara as “the only woman in Germany who can play my works.”

Chopin’s Variations on the Mozart aria “La ci darem la mano” inspired Robert Schumann to write his rave review— “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius” —in 1831. And who better to play it than a young piano prodigy named Clara Wieck, barely 12 years old at the time. It’s the first Chopin piece she performed.

By then Clara was already on her first European concert tour, which included a stop in Paris. Chopin didn’t attend. But when Chopin visited Leipzig in the fall of 1835, Felix Mendelssohn introduced them. Clara played some of her own music, a piece by Robert and two Chopin etudes. The performance reportedly moved Chopin to tears.

This was a time of transition for the piano recital in Europe. Audiences and critics had a taste for light, showy repertoire. After a recital she gave in Hamburg, Clara’s father Friedrich Wieck wrote that one reviewer called Chopin’s music “musical nonsense.” He added later, “How people must wonder at Clara, who plays such crazy things by preference.”

In HIS critical writing, Robert Schumann dismissed that sort of response as philistinism. And Clara only increased her focus on the new Romantics: Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin, turning recitals into a more serious musical platform. All of these composers would die young, but Clara carried on as an eloquent champion of their legacy. Robert said his wife was “a greater virtuoso” than Chopin: “Clara…gives almost more meaning to his composition than he does himself.” [x]

Frederic Chopin and Eugene Delacroix

Picture Fryderyk Chopin’s face. Chances are your mind’s eye is recalling a painting by Eugène Delacroix. There are actually plenty of Chopin portraits left to us, but it’s Delacroix’s image that demands attention. It captures “the image of the Romantic hero at its purest,” as art historian H.W. Janson put it. It’s also an image of Chopin as seen by one of his closest friends.

Delacroix was 12 years older than Chopin and already famous, thanks to his dynamic, richly colored painting “The Massacre of Chios” from 1824. It established Delacroix as a leading Romantic artist.

Chopin’s lover, George Sand, introduced the painter to the pianist not long before Delacroix began his iconic portrait of Chopin in 1838. (He included both Chopin and Sand in the painting, which he never completed, but after his death the two depictions were cut apart and sold separately.)

Chopin and Delacroix became fast friends. Frequenters of the Paris salons, they shared an interest in fashion, cultivating the image of a “dandy.” Most of all, they shared a passion for music. Sand once described Delacroix standing alongside the piano as Chopin played: “He embarks on a sort of casual improvisation, then stops. ‘Go on, go on,’ exclaims Delacroix, ‘That’s not the end!’ ‘It’s not even a beginning…. I’m trying to find the right color, but I can’t even get the form. You won’t find the one without the other….'”

Chopin was genuinely touched by his friend’s appreciation of his art. But, similar to his relationships with other composers, he did not seem capable of returning the favor. To quote Sand once more: “Chopin does not understand Delacroix. He has esteem, affection and respect for the man, but he detests the artist…. He has much wit, tact and malice, but he understands nothing of pictures or statuary.”

If Delacroix knew how Chopin felt, he didn’t let on. After the composer’s death in 1849, Delacroix inscribed a sketch with the words “Dear Chopin.” Delacroix’s final tribute to his friend, the great poet of the piano. [x]

Frederic Chopin and Robert Schumann

They were two pillars of the Romantic Generation, born three months and 400 miles apart. One was a Polish exile who made his fortune in Paris; the other, a German, eventually betrayed by his own imagination.

As a young music critic, Robert Schumann introduced the 21-year-old Chopin to Europe with the famous words, “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!” Schumann was also the one who wrote, “The works of Chopin are cannons concealed amongst flowers.“ And this: “He plays just like he composes, in other words in his own unique way.”

That’s not to say Schumann was unfailingly positive about his Polish contemporary. He noted “blemishes” in Chopin’s Op. 25 Etudes, and famously wrote that in his Piano Sonata No. 2 Chopin had “yoked together his four maddest children.”

Chopin seems to have had far less to say about Schumann. For one thing, he was not a critic. For another, he did not admire Schumann (or many other composers, for that matter). Typical was his reaction to Schumann’s “Carnaval.” According to a second-hand account, Chopin told his publisher it was not music at all.

On the other hand, Chopin did dedicate his Ballade No. 2 to Schumann. And different though their music and their opinions of each other may have been, posterity has yoked Chopin and Schumann together. As critic Harold Schonberg put it, their innovations demonstrated that “a small but perfect form, one that captured and exploited a single idea, could be its own aesthetic justification.” [x]

Funeral March in C minor Op. 72, No.2

Fryderyk Chopin gave the title “funeral march” to only one of his compositions. And it wasn’t the one you’re probably thinking of.

It’s the third movement of the Piano Sonata No. 2 that’s commonly known as THE Chopin funeral march. It was played at his burial in 1849 at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Earlier, during his funeral, the three-thousand mourners at the Church of the Madeleine heard two of Chopin’s preludes as well as Mozart’s Requiem.

But the only piece Chopin chose to CALL a “Funeral March” did not appear in print for more than 35 years after his death. He wrote it while he was a teenager studying at the Warsaw Conservatory—perhaps as early as 1826, the year Polish philosopher Stanislaw Staszik died. Chopin participated in his funeral. The next year, Chopin’s sister Emilia died of tuberculosis.

But it probably was not a particular event that inspired this early Funeral March in C Minor. The genesis could have been purely musical. Writer Jim Samson notes that “Chopin was attracted to this genre perhaps more than any other composer.” After the C Minor march and before the famous 1844 piano sonata, specters of the funeral march form appeared in a prelude, a fantasy and several nocturnes.

Biographer Tad Szulc locates the impulse in Chopin’s obsession with his own mortality. He calls this early piece, the Funeral March in C Minor, the product of “a precociously death-haunted sixteen-year-old.“ - Joe Brant& Don Lee [x]

Waltz in A-flat Major, Op. 69, No. 1

“Avoid late nights in the salons of nobility, and look after your health… everything depends on that.” Motherly advice…or a veiled threat?

The writer of those words, Teresa Wodzinska, sometimes referred to Fryderyk Chopin as her “fourth son.” And he nearly became her son-in-LAW. It was a match seemingly made in heaven. Maria Wodzinska was a dark-eyed Polish beauty. She sang, painted watercolors, and played Chopin’s Ballades on the piano. And they were old family friends: “I used to chase her through the rooms at Pszenny in days gone by,” wrote Chopin; Maria’s older sister recalled, “Of all the boys he was the most willing to joke and play.”

And, when Chopin was 25 and Maria was 16, the girl next door had become the living embodiment of the land he’d left behind. He was lonely, homesick, and living in Paris. She was wealthy, beautiful, and thoroughly and delightfully Polish. Chopin could stand it no longer. Visiting her family on holiday in 1836, Chopin made his first – and only – proposal of marriage. “At the Twilight Hour,” snippily noted Teresea Wodzinska.

Maria was thrilled; Mom and Dad weren’t so sure. There was the matter of Chopin’s ever-fragile health. And his whirlwind social life. And his suspect status as a composer. The Wodzinskas made a counter-offer: A one-year waiting period to see if Chopin’s health, fortunes, and habits would improve. Hence the warnings, buried in motherly advice.

But it was not to be. Chopin’s life only got messier, once George Sand entered the picture. The following summer, Chopin receives a “Dear Fryderyk” letter from Maria Wodzinska. He wraps Marie’s correspondence and the rejection letter in a bundle and labels it My Sorrow. And writes this “Farewell” Waltz in A-flat major, inscribed “To Mademoiselle Maria.” [x]

I love this strip so much it makes me want to kiss both of ‘em.

The Finale

Judy Davis as George Sand and Hugh Grant as Frederic Chopin in the 1991 film, Impromptu.