Chopin: From Sorrow's Hidden Depths

This time as well, The Woman's Voice takes pride in presenting to its readers a new woman's face, one that heralds to Arabic music the coming of dawn... And here she begins her series of talks on a select company of the world's musicians.

Poor Chopin! He lived a life short in span and abounding in sorrows and forebodings... He loved nature and surrendered himself to her, but she cast him off, for the two could not understand one another. So he despaired and went soaring above nature, repeating his sorrows to the breeze, the stars, and the birds. He complained of his misery to the stars, and they gave him shelter. Then he loosed his anger upon the Creator and creation and wept over that fate of his which had created him in the likeness of men when he was not one of them! The outcome of his revolt was that his feelings overflowed and tears streamed from his eyes like limpid water, and he let us hear in his "Nocturnes" plaintive melodies that steal into the folds of the ribs as though they were heavenly strains that magic had poured into the jars of the unseen.

His melodies are moaning and complaint, and his complaint is weeping and lamentation. He rises up against fate in the "Barcarolle"; then his feelings are stirred and he comes to us with the massive "chords" heavy-laden with obscure thoughts; and after that he lets us hear the fine, harmonious note, like a moan rising from the depths of the heart, heard only by those who have mastered the language of hearts. And Chopin uses the "minor," pointing thereby to his misery and wretchedness.

But how many stages of the soul did the famous artist pass through — and perhaps they were the reason for the excellence of his musical genius — such that tears would stream from his eyes onto the piano when he played a passage from his famous compositions under the title of the "Promenades." The reason is that he was never blessed with a true love all his life long, though his feelings were unruly and ablaze and the psychic impulses latent within him were in raging revolt... He it was who believed that life without love lies outside the bounds of morality, and that so long as a man feels no emotion of love toward another person he is little better than the beasts. How many obstacles he met with in his life, and how many times his heart took refuge in another heart, only to find itself — he, so delicate of feeling — shattered upon that hard rock. If you listen to one of the passages of the "Promenades," you will hear distinctly the hymns of hope as he runs toward his beloved; then suddenly he sounds for you a massive "aksura" at which hearts all but break for the pain that is in it; and at last your eyes brim with tears when you hear him moaning from excess of pain, gazing with the eyes of a despairing man at his hard-hearted beloved. Say the same of his relations with his friends: he found no bosom friend to whom he could turn in his despair save George Sand, the famous French writer. He knew her throughout the whole period of his stay in Paris, and she was perhaps the first to encourage his art, for she surrounded him with her tenderness when she felt that he was passing through an arduous stage of his life, his family having cast him off, and he far from his enslaved country, having left his band in the flower of its national production, despairing and empty of pocket. It was she who took him to her bosom and encouraged him to persevere in composing. So he dedicated to her the "Mazurka," which is a hymn of thanks to her who afterwards became the beloved of his heart. And how long does a love endure that rests upon friendship and esteem? The Waltz and the Mazurka express his devotion to George Sand; yet the moaning and the longing for the precincts of the homeland persist. That is why his melodies put on the romantic garb, which is a mark of enduring sorrow and continuous moaning by which Chopin was distinguished above all his contemporaries. Perhaps his enduring sorrow brought him to the highest summit of the summits of sorrow, which is the very motto of the romantics: pleasure in sorrow because it is sorrow — what is called in French "Le complaire dans la douleur." How often George Sand tried to lift the gloom from him, but she did not succeed, for he had despaired of life since he was a stripling, when he loved a village girl named Marie Wodzinska of Warsaw; the two had worked together in forming the band of liberation, such was the girl's patriotism and gift of leadership. But her family forbade her to keep company with him, since he was not of her social level. And how despair in youth works upon the imagination in later years! Thus Chopin remained that sad youth who, whenever the world closed in on him and he remembered his torment, would run and throw himself into Sand's arms, weeping and heaving burning sighs, like a child of five or six years of age.

There is no doubt that Chopin's music is a phenomenon of the first half of the nineteenth century. Chopin may be a turning point in the art of music, as the adherents of his school describe him. Yet he is, at the very least, a stage in the evolution of music beyond all doubt. Chopin formed his artistic personality little by little, in method and in style, as it appeared in the "Mazurka," and he tended both from his earliest youth — that is, from his seventeenth year — until they ripened and bore fruit. He has a musical piece, among the most splendid he ever composed, called the "Eighth Promenade," which is a glorious description of the struggle that broke out in his being between the artistic personality and the political personality. It is an analysis of his inner maturing along the road of art on the one hand, and along the road of politics on the other. Perhaps it ended in an equal balance between the two personalities and in their merging to form the personality of Chopin in the prime of his youth.

The complexes in Chopin's soul are many, awaiting someone to trace them back to the contradictions that stormed through his childhood, his boyhood, and his first youth — contradictions never fully resolved, and struggles never conclusively settled.

Perhaps the pieces among his melodies called the "Nocturnes" were what solved his problems, for the soul finds rest in listening to them, because of the clarity of thought and purity of conscience that are in them.

As for his musical literature, it is an individual, subjective, introverted literature, excessive in its individualism, its subjectivity, and its introversion. In his melodies he does not depict the events that occur in society, but depicts the thoughts that are born in the soul of the individual. His melodies were therefore true and faithful reflections of that rebellious feeling which welled up in his soul and set it aflame, and of that ruling struggle between his unruly passions and the restraining forces of society.

Chopin's music is another manifestation of the revolt against reason that has spread through Europe since the end of the last century. For in it there is the passage from consciousness to unconsciousness, a passage to which only a defeated soul, like Chopin's, has recourse.

The sense of defeat is a familiar phenomenon among the scattered remnants of individualist thinkers and artists. He who is not content with his present lives in his past, and he who is not content with what goes on around him withdraws into himself. This is what Chopin thought through his melodies, and by it he lived.

He lost the fighting quality that belonged to his predecessors among the individualist artists, such as "Schumann," "Schubert," and "Beethoven," and thereupon he cut himself off from the current of life and secluded himself in his ivory tower, content to offer his own self as the subject of his musical compositions.

Poor Chopin. He lived a martyr of the homeland and died a martyr of art — but how the martyr is honored after his death!