Nine Lives 4: Frederic Chopin!

Our book today is William Atwood’s diverting 1999 study The Parisian Worlds of Frederic Chopin, and it’s a very good example of what I like to call the ‘picture window’ biography, as opposed to the ‘banquet’ biography. I confess I prefer the ‘banquet,’ in which we get the entirety of the subject’s life and times laid out for us in painstaking, elaborate detail, preferably from the first moment that subject’s father fancied that subject’s mother right up until that subject’s invariably unworthy offspring are shipped off to some distant penal colony (usually wiping their posteriors with priceless letters from their parents the whole journey). But that could just be my oft-stated preference for very long books. I’ll certainly admit that even in the greatest lives not all the little details are important – the problem is, readers entirely divorced from those great lives are in no position to know which little details are genuinely unimportant. Even experienced biographers can’t know, which is, I guess, why the field of biography has flourished for so long.

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And my preference for doorstoppers notwithstanding, I do so love a ‘picture window’ biography when it’s done well! These are the (generally shorter) works that give us one static frame through which to view their subject, with the hope that they’ve chosen the frame – and the view – well enough so that the limited range (we don’t see the house getting built, we’re not there on move-in day, etc.) is more than offset by the freshness, the clarity of perspective.

When it works, it’s utterly refreshing, completely delightful. Peter Quennell’s Byron in Italy has already been praised here at Stevereads, and to that you could add many other such titles (Philip McFarland’s Hawthorne in Concord, for instance, or Robert Tanner’s Stonewall in the Valley).

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Atwood’s book might as well have been called Chopin in Paris, and it, too, is an utterly delightful success. Chopin left his native Poland shortly after the November Uprising of 1830 and arrived in Paris in 1831 not originally intending to stay.  He was full of his usual nasal bombast about the terrors being inflicted on his country, his home, and his family by the marauding Russians, at one point writing, “Oh, God, do you exist? … Haven’t you had enough of the Muscovites’ crimes?  - or is it – can it be – You yourself are a Russian!” But he took to Paris well enough for all his melodrama, and of the hundreds of people who left behind reminiscences of him from that period, it must be said that not all of them recall him endlessly sighing and weeping.

If ever there was a city in 19^th century Europe designed to forestall weeping, it was the Paris (Chopin’s lucky he never got to Venice –he’d have renounced his Polish nationality altogether) of the 1830s. This was apparent even to a visitor from staid, Puritanical Boston who spent only three weeks in the city in 1833 and almost immediately found himself subsumed in the filth, decadence, and sparkling frivolity of the place (he forever afterward nurtured a dislike of the French, probably because they had succeeded in wasting his time).

The population of the Paris Chopin found in 1831 was fast approaching one million people, although it was a noticeably smaller place. There were only twelve arrondissements – nine on the Right Bank and three on the Left (always factoring in the floating, mythical “fourteenth arrondissement,” where all secret, illicit meetings took place – a philandering man, like Chopin would eventually be with George Sand, was always due to meet his objet d’amour somewhere in the fourteenth arrondissement), but that space was absolutely stuffed with all manner of meeting places. Ballrooms, concert halls, palaces of art and commerce, parks, and of course the famous salons just now coming into their full vogue. And of course counterbalancing all of this splendor was an equal amount of squalor, from gaming houses to innumerable whore-houses to the rampant crime that afflicted even the best neighborhoods at night, as Atwood freely points out:

It is interesting to note here that George Sand’s predilection for men’s clothes in the early 1830s may have stemmed not so much from any lesbian leanings as a desire to protect herself from sexual assault on the dangerous Parisian streets after dark. Besides, men’s clothing was significantly cheaper than the reams of expensive fabric required to outfit a respectable lady of her time.

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It was in this brawling, bawling, captivating city that Chopin came into the full development of his musical talents, and it’s from the time of his residence there that most of his greatest successes – and happinesses – originate. Here he dealt with the great and small of the artistic world, from opera house managers (and censors) to publishers to fellow musicians – the greatest of which, at least in the public’s eyes, was Franz Liszt. Chopin always cultivated the wispy, vaguely ethereal pose so popular with the Romantics, but although he might not have believed Liszt the better piano player, even he had to doff his hat to the sheer mastery with which Liszt pulled off such playacting nonsense. There certainly couldn’t be any arguing with the effect, as Atwood describes:

Both the intensity of Liszt’s playing and the charismatic nature of his personality roused audiences to a frenzy. Ladies rose from their seats, screamed hysterically, and tossed perfumed handkerchiefs onto the stage before passing away in a dead faint. One excited lady even threw her tiara at him, but it fell short (so Berlioz tells us) and landed on the head of a German who was too busy applauding to notice it.

As Heinrich Heine (who knew and liked Liszt) put it, he seemed to make the very piano keys bleed.

Atwood is uniformly excellent in describing the whole breadth of the arts Paris boasted during this period, as for instance when he discusses the opera of the day:

During much of the early nineteenth century, opera in Paris was actually two vocal arts rather than one: besides the French school there was an equally important Italian school. The former represented the old bombastic declamatory style, which had been popular on the French stage for well over a century. It was particularly adapted to what Mrs. Trollope called “the dry heavy recitative.” The French themselves called it hurlement, which can be translated (depending on the dictionary one uses) as roaring, yelling, bawling, bellowing, screaming, wailing, or howling like a wounded animal.

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Fanny Trollope, who heard quite enough hurlement to last her a lifetime, remarked “that which is not worth saying they sing.” She might have added that their singing seemed to make the very notes bleed. As Atwood diplomatically points out, it’s not to everybody’s taste.

He’s also diplomatic on what at first looks like an essential contradiction: one the one hand, the fairytale airs so many of the Romantics put on, bursting into tears at the flicker of a candle, embracing someone with wild acclaim if all he did was make an interesting observation about Tacitus at dinner, etc. – and on the other hand, their often ruthless business dealings. I doubt that F. Lee Bailey could have danced more neatly around this point than Atwood does:

The burden of personal freedom imposed on the Romantics by their cult of individuality was clearly enormous. Those who were able to shoulder it, though, experienced not only intellectual and aesthetic rewards but often economic compensation as well. If some scorned financial gain (as a compromise with bourgeois materialism), many like Hugo, George Sand, Balzac, and Dumas were not the least bit squeamish about driving a hard bargain with their publishers. Others in the fields of music, painting, and sculpture could be equally aggressive when it came to money. Chopin, usually a model of gentility and decorum, often lashed out at his publishers in vituperative, even vulgar language. Liszt, Paganini, the actress Rachel, and a host of contemporary prima donnas shamelessly sold their talents, while painters and sculptors could be conniving and cutthroat in their scramble for government commissions. Such a crass concern for money, which seems so inappropriate among artists dedicated to the pursuit of spiritual values, was, in fact, a simple extension of the Romantic demand for individual liberty in the financial sphere as elsewhere.

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But as much as I like having Atwood’s company throughout his nimble little book, one of its strongest draws has nothing to do with his prose at all: it’s the absolute profusion of black and white spot illustrations found throughout the text. Virtually every major and minor character we meet in the text we also see, at some point, looking back at us from the pages – looking handsome (as in the case of Polish poet Juliusz Slowacki or, oddly enough, James Fenimore Cooper) or hugely insightful (as in the case of celebrated salon hostess Betty de Rothschild), or lively and intelligent (as in the case of poor George Sand, whose works are still under-appreciated among English-language readers), or else so immediately real that you expect them to turn towards you and speak their own stories (as in the case of Victor Hugo’s longtime mistress Juliette Drouet or the American force of nature Samuel F. B. Morse). Any reader with half a brain will immediately see that YouTube enjoys no superiority over such a presentation.

Which isn’t to slight Atwood – his accompanying little picture-tags almost always shine with his delight in his subjects, as in the case of the aforementioned pretty boy:

One of the triumvirate of great Polish Romantic poets, Juliusz Slowacki was a morbid, introspective individual, given to delusional fantasies toward the end of his life. At one time he and Chopin had been in love with the same girl, Maria Wodzinska, who spurned them both. Although the two men had some  social contact in Paris during the early years of their exile, Slowacki later accused Chopin of being a peacock, to which the musician responded by calling the poet a numbskull.

Hee. We must all call a poet a numbskull, from time to time. Nice to know Chopin had the same predicament.

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He ended up staying in Paris until his death in 1849, and Atwood has opened a marvelous picture window on the whole time.  There have been vastly larger and more wide-ranging ‘banquet’ biographies of Chopin, of course (and the vast Correspondance is endlessly enjoyable on its own), but you could scarcely do better than this (comparatively) slim volume just the same.

Nine Lives 1: Franz Liszt!

Our book today is actually three books – Alan Walker’s monumental three-volume biography of 19th century Hungarian virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt. The size of Warner’s accomplishment – three heavy hardcover books – is dwarfed by its scope. This is one of those overwhelmingly comprehensive lives, the kind that are born of a merciless swapping alchemy of kind for kind: Walker began researching and drafting his trilogy in the mid-1970s, delivered his first volume, Franz Liszt, The Virtuoso Years: 1811-1847 in 1983, worked for another six years and brought forth the next volume, Franz Liszt, The Weimar Years: 1847-1861 in 1989, then labored for seven more years and finished his achievement in 1996 with Franz Liszt, The Final Years: 1861-1866. Thus, by sacrificing roughly thirty years of his own life to the task, Walker was able to give readers forever a perfect inexhaustibly corroborated account of the roughly thirty years of Lizst’s long and fraught productive life. You see this incredible exchange time and again in reading scholarly biographies, and the only response permissible is gratitude.

That gratitude would stand even if the resulting work were dry as dust- the archival sorting alone is too much a boon to future scholars not to be so acknowledged. The crowning glory of Walker’s trilogy is the one further element it manages: the writing itself is never anything less than engaging. Walker has submerged himself in the vast Liszt historiography (indeed, his first volume opens with a work-by-work account of that historiography, a virtuoso little performance that serve as the triumphant conclusion to any other Liszt biography but here is only the throat-clearing before the main performance) –he knows all the previous biographies, he knows the contents of every letter and legal document, he knows the corresponding details of Liszt’s contemporaries, from the obscure to the famous like Hector Berlioz and Frederic Chopin … and yet, even after assimilating such an ocean of raw data, he spares the time over and over to tell his stories well.

He also knows the music, not just as a scholar but as a sensitive listener. His explications of musical terminology are delivered with the studied casualness of a practiced teacher, and his insightful treatment of every one of Liszt’s works was certainly a boon to a reader like me, someone who’s always appreciated the better-known works of this composer but hardly guessed at the range or vitality of most of what he composed. More than all but a handful of composers (certainly more than any other Romantic composer), Liszt left the field of classical music very different from how he found it, and this presents his biographers with many of the same problems with nomenclature that the composer himself faced, as Walker time and again acknowledges:

A perennial problem for Liszt was how to get the wooden ensembles of his time to respond to “tempo rubato,” Until he came along, no one had seriously attempted to find a symbol for rubato, that most elusive of all the dimensions of musical performance, and one which is so important for a correct interpretation of his works. All the other dimensions – pitch, duration, dynamics, tone-quality – had developed their symbols in a very clear way within the traditional system of staff notation. But rubato was too esoteric to be captured.

Of course Walker then goes on to capture it perfectly in words – that double-stroke, first setting up a challenge as insuperable and then handily meeting it – is one of the intense little joys of this trilogy. You get used to him doing it.

He starts off his story with Liszt the young piano sensation, inspired by the weird, otherworldly genius of violin prodigy Paganini (Walker’s portrait of that poor melodramatic syphilis-raddled figure is perfect and terrifying), inspiring others with his own theatricality and dazzling technique, eventually growing so impatient with his chosen discipline that he found it necessary to substantially remake it in his own image. The young Liszt traveled extensively, giving some of the first things a modern audience would recognize as ‘concerts,’ and drawing near-universal admiration – including from the innumerable women who found his aquiline good looks and overpowering musical talent an extremely intoxicating combination. Walker gives as full an account of all these paramours (including the disastrous Countess Marie d’Agoult) and their various outbursts and offspring, and if the reader has a hard time keeping them straight, well, it’s likely Liszt did too.

The virtuoso years included trips everywhere – Switzerland, Italy, Russia (Czar Nicholas I’s gift of two performing bears was graciously accepted, but, mercifully, the bears themselves remained behind in Moscow), Prague, Leipzig – and of course London, where great heaping crowds of theatergoers were spellbound by his performances.

The traveling life eventually wore on Liszt, and, seeking a more stable environment in which to work and compose, he turned his eyes to that city with which he’s now most closely associated, Weimar. Walker everywhere in his trilogy sets himself the task of dispelling the myths and legends that have accrued around Liszt in the last 150 years, and he recognizes that Weimar is the epicenter of quite a bit of that mythologizing:

Had Liszt known of the trials and tribulations that lay in wait for him in Weimar, the chances are that he would have given the place a very wide berth. This may come as a surprise to those whose view of Liszt is formed by popular legend. His Weimar years, after all, are commonly supposed to have crowned a remarkable life with glory. This was the period during which he produced his major orchestral works, embarked on a career as an orchestral conductor, and began his famous masterclasses in piano playing. There is a darker side to the picture, however, and we come to understand it only when we scrutinize his life on a day-to-day basis. Liszt was too great a personality for such a small place as Weimar; he aroused envy and made enemies. The petty squabbles and malicious intrigue to which he was subjected, almost from the first day of his arrival in “the Athens of the North,” gradually wore him down and eventually forced his resignation. They produced the sorry spectacle of a giant in Lilliput.

These fascinating years are given in full detail (in my opinion, The Weimar Years as a stand-alone volume is one of the finest exercises in biography – and certainly musical biography – ever performed in English), from Liszt’s life with his mistress Princess von Sayn-Wittgenstein to his dealings with the city’s ruling family, Grand Duke Carl Friedrich, the formidable Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, and the Grand Duke Apparent, the kindly bumpkin Carl Alexander.

But Walker’s judgements are almost always excruciatingly correct, and he’s right to characterize the trouble between Liszt and Weimar as one of scale. Even from youth, Liszt was a grand figure, larger than life in all the best Romantic ways, and he chaffed constantly in the petty court-gossip circles of his adopted home (dealing with the Wagners couldn’t have been a picnic in the Arboretum either), eventually closing down his famous masterclasses there and moving at first to Rome. But his impact on Weimar had been enormous, and after his death (the final days are recounted with great sympathy by our indefatigable biographer), Carl Alexander – now Grand Duke – offered to erect a handsome mausoleum to the composer. Liszt’s daughter Cosima made a counter-proposal: that Liszt be buried in the royal vault, which already held the remains of Goethe and Schiller. Carl Alexander of course refused (Liszt hadn’t even been German, after all), and in his account Warner gives one of his great little asides:

Today the entire family of the once-powerful house of Sachsen-Weimar lie in leaden caskets in the royal vault. This family, whose patronage of the arts did more than anything else to lift Weimar out of petty provincialism and make of it a centre for European culture, succeeded so completely in its noble aim as to obscure its own remembrance. And this becomes painfully evident the moment one visits the royal chapel in the Weimar churchyard and descends the spiral steps into the burial chamber beneath. The coffins of Sachsen-Weimar have been pushed aside into dark recesses, where they jostle for space beneath crumbling arches, while those of the two literary giants whom Carl August brought to his city lie on a raised dais in the centre of the chamber, illuminated both day and night as the world files past in homage. It is not for artists to complain about this reverence of genius, but the extent to which the patrons have become the patronized would require a Goethe to explain the paradox.

At one point in this enormously entertaining trilogy, Walker is writing about the possibilities that Chopin heavily influenced some of Liszt’s compositions (a possibility Chopin was known to murmur on more than one occasion) and offers a caution:

This topic of influence may be a paradise for historians, but it is full of pitfalls for those who do not now their Liszt in toto.

And that’s the best part of this huge work – you know almost from the first, almost from that virtuoso opening chapter settling the hash of every biography that’s come before – that you’re in the hands of someone who knows his Liszt in toto. It’s a wonderful feeling. In fact, it’s pretty much the only feeling that can carry you so effortlessly through a work this long and detailed. And its ultimately about more than knowledge – it’s about understanding. Walker achieves an almost one-to-one understanding of Liszt, so that when he assesses the place of his subject in musical history, the reader can only nod:

Whatever else the world may debate about his life and work, one thing is generally conceded: Liszt was the first modern pianist. The technical “breakthrough” he achieved during the 1830s and ‘40s was without precedent in the history of the piano. All subsequent schools were branches of his tree. Rubenstein, Busoni, Paderewski, Godowsky, and Rachmaninoff – all those pianists who together formed what historians later dubbed “the golden age of piano playing” - would be unthinkable without Liszt. It was not that they copied his style; that was inimitable. Nor did they enjoy close personal contact with him; not one of them was his pupil. Liszt’s influence went deeper than that. It had to do with his unique ability to solve technical problems. Liszt is to piano playing what Euclid is to geometry. Pianists turn to his music in order to discover the natural laws governing the keyboard. It is impossible for a modern pianist to keep Liszt out of his playing - out of his biceps, his forearms, his fingers – even though he may not know that Liszt is there…