STATUE OF CHOPIN

Evening Star, Issue 19407, 16 November 1926, Page 5

STATUE OF CHOPIN

UNVEILED IN WARSAW Press Association—By Telegraph—Copyright WARSAW, November 15. (Received November 16, at 9.20 a.m.) Delegates from thirty countries attended the President’s unveiling of Chopin’s statue, which is of bronze and designed by Symanowski. Wreaths from all over the world were laid at the base of the statue., [Frederic Chopin was born in 1809 at Zelazova Vola, a village near Warsaw, whore his father, a native of Lorraine, had settled and married. In 1829 he visited Vienna and gave a public concert, which paved the way for his success. Leaving Warsaw for good in the following year, he remained for a short space in Breslau,_ Dresden, Prague, and Vienna, and in 1831 he went to Paris, where he found fame and lived for eighteen years, and died in 1849 from consumption. In 1848 ho visited England, and played three times in London, twice in Manchester, and once each in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Chopin achieved his greatest Fame as a creative artist.]

THE REAL CHOPIN AS DRAWN BY JAMES HUNEKER. A parallel between the Chopin conceived by writers of romantically inclined and tho Chopin of reality is well drawn by James Huneker, in ‘ Overtones.’ He observes: “ That Chopin was a Pole, who went from Warsaw to Paris, there won fame, tho love of George Sand, and a sad death are facts that even school girls lisp. The pianist-composer belongs to the stock figures of musical fiction. He was slender, had consumption, slim, long fingers, played vaporous, moon-haunted music, and, after his desertion by Sand, coughed himself off the contemporary canvas in the most genteel and romantic manner. . . . All this is Chopin romantically conventionalised by artistbiographers and associates. The real man—as nearly as we dare describe a real man—was of a gentle, slightly acid temper, and of a refined nature, who had a talent for playing the piano that was without parallel, and a positive genius in composition. His life was stupid, if compared with an actor’s or a sailor’s, and was devoid of public incident. We can see him giving a few lessons to prim, chaperoned misses of the Boulevard Saint-Germain; in the afternoon making calls or studying; in the evening at the opera for an hour, later in the enchanted circle of countesses, who listened to his weaving music, and afterward, with a space for breathing, at a fashionable cafe before retiring. Public appearances were rare; this aristocrat loved not the larger world and its democratic criticisms. His was a temperament prone to self-coddling. Only to the favored few did he reveal the richness of his inner life. That hs suffered intensely from the petty annoyances, before which the ordinary man would hunch his shoulders, was but tho result of a hyper,-esthetic delicacy. An Aeolian harp! you cry, and the simile is a happy one. But no wind harp has ever discoursed such music as Chopin’s piano.”