CHOPIN

Grey River Argus, 22 February 1928, Page 8

CHOPIN

HIS CREATIVE SOLITUDE. The interest of musicians in Chopin is for many reasons intense. He was a poet in tone, an exile from his native land, proud of his affinity aud aristocratic culture, delighted by all appeals to the beautiful, and an invalid gripped by a consuming disease that abnormally excited his higiTiy strung

nervous temperament. Francois Frederic Chopin Was born on February 22, 1809, near Warsaw. His father was a teacher of the French language. Chopin played in public just before his ninth birthday. His Op. 1 was pubfished in 1825. He travelled Europe as a virtuoso, and met all the notable musicians of his day. Schumann drew attention to the unique value of his compositions. He visited England seeking medical advice, and playing to select audiences. Returning to Paris in 1849, he died there on October 17 and was buried near Bellini and Cherubini in the Be re-1 a- Ch a ise Cem et ory.

Chopin, “an angel fair of face as a tall sad woman,” was in touch with two worlds. The history, the ideals, the sorrows of Poland, held him in the bonds of fervid loyalty; the ideal of free-born poetic vision and aesthetic emotion formed his haven of peace. But inextricably involved were the convolutions of his soul. It is questionable if the solid prosaic mind will ever recognise and measure the sensitiveness, the burning imagery, the instant shimmering of the Polish artist’s mentality. His thoughts fly and change too quickly. The corre-

sponding emotion demand an ultra-re-fined expression too rarefied for normally constituted beings. Too subject is this poet to the quivering agitation anticipations and fears. Fortunately

saqipqisspd ‘suoqoiauoj Aploop jo gleams’ of light and humour play a part in steadying the distressed seer for life’s bitter draught. His mimicry drew laughter and tears from his favoured listeners. But in all he remained a child.

There was never anything more pure and more exalted than his thoughts.

Such are the reflections which fill the mind on reading the new book entitled “Chopin” by Guy de Pourtales ( Thornton Butterworth). The invaluable documents therein are for readers worthy of sympathetic companionship, with a unique personality throbbing with a burning ardour for truth as it may be expressed through beautiful sound. The volume is an intimate record of Chopin, ol his nearest f and in particular of George Sand. The complex character of the novelist, her interior probings, her musings and ref lections,and her actual influences, so enigmatic, fanci-

ful, disappointing and in the end cruel, are laid bare by means of her letters and the irregular eventualities of her life. The whole work is ot incomparable attractiveness to students of human nature, lovers of Chopin, readers of absorbing historic epochs, national tendencies and personal ideals.

The ability of Alarie Wodzinski to appreciate her bethrothal with the master (the desk as they called it)i her coldness, timidity and fa-nt-heart-ednoss, led to the eight years of uncemented affinity with George Sand. Her spirit of disaffected relationship ehroniclel first round the names of Sandeau and de Musset ran this time i’nto a resolute despondency, baffling to describe, but seemed to be inevitable when the conflicting dispositions of the son and daughter ol the novelist are considered.

The value of the introspective study to the interpreter of Chopin’s works lies in the discovery of the poet’s soul in his compositions. His imagination, which took on as, Liszt said, “the velvety texture of plants, and was never exposed to the dust of the highways,” rules out in the exposition all but a miraculously balanced mind-play which is the despair of the worlding. the professional, the conventional, and the sophisticated Schumann declared that composers offer to the eye in their printed text a physiognomy of notes. In Chopin’s music he fancied that quite strange eyes, the eyes of a flower, the eyes ot a basilisk, the eyes of a peacock, the eves of a. virgin, were- marvellously regarding him. In sorrow and in solitude, romantic, calm, and melancholy, the patriot and poet found his ideal The pain and pathos of life were latent in him. He stands self-revealed this Raphael of the pianoforte as nervous, lonely and shrouded in dread sensitiveness. But neither inward sorrow noir outward pains clouded his ideal. Sing he must. His beloved instrument was the confiding medium of his unexpressible being. And in his music we have the- fruition of his buoyant hope of creating a new world for himself. Enough has been sard to indicate the quality of the author’s psyehologieial method. Minute details of events are kept subordinate to the inner experiences of the composer s life in Venna, Paris, Majorca and Paris again. A few obvious errors the titles of the worke will be readily corrected.