Chopin and others played and sang in the elegant mirrored drawing room with its french windows open onto the terrace and the smell of orange blossom in the warm night air. ‘Her image is continually before my eyes,’ he wrote in his diary, adding that ‘sometimes I think I no longer love her, yet I cannot get her out of my head’.33 Chopin was still a child in many ways, and showed great reluctance to grow up: when he had turned twenty in the previous year he had loaded the event with extraordinary significance, and harked back to all the things he felt he had lost irretrievably.
On 20 July 1831 Chopin and Kumelski left Vienna at last, travelling through Linz to Salzburg, where they visited Mozart’s birthplace. In Munich, their next stop, Chopin discovered that the money his father had promised to forward had not arrived, and he was obliged to break his journey for a month. He soon made the acquaintance of the musicians in the city, who persuaded him to give a concert. No longer in the euphoric mood that had caused him to refuse in Dresden, he willingly agreed. The event took place in the Philharmonic Society Hall on 28 August, Chopin playing his E minor Concerto and the ever-popular Fantasia on Polish Airs, both of which were well received. The review of the concert in the local musical gazette was effusive on the subject of his ‘excellent virtuosity’, his ‘developed technique’ and ‘charming delicacy of execution’, and praised the works themselves.34
Chopin’s next destination was Stuttgart, where he spent a couple of weeks, alone, since Kumelski had stayed in Munich. He was in a state of morbid depression verging on the pathological, as the very long entries in his diary reveal:
Strange! This bed I am about to lie on has probably served more than one dying person, and yet that does not worry me. Perhaps more than one corpse has lain on it – and for many days? But what makes me any better than a corpsę Like a corpse, I have no news of my father, mother, sisters, of Tytus! Nor do corpses have lovers! Corpses are pale like me, cold like my feelings. A corpse has ceased living, and I have lived long enough…Why does one go on living this miserable life? 35
He looked back on his life, pointing to its worthlessness and to the fact that, cut off as he was from everything dear to him, it made no sense. There is less affectation here than in some of his letters from Vienna, and the feelings expressed have a genuine ring to them. The twenty-one-year-old composer felt lost, and anxious over his future. He was now quite alone, and further from home than he had ever been. Not the least of his worries was the fact that, while philandering in the company of Kumelski, he had caught a venereal disease.36 If he had invested his twentieth birthday with such significance, he can hardly have regarded what may well have been his first sexual encounter, let alone its consequence, as anything but a watershed in his existence.
But he did not have time to indulge his own miseries, as only a couple of days later he received news which was to alter the course of his life dramatically – the Polish army had been defeated and Warsaw had fallen to the notoriously ruthless Russian commander General Paskievich. In his diary, Chopin wrote:
I wrote the preceding pages without knowing that the enemy had already broken in – the suburbs are destroyed, burnt down – Oh, Jaś[Matuszyński]! Wiluś [Kolberg] probably died on the ramparts! I can see Marceli [Woyciechowski] in chains! Sowiński [the general in whose house Chopin wrote the Fantasia on Polish Airs], that kind old man, in the hands of those monsters! Oh God! You exist! You exist and yet You do not punish! Have You not seen enough Russian crimes? Or perhaps – maybe You are a Russian Yourself! My poor father! My dearest! Perhaps he has nothing left to buy my mother bread with! Perhaps my sisters have succumbed to the fury of the Russian rabble! Paskievich, that dog from Mohilev, has stormed the capital of the first monarchs of Europe! The Russian is master of the world!? Oh, father, so this is your reward in old age! Mother, suffering, gentle mother, you watched your daughter die, and now the Russian marches in over her bones to come and oppress you!…Did they spare her gravę They trampled it and covered it with a thousand fresh corpses! They have burnt the city! Oh, why could I not have killed at least one Russian! Oh, Tytus, Tytus!…What is happening to her, where is shę – unfortunate creature! – Perhaps she is in Russian hands? The Russians are pressing her, stifling, murdering, killing her! Oh my love, I am alone here, come to me, – I shall wipe away the tears and heal the wounds of the present with memories of the past…when there were no Russians…Maybe I have no mother any more, perhaps the Russians have killed her, murdered her…my sisters unconscious, yes, or struggling; my father in despair, helpless – no one left to pick up my dead mother. I am inactive, I sit here empty-handed, just groaning, suffering on the piano in despair…and what next? God, God! Move the earth – may it swallow up the people of this century. May the cruellest tortures fall on the heads of the French, who would not come to our aid!…37
Having cursed the French, Chopin set off for Paris a few days later. He was to build a new life there which suited him better than any he could have had in Warsaw, but the sense of loss sustained on that night in Stuttgart never left him. It came to embrace everything – home, country, family, friends, love and youth – and remained the fundamental inspiration for his music. As he had promised Konstancja, he would ‘heal the wounds of the present with memories of the past’.
The Paris that Chopin saw for the first time in September 1831 was a formidable city. Its size, the grandeur of its buildings and monuments, the scale of its open spaces, its bustle and vitality, not to mention emblems of modernity such as the gas lighting to be seen here and there, all made Vienna look like a market town by comparison. But Paris was far more than that. ‘Paris is the capital not only of France, but of the entire civilised world; it is the rendezvous of its intellectual notables,’ wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine, who had exiled himself there. ‘Here is assembled all that is great in love or in hate, in sentiment as in thought, in knowledge or in power, in happiness as in misery, in the future or in the past. When one considers the collection of distinguished or famous men that one finds here, Paris appears like the Pantheon of the living. They are creating a new art here, a new religion, a new life; it is here that the creators of a new world are happily at work.’1
Chopin was no intellectual, and what arrested his attention first in Paris was the allure of the decadent yet vibrant capital, so very different from the strait-laced cities he was used to. It exuded a permissive atmosphere which both shocked and delighted him. Apart from the bright lights, what intrigued him most were the whores who pursued him in the street, the chorus girls who were so keen on ‘duets’, as he coyly put it, and the lady upstairs who suggested they share a fire on cold days. ‘Here you have the greatest luxury, the greatest squalor, the greatest virtue and the greatest vice – everywhere you look there are notices about ven. disease – you simply cannot imagine the shouting, the commotion, the bustle and the dirt; one could positively lose oneself in this anthill, and the nice thing is that nobody cares what anyone else does,’ he wrote to Kumelski after a few days in the city, adding that he was prevented by his ailment from ‘tasting the forbidden fruit’.2
The other thing Chopin quickly became aware of was that Paris lay at the epicentre of European dissidence. The revolution which had swept the Bourbon Charles X off the throne in the previous year and replaced him with Louis Philippe had been incomplete, and there was continuing unrest, fuelled by the influx of defeated revolutionaries from Italy, Germany and Poland.
While Chopin was conservative by instinct, the shock of seeing his country crushed had induced a spirit of rebellion in him, and he ranged himself on the side of the enemies of the status quo, voicing subversive views on all authority. Possibly out of a desire to compensate for having failed to take part in the insurrection, he attended meetings along with