Part 2: Paris - In the Maelstrom (Ch. II)

Part 2 of chopin-the-man-and-his-music (Chapter II: Paris - In the Maelstrom).

Question this unit answers

What did eighteen years in Paris (1831-1848) do to Chopin — as a performer, as a member of the Romantic generation’s inner circle, and as the partner of George Sand? Huneker’s implicit question: did the salon and the Sand liaison make Chopin’s art or corrode it?

Key terms

• Romantic movement (Paris, 1830s) — the literary/musical wave Huneker sketches around Hugo, Heine, Gautier, Berlioz, De Musset; Chopin lived inside it but never enlisted.
• Salon — the aristocratic drawing room that was Chopin’s real concert hall; Huneker treats it as both his natural habitat and a narcotic.
• Ombrageux — French for touchy/shadowed; Huneker’s word for Chopin’s easily-offended temperament.
• Liaison — the contested label for the Chopin-Sand relationship; Huneker declines it out of deference to Hadow while still insisting on gossip’s version.
• “La merle blanche” — the white blackbird, Huneker’s nickname for George Sand (Aurore Dudevant).
• Nohant — Sand’s country estate, site of Chopin’s most productive summers (1843-1847).
• Majorca — the 1838-39 Mediterranean trip where Chopin’s tuberculosis first became grave.
• “Lucrezia Floriani” (1847) — Sand’s novel whose Prince Karol is a burlesque portrait of Chopin.
• Chopinist — Huneker’s term for the specialist reader of Chopin’s letters and legend.

Propositions

1. Chopin’s Paris years were geographically restless, and the restlessness was medical, not wanderlust: “consumptives are often so” (Ch. II).
2. The Paris of 1831 was one of the richest concentrations of genius since Periclean Athens, and Chopin was admitted to it almost at once because “his genius was quickly divined” (Ch. II).
3. Liszt is the most trustworthy contemporary witness to this period, but a partial one — he idealized Chopin after his death and recorded none of his defects (Ch. II).
4. Chopin could never conquer a large public; the causes were temperamental and physical (frail body, dislike of crowds), not technical. Thalberg and Liszt each could, by opposite means (Ch. II).
5. Kalkbrenner, the reigning pianist of the day, could not classify Chopin’s playing and fell back on comparisons to Cramer and Field; his offer to teach Chopin for three years was refused on Elsner’s advice, to protect Chopin’s originality (Ch. II).
6. Chopin’s true technical ancestor was Hummel, not Field, and his lack of scholastic grounding is simultaneously the strength and the weakness of his music (Ch. II).
7. The February 26, 1832 Paris debut with the E minor concerto was an artistic triumph and a financial failure; after it “nothing more was heard of Chopin’s lack of technique” (Ch. II).
8. The salon made Chopin more cosmopolitan but also more artificial; only real suffering rescued him from decorative drift (Ch. II).
9. Chopin was never a partisan of Romanticism — its noise, iconoclasm and self-advertisement repelled him — yet his is the voice from that era that survived (Ch. II).
10. Public performance became progressively intolerable to him: after 1834-35 his concert activity waned and “his irritability increased with every public performance” (Ch. II).
11. The Marie Wodzinska engagement (1835-37) collapsed over money and rank, and Huneker reads this as providential for music.
12. Chopin’s chest trouble dates from the first, eleven-day English visit of July 1837.
13. In the Sand relationship Sand was the dominant and “masculine” partner: she initiated, mothered, used him as literary copy, and ended it when bored.
14. The union nonetheless helped both artistically: “his best work may be traced to Nohant and Majorca” (Ch. II).
15. Chopin’s taste was narrow and idiosyncratic: Bach and Mozart yes; Beethoven mostly not; Schumann dismissed outright, with “Carneval” declared “really not music at all” (Ch. II).
16. His character was self-contradictory — generous and petty, moralist and adulterer’s partner, anti-Semitic and anti-Russian in theory while associating with both.
17. The 1847 break was precipitated by the Solange-Clesinger marriage quarrel, but that was pretext; Sand had finished studying him.
18. Sand, uniquely positioned to leave a true portrait of Chopin, failed: she understood him but could not characterize.

Arguments

• On Liszt as source: Huneker grants the Chaussee d’Antin evening as the finest page in Liszt’s Chopin, then discounts Liszt’s tact — the argument is that literary charm and evidential value diverge, so use Liszt for atmosphere and Niecks for fact.
• On the salon’s danger: the claim that the salon “threatened to drug his talent” is supported not by musical analysis but by a counterfactual — Life as “master-sculptor” intervened with real trouble, and the later work is deeper. This is assertion dressed as narrative.
• On Sand’s character: the argument is built by analogy rather than direct evidence about Chopin. Huneker introduces the 1833 Pagello episode (Sand dropping De Musset “some days afterwards”) and generalizes: since she behaved this way once, this is her pattern, therefore she left Chopin when bored. He states the inferential move openly — “The words ‘some days afterwards’ are significant.”
• On the balance of testimony: Huneker concedes both idealist and realist readings exist and rules that “the truth lies midway,” then in practice sides heavily with the realists, using Balzac’s 1838 letter to Madame Hanska as a sympathetic-but-damning character reference.
• On the asymmetry of the record: quoting Walkley, the argument is evidential rather than moral — Sand wrote, Chopin composed; music is “vague as a literary document,” so posterity hears only her side. This is the chapter’s most careful piece of reasoning.
• On snobbery: the charge that Chopin was inaccessible in his last decade is answered by weighted testimony — “where one accuses him of indifference and selfishness there are ten who praise his unfaltering kindness.”

Evidence

• Documents: Chopin’s letters to Titus (the Kalkbrenner interview, the “dangerous seducteur” joke); the letter to Grzymala from London, dated November 17-18, 1848, cursing “Lucrezia”; Balzac’s Lettres a l’etrangere, March 1838; letters of Chopin printed by Pierre Mille in Revue Bleue, first printed in a Warsaw newspaper; Sand’s Histoire de Ma Vie on Majorca.
• Lost evidence: the Paris letters to his parents were destroyed by Russian soldiers in Warsaw on September 19, 1863, along with Ary Scheffer’s portrait and Chopin’s first piano. Karasowski, who saw some, called them melancholy.
• Oral testimony: Niecks obtained facts viva voce from Franchomme; Hiller on the debut and the improvisation at Schadow’s; Edouard Grenier’s physical description of Sand; De Lenz on Chopin dying of heart-break; Dr. Pagello interviewed in 1896 by Dr. Cabanes of the Paris Figaro.
• Dated public events: Paris debut February 26, 1832; charity concert for Prince de la Moskowa May 20, 1832; Habeneck benefit April 26, 1835; Lower Rhenish Music Festival at Aix-la-Chapelle 1834; Carlsbad meeting with his father July 1835; Pleyel concerts April 26, 1841 and February 20, 1842; last Paris concert February 16, 1848 at Pleyel’s, where Oscar Commettant says he fainted in the artist’s room.
• Debunked evidence: Niecks found the Radziwill/Rothschild-soiree origin story baseless — Liszt, Hiller, Franchomme and Sowinski had never heard it. Liszt likewise denied the Nohant stories (swapping places in the dark, working the broken pedal rods, accompanying Viardot-Garcia).
• Circle roster as evidence of standing: Hugo, Lamartine, Lamenais, Chateaubriand, Merimee, Gautier, Liszt, Baudelaire, Ary Scheffer, Berlioz, Heine, De Musset, De Vigny, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Auber, Sainte-Beuve, Nourrit, Hiller, Balzac, Dumas, Heller, Delacroix, Michelet, Guizot, Thiers, Mickiewicz, George Sand.
• Professional detail: twenty francs a lesson, and roughly four months a year earning nothing.

Quotes

• “Chopin was a restless, though not roving nature.” (Ch. II)
• “Are you a pupil of Field’s?” (Ch. II) — Kalkbrenner to Chopin
• “I cannot create a new school, because I do not even know the old.” (Ch. II)
• “After this, nothing more was heard of Chopin’s lack of technique.” (Ch. II) — Hiller
• “Ah, sir, I have eaten so little!” (Ch. II) — Chopin refusing to play after dinner
• “his best work may be traced to Nohant and Majorca” (Ch. II)
• “Chopin is a detestable invalid.” (Ch. II) — George Sand
• “If I do not believe any more in tears it is because I saw thee crying!” (Ch. II) — Chopin on Sand
• “he was in this world like the E string of a violin on a contrabass” (Ch. II)
• “Cher M. Chopin, have you read ‘Lucrezia’? Mamma has put you in it.” (Ch. II)

Tensions and links

• Kalkbrenner — the chapter’s key encounter with the old virtuoso order. Kalkbrenner has no vocabulary for Chopin’s playing and offers three years of tuition; Elsner’s counter-advice preserves Chopin’s originality. Yet Chopin admired his “finished technique,” and Niecks suggests he could have learned from him mechanically. Unresolved tension: was the refusal a rescue or a permanent gap in Chopin’s craft? Compare with Proposition 6 (Hummel as true ancestor).
• Liszt — triple role: rival, advocate, and biographer. Friendly contests in which “Chopin always came off winner when Polish music was essayed”; Liszt’s influence called stimulating, immediately countered by “but what did not Chopin do for Liszt? Read Schumann.” Then a decade of coolness after 1837 without an open quarrel. Liszt is both the chapter’s best witness and its least neutral one.
• Thalberg — the counter-model of public success (aristocratic bearing, imperturbability), mimicked behind his back by Chopin and answered with the pianissimo joke. Useful contrast for any wiki page on 19th-century virtuoso performance practice.
• Mendelssohn — patronizing (“Chopinetto”) yet Chopin’s furious partisan against Kalkbrenner at the 1832 debut.
• Schumann — asymmetry worth noting: Schumann “gushes over Chopin, but this friendliness was never reciprocated,” culminating in the dismissal of Carnaval. A one-way admiration.
• Franchomme — lasting friendship, duo playing, dedicatee of the G minor cello sonata; also Niecks’s oral source. The one uncomplicated relationship in the chapter.
• Bellini — Chopin’s “peculiar predilection” for his sensuous melody; a direct lead for tracing operatic bel canto influence on Chopin’s melodic writing.
• Berlioz — Huneker’s long digression calling him “a magnified virtuoso” whose music “fails to force its way into my soul” reveals the critic’s own aesthetic axis (genuine Romanticism vs. orchestral spectacle), the same axis he uses to place Chopin above the movement’s noisemakers.
• Method tension: Huneker praises Niecks as the iconoclast who destroys legend, then reproduces legend anyway (“let us not attempt to impugn the details of the Chopin legend”) and recommends De Lenz for “the finishing touches of unreality.” The chapter is knowingly double-minded about biography.

Open questions

• What did Kalkbrenner’s mechanical training actually offer that Chopin declined? The chapter raises Niecks’s suggestion and drops it.
• What did Chopin himself think of Sand? Huneker admits “His real view of her we shall never know” — the Grzymala letter of November 1848 is the only direct trace here.
• Which specific compositions belong to Nohant and Majorca? The claim that his best work traces there is asserted without a work list; Part I of the book defers analysis to Part II.
• How reliable is the Pagello-as-pattern inference? It rests on a single 1896 interview about events of 1833, used to explain behavior a decade later.
• Why the ten-year cooling toward Liszt after 1837? “He grew suspicious of Liszt” — cause unspecified. The hint that “Chopin was jealous of him” over Sand is raised and waved off with “Pouf!”
• Did tuberculosis or heartbreak kill him? Huneker entertains both (“Animals die of broken hearts”) without deciding; the medical chronology (1837 chest trouble, 1839 alarm) sits awkwardly beside the emotional one.