Part 14: Chopin the Conqueror (Ch. XIV)

Part 14 of chopin-the-man-and-his-music (Chapter XIV: Chopin the Conqueror).

Question this unit answers

What did Chopin achieve in his two largest and most ambitious genres — the four Scherzi and the F minor Fantaisie — and, taking his whole output together, what is his final standing as a composer? The chapter title announces the verdict: despite lapses of scale and structure, Chopin “conquers,” and his best work will outlast fashion.

Key terms

• Scherzo (Chopin’s sense) — not the Beethoven/Mendelssohn type but a new structure Chopin built and named Scherzo, filled with demoniacal energy, mockery, and titanic anger rather than robust humor.
• Sublimity vs. grandeur — Huneker’s distinction: Chopin “seldom compasses sublimity” (his arrows “do not fly far”) but does reach grandeur in a handful of works.
• Psychical record — the Scherzi as confessions committed to paper, utterances that could never have been spoken aloud.
• Byzantine vs. Hellenic — the architectural metaphor for the B minor Scherzo: florid, ornamented facade rather than severe classical line.
• Sarmatian physiognomy — Schumann’s term for the specifically Polish coloring that Chopin’s later works partly shed in favor of a universal ideal.
• “Ballade of Love and War” — Huneker’s own private programme for the F minor Fantaisie.
• De Quincey’s Dream Fugue — literary analogue for the Fantaisie as visionary, fear-haunted narrative.
• Subjective criticism — the interpretive mode Huneker practices, whose “validity” he questions when Chopin’s own programme contradicts him.

Propositions

1. The Chopin Scherzo is a genre of his own invention; the Beethoven–Mendelssohn type “had no meaning for him,” and the title is “widely misleading when the content is considered” (Ch. XIV).
2. Chopin’s range stops short of the sublime, but in a countable set of works — one Scherzo, one Ballade, the F minor Fantaisie, the first two movements of the B flat minor Sonata, several Etudes, one Prelude — he attains grandeur (Ch. XIV).
3. Individuality, beauty, and divine eloquence of utterance are enough to disarm criticism entirely: before these, “criticism then bows its questioning brows before this anointed one” (Ch. XIV).
4. The four Scherzi are autobiographical documents from which “we may almost reconstruct the real Chopin, the inner Chopin,” whose bland exterior misprepared the world for the tragedy in his music (Ch. XIV).
5. Formal imperfection does not disqualify greatness: the B minor Scherzo’s edifice is “not architecturally flawless,” yet Chopin gave it dignity, largeness, and classic massiveness (Ch. XIV).
6. Individual verdicts on the set: No. 2 in B flat minor is the warmest and most public because it is easiest to understand; No. 3 in C sharp minor is the most dramatic, sober, self-contained, “a great work of art”; No. 4 in E is “more truly a Scherzo than any of them,” light and intellectually refined, and unfairly banned by classicists and Chopin worshippers alike (Ch. XIV).
7. Despite their shortcomings the Scherzi “are without peer in the literature of the piano” (Ch. XIV).
8. The F minor Fantaisie, op. 49, is Chopin’s grandest composition and “one of the greatest of piano pieces” — excluding the Beethoven sonatas, which Huneker holds are not strictly born of the instrument (Ch. XIV).
9. The Fantaisie is the work in which Chopin comes nearest Beethoven, in unity, formal rectitude, and “brave economy of thematic material” — the very tenaciousness Huneker elsewhere says Chopin lacks (Ch. XIV).
10. Chopin’s characteristic structural weakness is prodigality: given a foundational subject, “Beethoven would have built a cathedral,” but Chopin “dashes impetuously” onward to the next melody (Ch. XIV).
11. Chopin’s late development is a turn from art-for-art toward the human: in the Fantaisie “as art for art, it is less perfect; the gain is on the human side” (Ch. XIV).
12. Final verdict: Chopin “did not always succeed, but his victories are the precious prizes of mankind,” and like Mozart he may become old-fashioned yet “will remain eternally beautiful” (Ch. XIV).

Arguments

• Genre invention argued by mismatch of content to name. Huneker establishes what the Beethoven Scherzo is (robust humor, gossip, rarely poetical, occasional hints at the mystery of life), then shows that Chopin’s content — fierce jollity that mocks itself, titanic anger — is precisely what Beethoven would have judged unsuited to the form. The conclusion follows: Chopin built a new structure and merely borrowed the label, exactly as he did with the Ballades.
• Architectural criticism as a way of holding two verdicts at once. The B minor Scherzo is analyzed as a building — porch, principal subject, trio, working-out, return, coda — so that Huneker can grant a structural defect (“not architecturally flawless”) while insisting the walls “stand firm despite the hurricane.” Formal untidiness and expressive integrity are thereby made compatible rather than contradictory.
• Appeal to authorities, arranged as a chorus rather than a proof. Niecks (the “porch”; the Fantaisie as “a Titan in commotion”), Ehlert (“tornadic”; “composed in a blessed hour”), Schumann (Byronic tenderness; the cosmopolitan sacrificing local color), Karasowski (Shakespearian humor), Hadow (clear-cut, exact balance), Rubinstein (preferring the first two), de Lenz (“It must be a charnel house”) are cited in quick succession. Huneker consistently uses them to widen the range of admissible readings, then registers his own dissent — he flatly rejects Niecks’s “fragmentary” verdict on op. 54.
• Hadow’s phrase-parallelism argument, endorsed and nationalized. Chopin builds paragraphs “either on a single phrase repeated in similar shapes or on two phrases in alternation,” a practice traced to Polish folksong; Hadow concedes Beethoven does not attain this lucidity, and Huneker converts a technical observation into evidence of national and personal manner at once.
• Programme criticism deliberately undermined, then reasserted. Huneker narrates his own elaborate Fantaisie programme (macabre march, heroic love chant, warring triplets, forlorn princess), then produces the authoritative rival: Liszt’s account, via Pachmann, of Chopin’s own programme — a knock at the door, the invitation entrez, the entrance of Liszt, Sand and Mme. Pleyel, Sand’s plea for pardon. He concedes the source is authoritative and that it demolishes his reading of the A flat section, then rejects it anyway on two grounds: the story may have “caught some personal cadenzas of the two historians,” and his own version is worth keeping regardless. This is the chapter’s most explicit statement of critical method — subjective response outranks documented intention.
• Ranking by comparison to Beethoven, both ways. Beethoven is the yardstick throughout: the Fantaisie’s first subject is asked to be “almost as ethically puissant” as Beethoven’s F minor Sonata; Chopin’s failure of tenaciousness is measured against Beethoven’s cathedral-building; but the Beethoven sonatas are excluded from the piano-literature comparison as not idiomatically pianistic, which is what clears space for the Fantaisie’s supremacy.

Evidence

• Structural walkthrough of the B minor Scherzo, op. 20 — introduction, principal subject, trio, working-out, return, elaborate coda; the lyric intermezzo in B; the Wilde Jagd finale with its “shrillest of dissonances” and chromatic uproar.
• Editorial detail as evidence of judgment. Klindworth preferred; Kullak follows him in the double note stems in the B major section; Kullak gives A sharp in the bass six bars before the return of the first motif where Klindworth and others prescribe A natural, “which is not so effective.” Huneker also suggests op. 20 might profit from omitting the repeats, and singles out the chromatic interlocked octaves at the close.
• Publication and dedication record — op. 20, February 1835, to M. T. Albrecht; op. 31, December 1837, Comtesse de Furstenstein; op. 39, October 1840, Adolph Gutmann; op. 54, December 1843, Mlle. de Caraman. Op. 49 published November 1843, probably composed at Nohant on the evidence of a letter.
• Biographical anecdote, used two ways. De Lenz’s story that op. 39 was dedicated to Gutmann because his prize-fighter’s fist could “knock a hole in the table” with a certain left-hand chord (sixth measure), plus his dismissal that “nothing more was ever heard of this Gutmann.” Huneker rebuts with the fact that Chopin died in Gutmann’s arms and that Gutmann was known as a favorite pupil until his own death.
• Op. 39 composed or finished at Majorca — the most dramatic of the set; virile octaves, the chorale trio whose “piety is a bit of liturgical make-believe,” a frenetic coda ending surprisingly in the major.
• Op. 31 details — de Lenz’s “charnel house” remark on the opening, the A major trio, the C sharp minor episode merging into E major, the dizzy coda; likened in public affection to the A flat Ballade.
• Op. 54 details — the C sharp minor theme of lyric beauty, the brilliant scale-coda, and the Schumann question (“How is gravity to clothe itself if jest goes about in dark veils?”) which Huneker says cannot be asked of this work.
• The Liszt–Pachmann testimony on op. 49 — the first two bars as the rappings at the door, bars three and four as Chopin’s entrez, entrez!, the march as the visitors’ entrance, the F minor song as his complaint, the A flat section as Sand’s plea for pardon, the second march as their departure, and the Lento Sostenuto in B as his moment of peace.
• Reception history — the Fantaisie “never properly appreciated by pianists, critics, or public,” understood only “after more than a half century of neglect.”

Quotes

• “Chopin seldom compasses sublimity. His arrows are tipped with fire, yet they do not fly far.” (Ch. XIV)
• “criticism then bows its questioning brows before this anointed one” (Ch. XIV)
• “These four Scherzi are psychical records, confessions committed to paper” (Ch. XIV)
• “We see the soul that suffers from secret convulsions, but forgive the writhing for the music made.” (Ch. XIV)
• “The walls stand firm despite the hurricane blowing through and around them.” (Ch. XIV)
• “It must be a charnel house.” (Ch. XIV)
• “It is Titanic; the torso of some Faust-like dream, it is Chopin’s Faust.” (Ch. XIV)
• “Beethoven would have built a cathedral on such a foundational scheme” (Ch. XIV)
• “Alas! for the validity of subjective criticism.” (Ch. XIV)
• “In any case I shall cling to my own version.” (Ch. XIV)
• “As art for art, it is less perfect; the gain is on the human side.” (Ch. XIV)
• “He may become old-fashioned, but, like Mozart, he will remain eternally beautiful.” (Ch. XIV)

Tensions and links

• The closing peroration answers Ch. IV, “The Artist.” Where the earlier chapter reconstructed Chopin the performer — the small tone, the salon, the poet of the keyboard — this chapter delivers the verdict on Chopin the composer, and delivers it as conquest. The “victories are the precious prizes of mankind” line is the book’s resolution of the tension Ch. IV set up between a physically frail, drawing-room artist and a musical intelligence of the first rank: the frailty is granted and declared irrelevant to the outcome.
• Genre invention echoes the Ballade chapter. “Boldly called it a Scherzo, and, as in the case of the Ballades, poured into its elastic mould most disturbing and incomparable music” — the same argument, explicitly cross-referenced. Chopin’s habit is to take an inherited title and repurpose it, which makes the received names a poor guide to the music. See the Ballades unit.
• Formal weakness vs. final greatness — the book’s persistent unresolved strain. Huneker maintains that Chopin lacks tenaciousness and long-range constructive power (the cathedral he never builds), yet insists on the Fantaisie’s “unity, its formal rectitude and its brave economy of thematic material.” Either op. 49 is the exception that proves the rule, or the rule is overstated; the chapter does not decide.
• Intimacy relocated. “Chopin is not so intimate here as in the mazurkas” — the F minor Fantaisie is his largest canvas but not his most confessional, which keeps the mazurkas at the center of Huneker’s account of the man even as the Fantaisie takes the crown for scale. Compare the mazurka unit and its claim that the mazurkas are where Chopin is most Polish and most himself.
• The Scherzi as biography contradicts Huneker’s own anti-programme instinct. He treats the Scherzi as documents from which the inner Chopin can be reconstructed, yet mocks programme-hunting in the same breath — witness the joke that Chopin may have outlined op. 20 in “a time of soul laceration arising from a cat scratch or a quarrel with Maurice Sand in the garden over the possession of the goat cart.” The mockery is aimed at specific narrative programmes, not at psychological reading in general; the distinction is asserted rather than defended.
• Authorial intention vs. critical response, stated outright. The Liszt–Pachmann episode is the clearest test case in the book: Huneker concedes the account is “an authoritative one, coming as it does from Chopin by way of Liszt” and that it destroys his own reading, then keeps his reading. This is a methodological commitment, and it retroactively licenses the impressionistic prose of every preceding music chapter.
• Schumann’s cosmopolitanism thesis vs. the book’s Polish-nationalist thread. Schumann has the late works losing their “Sarmatian physiognomy” and approaching the universal Greek ideal found again in Mozart; the closing sentence pairs Chopin with Mozart for permanence. Yet Hadow’s phrase-parallelism is credited to Polish folksong on the same page. The chapter wants Chopin universal in stature and Polish in grain simultaneously.
• Popularity as evidence of shallowness. Op. 31 is “beloved of the public. But then it is easier to understand,” while op. 39 is “never to become the property of the profane” and op. 49 went half a century unappreciated. Difficulty of access functions as a quality marker throughout, which is in tension with the closing hope that Chopin’s music can never “fall upon unheeding ears.”

Open questions

• If Chopin genuinely reached grandeur in only the handful of works Huneker enumerates, on what grounds does the rest of the output support a verdict of “conqueror”? The chapter asserts the conclusion but rests the argument on the exceptions.
• Why exclude the Beethoven sonatas as “not strictly born of the instrument”? The premise does the decisive work in ranking op. 49 among the greatest piano pieces, and it is never argued.
• Is “the Scherzi are psychical records” a claim about Chopin’s psychology or about the music’s effect on the listener? Huneker moves between the two without marking the shift.
• How seriously should the Liszt–Pachmann programme be taken as historical testimony, given that it reaches the reader third-hand and that Huneker himself suspects both intermediaries of embellishment?
• Op. 54 is said to be “banned by classicists and Chopin worshippers alike” — what exactly did each camp object to, and is Huneker’s diagnosis (“the agnostic attitude is not yet dead in the piano playing world”) a rebuttal or a dismissal?
• Does “the gain is on the human side” imply an evaluative hierarchy in which expressive humanity outranks formal perfection, and if so, how does that square with the Beethoven-shaped standard applied a few paragraphs earlier?