The Influence of Adam Mickiewicz on the Ballades of Chopin

The Influence of Adam Mickiewicz on the Ballades of ChopinAuthor(s): Dr. Lubov KeeferSource: American Slavic and East European Review, Vol. 5, No. 1/2 (May, 1946), pp. 38-50Published by: The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2491580Accessed: 25/07/2010 22:41

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THE INFLUENCE OF ADAM MICKIEWICZ ON THE BALLADES OF CHOPIN

By DR. LUBOV KEEFER

WERE one to confess total ignorance concerning an alleged tie between the Ballades of Chopin and the poetry of his friend-compatriot Adam Mickiewicz, he would be forever ostracized from among musical conoscenti. Only slightly less flagrant an offense would be the omission of Schumann or perhaps Liszt as reported go-betweens. But, while accord has been reached on the poems which provided Chopin with his musical imagery, even Chopin scholars (Karasowski, Ganche, Bidou, Binental, Hadden) would be at a loss to trace the list down to its origins. Yet, so meaty is the whole, so plausible on the surface, so brimming with national-patriotic-romantic potentiali- ties, that each and every Chopinite has succumbed to its lure, vary- ing solely the stress on this or that facet and the reserve brought to bear on it.

By almost unanimous vote the First Ballade is said to have been sired by Mickiewicz's Conrad Wallenrod, a canvass of such white- heat fire and vehemence, an indictment of tyranny so flaming that the oppressors were kindled by its fury to circulate it in Russian whispers many months before its printing in the vernacular Per- ceptibly fewer ballots are cast in favor of the whimsically phos- phorescent Switezianka and the related Switet, flippant and arch, as patterns for the cataclysms unleashed respectively in the F and A Flat Ballades. As to the colloquial, humorous Pan Budri, only the most credulous and staunch accept it as the source from which flow the miasmic depths of the F Minor.

Readiest to indorse the ticket unreservedly are the virtuosi Cortot and Casadesus. But even among proverbially prudent musicologists deviations from this official roster (one avidly disseminated for the edification of Chopin devotees) are rare enough to be cited. Huneker, for one, rhapsodizes about "thunder and surge, fabulous genii, tall fountain-lilies and slender-hipped maids," but seconds nevertheless the Wallenrod pedigree with its "well-knit logical sentence." Pro- ceeding with all of a scholar's caution threading the footsteps of another (Hoesick), Hugo Leichtentritt reads into the F Minor the aspirations not of Mickiewicz but of a lesser bard of autonomous Poland, Slowacki. Farther removed from the sphere of all-consuming patriotism are isolated interpretations of the A Flat: again, Leichten- tritt's, as an image of a cavorting timid colt and its coming of age

38

Adam Mickiewicz on the "Ballades" of Chopin 39

to a fierce gallop, and Ehlert's (pupil of Schumann), as a dream- world of brilliantly lit ballrooms afloat with tender avowals and, tucked somewhere in this triviality, the "voice of the people." And both Berlioz and Heine have had something to say of the Ballade8 "singing of Ossianic loves and heroes, chivalric hopes and the past of a far-away country, ever eager for victory and ever beaten."'

These few dissenters are hardly sufficient to weight the scales against the Mickiewicz-legend. And if the Germans, notwithstanding an occasional excursion into nebulous hypothesis, are at pains against bracketing Chopin as photographer, among French colleagues sky alone is the limit in verbatim poems - music - maps. To what lengths of absurdity this teaming can aspire is shown by the mag- num opus of one Jean Stan, modestly entitled Les Ballades de Chopin.2

Operating on the assumption that Wallenrod and Chopin are one, Stan starts with a summary of the bloody struggle waged by the Teutonic Templars against the Lithuanians with Conrad at their head. This harrowing tale, soaked in hatred and revenge, with ar- tistry of style and devotion to one's soil its only redeeming features, is given accurately enough.

Circumspectly Stan admonishes the reader not to expect Chopin to follow this adventurous maze in all ramifications. His qualms, if any, concern the film's footage. Once assured that Chopin translated all of Wallenrod, he will resolve his task into a ratio of measures and verses. So, the opening massive octaves represent a hero fighting in- ebriety; B Flat modulations, "perfidious and reptile - plaints of the tortured, or else, secret treason"; valse and lute-strains-frolics at Court; a "dissimulation-motif" -sly maneuvering, and what but lust for terror has bred "short recurring phrases of smiling landscape or recollections of early childhood," spiced as they are by unorthodox harmonies rising from hushed sighs to stirring climaxes? As "the tribunal crosses, in tumult, the palace stairway" and agonizing runs break against inexorable crashes (excitedly, Stan resorts to a singu- lar), his compass gains in authority. "Let us observe that the second scale is an octave higher than Conrad's. Is it not known that the female voice is exactly eight notes above the male? Therefore, hus- band and wife are one in death."3 No longer does sedition need a veil. Chaos is the watchword, and a thunderous cadence consumes in Valhalla flames the savage story.

Stan survives. Brought to earth, he reminds us that eight years I E.-F. Ganche, Chopin, sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris, 1913), p. 325. 2 Paris Editions, 1934. 3 Ganche, op. cit., p. 45.

40 Dr. Lubov Keefer

separate Chopin's version from its model, and that Mickiewicz had tried his musical hand at the Willia Ballad,4 as well as Ponchielli.5

If a common background proved the authenticity of Wallenrod- Chopin, Stan is just as adamant regarding the F Major that Ma- jorcas's specters had nurtured a nostalgia for their geographical pole, the Lithuanian Novogrodek. As told in Switezianka, the lake, placid by day, awakens with dark to convulsions and tears, wails, howls and the clatter of arms, all tools of retribution wrought by a noble prin- cess upon her fatherland's despoilers. "It will be easy," claims Stan, "to adjust the music to the verses or vice versa." First, however, he must settle an account with the "all too numerous pianists who just- ify their intellectual indolence by slogan of pure music," among them "Undinists" (Huneker, Dry, and Casadesus) or yet Rubinstein, who lacked the stamina to pursue his simile of a nodding flower.

If anything, Stan manifests a more than accustomed legerdemain, for he leans on what would seem to be an impeccable savant, Ganche. After maintaining that adulation of Mickiewicz merely bestowed pro- digious breath and sweep on Chopin's fantasy-legends,6 this apostle of the Pole unfortunately turned a complete volte-face and manu- factured a word-for-word Switezianka-Baedeker for the F Major. It to the letter is appropriated by Stan: "lake in repose, sinister rum- blings," lovely stranger (in Plural), chromatically terrified onlookers, reassurances in major and minor-dechained sonorities, breathless paroxisms and attacks. For additional references he designates Lalo with Legende d'Ys and Debussy's Cathedrale Engloutie.

Having painlessly disposed of two opuses Stan can afford a detour, in the shape of two comments on the A Flat as played by Chopin in the Salle Pleyel: Bourget's: "flexible imagination, vitality and poetry, supremely clothed in tones"7 and, a degree less glowing, Schumann's. The sheer fact that both had heard of Mickiewicz is, in Stan's eyes, ample guarantee of the proximity of Op. 47 to Switez, a piquant recital of man's fickleness and nymph's cunning, and, by the same token, an unequivocal refutation of any possible tie-up with Heine's Lorelei.

If Stan insists on discriminating between naiad-species, his meth- od is unchanged. So and so many measures are allotted to the ruth- less Wagnerian sprite whose sophistication derives from changes of key, exactly 150 bars go to the love-duet of double thirds, a half-page

4 Chap. ii. 1 I Lituani (1874). o Ganche, p. 168. 7 Gazette Musicale, Feb. 1, 1842.


to Virgilian coquetry, a whole to the victim's protestations served under an enharmonic-Freudian sauce. Fate strikes at the double bar, and, as the nymph plunges the man into the abyss to a chorus of se- duction, fickleness, and twined chromatics, the chastisement is pro- claimed by "elegantly-cruel" bass streams roaring with the sighs of the damned.

Even as able a strategist as Stan is nonplussed by the refusal of the F Minor to comply literally with Budri, the narrative of a warrior who expedites his sons to fight the enemy only to find himself facing triple nuptials. For one thing, what to make of "thematic modifica- tions," a refinement which to Pugno and Cortot elevates Op. 52 into a class all its own, or the "superfluous" opening? The analyst regains his aplomb in measure 8, visiting cards of sire and offspring, spots four pages as airing of paternal ire, makes light of "Conradian" echoes, elates at the double-thirds, shorthand to conjugal bliss, grows duly meditative at departure and dream, perplexed in the Coda, but finally assuaged in the Canon's triplets, for those do not lie: harbingers of celestial harmony among the ravages of winter, they lead into ram- bunctious rioting: the apotheosis. A further bit of mud-flinging towards the pedants who glibly report three distinct home-comings as though Chopin could not bolster Eros with "conscientious objectors," and Stan's musicological feat is at an end.

Coarse, pedestrian and inane as these cliches may well be, they attest a common orientation stretched ad absurdum. Something in the Ballade must invite this grotesque accumulation of nonsense. In Enault's account Chopin seals his fatal encounter with George by improvising on the spot a "Ballade written by no poet but resembling a Cavalier's Farewell" ;8 Gronowitz assembles for the purpose a gush- ing Chopin, hysterical Mickiewicz, and Liszt;9 and even a fanciful rendezvous with Goethe is not lacking.'0 So persistent is the allure that Karasowski and Niecks are not below reproducing portions of the data. True, the latter takes violent issue with another narrative, Liszt's, of a seance held with Hiller, Delacroix, and a host of stars in the Abbe's own quarters, when Chopin, unable to make Mickie- wicz speak of Conrad, poured out his own wounded heart in golden melody."1 On Hiller's testimony Niecks discredits every inch of it. He holds that even Liszt's uncanny magnetism and faculty for drawing to Musical Soirees the Parisian Who's Who, a gift, equally

8 F. Chopin as a Man and Musician (London; Novello, 1888), ii, 2. 9 Chopin (N.Y.: Novello, 1943), p. 104. 10 Chopin, His Life, Letters and Works (London; 1879), pp. 104-111. "' Ladislaus Mickiewicz, In Memoriam, pp. 108 and 138.

42 Dr. Lubov Keefer

odious to Berlioz'2 and Sand,'3 would be impotent to secure such a coterie simultaneously. What does Huneker do but enlarge once more on Chopin's "hypnotic improvisation which animated the very house-furnishings?"'4

Some of this fable-atmosphere may be laid to the door of Liszt. In any case, through the ambiguity of protestations of esteem and ill-concealed suspicions, lodged in aspirations for pianistic primacy, it is by no means easy to sift the truth.'5 Yet it was a lucky Provi- dence which guided the Abbe to take over for E. Legouve April 26, 1841. On the program was the G Minor Ballade. Chopin's fear lest his dazzling confrere leave him but a "corner of his vast empire" was not founded. Liszt held him up not to himself but to Mickiewicz, the "great poet," to whom the muse of his bereaved country dic- tated his songs, punctuated with indelibly mysterious accents of wildness and abruptness. If less brilliance, a less blinding halo gath- ered around the pianist's Nocturnes and Ballade (encored on the occasion), it was because unexcelled energy of thought and depth of sentiment were lavished on smaller forms and fewer faithfuls. In raptures over the noble Polonaise as sung by Mickiewicz in Ancestors and Pan Tadeusz, Liszt conjectures that Chopin was "frequently inspired by it to harness his forces" in classic style. Not that this last holds water. Elsewhere Franz laments Frederic's inability to embrace classicism, a metamorphosis with which he credits Mickie- wicz's Ancestors and ballads,'6 or holds up the Poles as thrust and counter-thrust in the romantic-classic duel.

Now, if there ever breathed a human not content to be a "placid player to citizens in comfortable nightcaps," "bent on poking his brain's nose into every pot wherein the good God cooks"'7 (litera- ture, politics and religion), this was Liszt. No one was more au courant with literary-musical entanglements of the day than he. Yet, where are the Switezes and Budris? At best, Liszt shuffles poems and prose, culls the heterogeneous elements into a mood-pattern, but is not too sure that Chopin catches the spirit of the latter. Nor could he ever subscribe to servile mimicking. For Liszt was indom- itably, bellicosely averse to any kind of corporeal program.

12 To Liszt, Jan. 6, 1839. 13 Histoire de Ma Vie. 14 Chopin (N.Y.: Scribner, 1924), p. 10. 15 To d'Agoult, July, 1836: "Franz is the only artist in the world who knows how to

impart life to the piano"; R. Schumann, Music and Musicians: Karasowsky: Chopin, pp. 103-107.

16 Chopin (Paris; Escudier, 1852), p. 108. 17 Berlioz, Liszt, Chopin (London, 1874), p. 23.


And what of Schumann? Where, when, and for what purpose did he deliver himself of the Ballades and Mickiewicz? And what were his credentials by virtue of understanding, sympathy, friendship? How much lies behind the almost too familiar "Hats off"?

As a matter of record, Chopin makes a less glamorus debut in Schumann's writings than the ecstatic greeting had promised. And in some intangible way he remains to the end a foreigner within a pale, somewhat of a "Muscovite,"18 distinctly a "Pole,"'" and "east- erner,"'20 more often a "Sarmatian,"21 not admitted in the zone of the truly sublime Germans, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn.22

Nor is Schumann immediately won over. Suspicion clouds the first entry to F. Wieck.23 "Chopin's Opus 1 is in my hands. A lady would call it pretty, but I firmly hold that it is Op. 10, that fully two years and twenty works separate it from Op. 2, the 'incredible' Ci Carem Variations."24 Nevertheless he directs Clara to study the "inspired" piece, ridicules the near-sighted finicky critics of the "Pantouffel" Journal, Finck and Rellstab,25 and darts to a concert neighbor who can not decide whether it is good or bad, "idiot"!26

Before long Chopin is knighted "genius" and Davidite, strange yet all-pervasive spokesman of night-shadows, an enthusiast with an unmatched insight into his instrument, a daring, almost too daring harmonist, wending his way "with dissonance through dissonance in dissonance,"27 yet one whose virtuosity is invariably held in check by fantasy. Beethoven has given him courage, Schubert-tenderness, Field-mobility.28

Of Clara, Robert inquires whether a certain B's eyes still glisten when he hears Chopin's music,29 and begs for the high F of the Varia- tions and for an electric current to carry to her "tomorrow at 11 sharp"30 the Adagio. Her immaculate rendering of Giovanni, the finale of the E Minor Concerto and Trio, just as any other manifes- tation of partiality to him grow synonymous with musicianship -

'8 "Not too inhuman"; to Novakowsky, Leipzig, Oct. 18, 1836. '9 To Lipinski, Nov. 1, 1836 and Dec. 11, 1837. 20 Music and Musicians, 1834. 21 M. a M., 1836. 22M. a M., 1841. 23 Leipzig, Jan. 11, 1832. 24 Allgeine Musikische Zeilung, Dec. 7, 1831. 25Finding fault with Clara for playing a man's diet. 26A. M. Z., 1832. 27 July 2, Aug. 18, 1834. 23 A. M. Z. 1841, pp. 83, 92, 96. 29 July 10, 1834. 30 Berlioz copies it with Estelle.

44 Dr. Lubov Keefer

all of old Kalkbrenner is not worth a particle of the youthful Fr'd'ric, and Wieck should be proud of Chopin's mantle.3'

Above all Schumann yearns for a meeting. It materialized in Leip- zig, early August, 1835. "Chopin was here: Florestan rushed up to him. I saw them float arm in arm. But Eusebius did not speak; the very idea lamed him." A less highfaluting variant reads: "Chopin was here, a few hours spent in a narrow circle. He plays exactly as he writes - uniquely."32 Once more Clara obliged with the Concerto's Finale, some Etudes, and Robert's unpublished F Sharp Minor Sonata, and he, in return, treated to a Nocturne, which Clara ruled "too capricious."

The visit only whetted Schumann's appetite. If need be, he will follow the Pole to the Dusseldorf Festival,33 Dresden,34 Marienbad,35 or wait for him in Leipzig.36 He will postpone business, lay aside writing, incur the wrath of family or chief. Great urgency pulsates in these pathetic calls.

At last, the red-letter day!37 "Chopin dropped in day before yesterday, and so exciting was the interview that I am still under its spell. I have from him a new Ballade, perhaps his most personal if not most finished .... I told him I loved it best and he emrphatically re- marked that it was his favored too. He played eloquently, touch- ingly."38

Still no mention of Mickiewicz. Nor does he figure in other letters bearing on the event; to Lenz: "Many delights, among them a flying visit of Chopin, have cut into the routine," and a memorial to H. Voigt: "Yesterday Chopin was here and played a Fantasy and new Etudes - an interesting man and even more absorbing player .... He has bewitched me as never before - by his high tension, velvet fingers, and childish simplicity."39

Since the whole is a retrospect,40 the omission of the G Minor is understandable. Curiously, the only reference to Mickiewicz also graces a recollection. The pretext is the dedication of the F Major. In awe before the genius shining through every letter of its circum-

31 To H. Voigt, to his mother, March 33, July 2, 1834, 1836, p. 212. 32 October 6, 1835. 33 To Moscheles, March 8, 1836. 3' To Burmeister - Lysch, Sept. 10, 1837. 35 To brother Eduard. 36 To Nauenburg. 37 To Dorn, Sept. 14. 38 Originally accepted as Op. 38, not written before 1840. 39 Sept. 13, 1836. 40 It was printed a year later.


scribed vocabulary, Robert rules that half of Frederic's strides, in eschewing ornament and courting grace, invite Hosannas. From here he passes to the "well remembered" first audition, minus the effec- tive A Minor cadence, and casually drops: "He also said that he was led to the Ballades by several poems of Mickiewicz." Hardly more illuminant is the observation that the Ballades are imbued with supreme poetry. This then is the slender bridge holding the fireworks of speculation! Its trustworthiness gets more dim if we remember that only one and a half Ballades were finished at the time.

But there exists another document.4' Reviewing the same year some Chopin dances, Schumann gives, instead of sober statement of fact, a figurative literary-historical ball, arranged by the editor of the "Newest" Journal for his daughters, the erudite love-lorn Ambrosia and irresistibly lovely Beda. Aflame for Chopin whom she has never seen, Beda swoons at his very name, falls in love with Robert, because, admitted into his holy precincts, he is "brush for his kisses," and insatiably drinks in every detail of his playing up to his way of caressing a sobbing keyboard, and of his person: revolu- tionary lips, provocative prophetic gaze, miraculous luminosity. To dance with Beda the Polonaises, Mazurkas, Bolero, and Waltzes and hear her rapture is ecstasy, well worth the unexpected emergence of a Cossack with his whip. "Chopin, you wonderful heart-thief, never have I envied you as now!" exclaims Robert. There follows a refusal of matrimony in defiance of a "romanticist, three-fourths Faust, Lisztian poem."

Needless to say, down to the dedication of the piece via Heller to Chopin, one recognizes at every point the setting to the Carnival.42 But another deeper meaning resides in these lines. For Beda (misery) is a pseudonym bestowed by Chopin on Marie Wodzinska after their rupture. To Sluzevo, her home, the composer fled in thought; thither go a piano, beautifully bound books, songs. The pain went deep, and her letters tied with a pink ribbon and inscribed: Moja Beda were found on his death. To Schumann, still waiting for his Clara, the recital of lacerations wrought by an unsympathetic father was doubly pathetic. But if Chopin's infatuation for Marie was re- sponsible for the vehemence of the G Minor, and could awaken sympathetic response in an outsider some months later, the Stan- Wallenrod stock is due for a decided drop.

What of Chopin's nationalism, the arena on which he and the poet 41 Leipzig, 1837. 42 Jeanqui-rit in Augsburg - S. Heller, ill at the time, not Jean qui rit or Jean qui

pleurt; Knapp-Banck; Serpentin - Davidite; Beda - Si, mi, re, la.

46 Dr. Lubov Keefer

were bound to measure strengths before Schumann? Contrary to general belief, Robert did not see the highest good in self-imposed geographical preferences. If anything, he rejoices at Chopin's gradu- al emancipation from national chains: localisms, eccentricity, shallow virtuosity, stress on Polish courage, Polish power, Polish threats against "Corrplaisant monarchs in the North," towards loftier re- gions: independence of thought prohibiting a finish a la Rossini with "votre humble serviteur"; broad sympathy; give and take; mating of creative with recreative; pungency of rhythms and colors not cog- nizant of East and West, servant and master. Already, says Schu- mann, Chopin's spiritual sphere is the globe: Thalberg, Kalkbrenner, Henselt, Hiller, Wolff, Lickl, Wielhorski, Bergson, even Liszt, are his pupils in melodiousness, delicacy, ardor.43 Step by step he waxes into an emblem of artistic, no longer regional, iconoclasm. Explaining that modern music stems from Bach, not Mozart,44 Robert classes Chopin with the petrels: Mendelssohn, Bennett, Hiller.45 Again, he discloses that, revering the old, he encourages the new: Chopin,46 "caviar" of libraries and anthologies,47 a healthy ferment, even after death,48'49'50 a charmer with a sorely needed note of humor.

How could such an original and independent colorist stoop to translating other men's thoughts? All through life Schumann stub- bornly refused to prostitute music's transcendent domain by external labels.soa Let us not mistake the trait: in no way does it run counter to his literary worship, the seeking for an indefinable mystic, chaste, veiled affinity between sister-arts. Schbnberg-like, he frequently spotted the resemblance after the music was completed. And who would dare to dissect the fragrance of the F Minor Fantasia, Mazur- kas and Etudes? Is not the idea already profanation, a folly as sacrilegious as presenting Beethoven at the brook, notepaper and pen in his hands, imbibing the birdcalls and perfumes of the Pas- toral?5"

Well may Schumann have hailed the ashes of Chopin's erstwhile 43 A. M. Z.,1 1842. 44 To Keferstein, Jan. 31, 1840. 45 To Reinhold, Feb. 17, 1840. 46 To de Sire and Zuccalmoglio, Jan. 13, 1838. 47 Etudes, an abortive scheme, to Mangold, Jan. 7, 1838, and Mozart-Album, to Pott,

Aug. 30, 1839. 48 Hiller's Memorial Poem, Dresden, Dec. 3, 1849. 49 Ehlert Album, to Klitsch, Dec. 19, 1849. 50 Clara's Rotterdam Concerts, to Smalt, Amsterdam, Dec. 18, 1853, and Endemin,

Sept. 14, 1854. 60a Prohibition of the Frauenkirche Concert. 51 A. M. Z., 1835.


patriotism! Not so Mickiewicz. Hopes vested in Frederic as Slav Messiah were due at least two grave setbacks. For one Elsner, he of the urn, carried the larger responsibility. Spurred by the profoundly national vein of the Mazurkas,52 Elsner insisted that his young pupil immediately apply the same strokes to a music-drama. There was a lot at stake. With only one other, Kurpinski, this German-bred Silesian had risen to the post of chief purveyor of flamboyantly slavo- phile opera in the shameful Lw6w days, thus, to a legitimate heir of the mighty triumvirate Kamenski, Boguslavski, Steffani.53 But his was not the only voice. Pleading with Frederic to give up trifling were his sister, the poet Witwicki, Niemzevicz, christened the "Polish Nestor," and Mickiewicz. Rumor has it that arguments on the score were known to reach alarming pitch.54

The plans died stillborn. To the ennui of some and the gratitude of most, Chopin decided to cultivate his own garden, sprinkling it now and then with Kurpinski-Elsner tunes, but keeping shy of the poets.

Mickiewicz was frustrated on yet another score. Among the songs dispatched to Marie at Sluzevo were several by him. Too fastidious to include the youthful and casually jotted down sketches in the definitive edition, Chopin would have been horrified at Fontana's highhandedness in publishing them at Slesinger's posthumously, as Op. 74. Never of exceptional poetic instinct, they are outspokenly unfair to Mickiewicz. Of Zaleski Chopin gives the passionate Lover and nostalgic Grief; of Witwicki the eery Return, desolate Lithuanian Song and exultant Polish Dirge, but Mickiewicz's are the flimsiest bubbles of the anthology. Even where love-pain is the leitmotif as in Witwicki's Maiden's Wish and Bacchanal the music has a way of striking deeper than under the impact of Poland's laureate. If Marie was "charmed" and the contented Witwicki moved to urge Frederic to outshine Italian Opera by dint of "nationality, nationality, and more nationality,"55 Mickiewicz had less to jubilate over.

There are actual indications of coolness, if not of rift. Eventually Mickiewicz will voice anxiety lest Sand, his fervent press-agent and confidante, be overcome by the whole brunt of this "evil genius, moral vampire, cross and torture, her undoing - Chopin."56 Pres-

62 Gaz. Mus., June 29, 1854. b3 H. Opienski, "Les premiers operas polonais dans leurs rapports avec Chopin,"

Rev. de Mas., May, 1929, pp. 92-98. 64 Chopin's pupil Mathias, the painter Kwiatkowski, and Count de Porthuis, Louis

Phillipe's aide-de-camp. ss Ganche, op. cit., p. 77. 26 Diary of Madame Olivier, March 8 and 11, 1842.

48 Dr. Lubov Keefer

ently their views clashed on many fronts. Mickiewicz, on Russian earth, carried respect and admiration for his jailers, the "most talented race in Europe," to the point of being suspected of treason. His unstinted friendship was given Pushkin, Russia's "strongest pillar," who could not find words to express his own humility.57 The devotion is reproduced in an unforgettable tableau of the Ancestors. Yet, lionized by the Russian elite and aglow over the country's artistic progressiveness, he invariably spotted sham: and enthusiasm for Peter's intellect did not blind him either to the Tsar's cruelty, or however much he worshipped Pushkin, the genius, to the divergence of their creeds.

How different Chopin! The talented Lenz he rebukes for being Russian, yet slaves over the piano-lisping of many a titled Muscovite nonentity 58 No force can induce him to play his Funeral March,59 reminder of Poland's disaster, yet he trades the barricades and battle- fields of his scorched land for flowered vests and violets. What a far cry from the Stuttgart letter, penned at the news of Warsaw's fall,60 to Blue-Book lists of faded belles and cheap gossip!" His reactions were always fanned by purely fortuitous"2 events and burned until the sound of Polish or mention of non-grata compatriots became anathema."

Mickiewicz's deep immersion in music could hardly resolve the discords.64 From the first things stood better with Sand. Here the common ground was Poland's plight. On meeting the poet at M-ame d'Agoult's65 she puts at once her house, her all, at his disposal "to death" and forever.66

Soon the friendship was to be tested. For months Mickiewicz's Aristocrats had tried to crash the Porte St. Martin. Her help was solicited. The few localisms ironed out, he, a dazzling linguist, was overcome by her eulogies, swore "eternal gratitude" and a promise to cherish the "dear traces of charming nails."67 On his return as

"I Chuiko, "Mickiewicz v Russkom Obshchestve," Severnyi Vestnik (1838), p. 33. 68 Lenz, Chopin (Schirmer, 1899), p. 54. b9 E. Legouv6, Soixante A ns de Souvenirs, p. 328. 80 A. Hadley, Somze Notes on Chopin (1937), p. 48. 81 T. Boy-Zelinski, International Liter. (Moscow, 1941). 62 Dambrowski's and Slowacki's visits. Sand to M. Marliani, Jan. 22, 1839. 63 Ganche, Voyages avec Chopin (Paris, 1926), p. 37. 63 To Odynic, Aug. 16, 1837. 64 Mickiewicz had married the daughter of the pianist Szimanowska, and could never

be without a piano. 65 Hist. de ma Vie, VIII, 99. 6 Nohant, March 18, Apr. 5, 17, 1837. 67 June, 3, 1847.


Slav lecturer at the College, intimacy waxed.-8 She hardly missed a talk and, surrounded by Michelet, Sainte-Beuve, Balzac, Ampere, was known to steal the show.69

Her pulling of strings in his behalf redoubled, in the conviction that "no line of his was useless or insignificant." And their mutual esteem survived the fiasco of his brain-child. As special favor he begs her to apply her talents to Krasinski's Undivine Comedy, and she titles him "the sole ecstatic to cross her path, peer of St. John, Socrates, Jesus, Dante, Joan of Arc," kind, sweet, self-disciplined.

Aghast at the French, unable and unwilling to understand Mickie- wicz, she challenges their lethargy in a metaphysical essay, where she draws a parallel between him, Byron and Goethe.70 Her verdict is that neither Faust, "reality seen through the prism of mocking demonism," nor Manfred the dreamer, approach the seething lava of hatred rocking the Ancestors and Conrad. What is more, both self- sacrifice and rage, are masks for Mickiewicz. All-inclusive and in- trinsic, his world rises over reality-gantlets thrown to tzaristic des- potism - to the temple of the soul knowing no victors or vanquished. Eventually his fanaticism, particularly his Napoleonic cult, an illness akin to that of her Frederic, will frighten her, just as the patriotic excesses of his son many years later.

Yet, for the moment, the poet's genius all but engulfed her. As artist and human she ranks him alongside of Eugene Delacroix, her idol. In Impressions et Souvenirs, we have a fireside group-portrait of the Menage, highlighting the well-nigh incredible sweetness and humility of the poet in contrast with Chopin's preoccupation with glitter, reproduced with more bile in Elle et Lui.

It is a thousand pities that Delacroix crossed Chopin's path so late. From his unadulterated esteem of the musician one could expect more than, in the first installments of the diary, a noncommittal society- column, later, a hospital chart. Yet, his very presence brings out a highly pertinent phenomenon, that is, Chopin's mental self- sufficiency. Sand is pitiless in branding it and never tires to oppose the staggering versatility of the painter, at home in letters and music, curious of the Why and How of the Universe, to the onesidedness of that other whose readings began and ended with her own works, Vol- taire's Dictionnaire Philosophique, and a few Polish poems,7' who availed himself of Parisian intellectual wealth to the extent of one

68 V. Karenin, Adam Mickiewicz i. G. Sand, Vestnik Evropy (1907), p. 195. 69 Beer, Mickiewicz und seine Weltanschauung (Stuttgart, 1898), p. 390. 70 Revue des deux Mondes, 1841, writ. 1839. 71 Many doubt even these.

50 Dr. Lubov Keefer

play (Oedipus), and could not be budged to attend the Bonn unveiling of Beethoven's monument. On Delacroix' request the pianist divulged mysteries of Bach and Mozart, but asked nothing. Ingres he found stiff. Fear and terror, grafted on old superstitions, were his only response to Michelangelo and Rubens, as they were to religion.72 More, the only books ever requested by Chopin were the Ancestors and a lent copy of Witwicki,73 both destined, according to some, never to leave his bedside.74

Of course, this apathy extended itself to music and its priests. Liszt it was who diagnosed Chopin's sympathy as conditioned solely by congenial traits.75 When Heller submitted to him the Carnival, he found praise only for the cover, and, confronted with Schlesinger's suggestion of a French edition, turned it down with the judgment that "it was not music."76 Never did he teach anything by Schumann. As to the dedication of the F Major, it was a perfunctory impersonal gesture, a bargain in which the Preludes and Pleyel could be sub- stituted at will.

This intellectual isolationism, the very quintessence of Chopin's aristocratic fragrance, deals the mortal blow to the Mickiewiczians. "Look not on the meat but look on the man." Strongest of the ar- raignments is the immediacy and spontaneity of Chopin's speech. For that matter, Sand, initiated by her own admission, into every fibre of Chopin's consciousness, insists77 that no one shuddered more at link- ing ethereal sound with concrete matter.

Negative evidence may not be as conclusive as its opposite. And a lover of Chopin should have, no matter how cursory, an introduc- tion to Mickiewicz. Yet any pigeonholing of the type perpetrated by Stan and his ready disciples belongs in the nursery. So, why look for resemblances? Let us cherish the Ballades, every note of them, as music, and start where Karasowski78 and Bronarski wisely had left off, viz., that it is "foolhardy to seek here allegory, history, politics or philosophical deductions."

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, PEABODY CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC, BALTIMORE.

72 L. Wiener, Sketches of G. Sand (Chicago, 1892), p. 88. 73 To Fontana, Majorca, April 10, 1839, with 2 Ballades finished. He read it to Sand,

who found it "charming." 74 To Hadden, London, 1934, p. 149. Also Mathias, also to Grzymala, March 17, 1839. 75 M. a M., II, 524. 76 To Fontana, March 6, 1849. 77 istoire de ma Vie, ViII, 99. 78 Karasowski, p. 343 and L. Bronarski, "Stosunek Schumanna," Kwarlalnyk musycz-

ny, Z. 3, pp. 260-271, 396-412.

Article Contentsp. 38p. 39p. 40p. 41p. 42p. 43p. 44p. 45p. 46p. 47p. 48p. 49p. 50

Issue Table of ContentsAmerican Slavic and East European Review, Vol. 5, No. 1/2 (May, 1946), pp. 1-227Front Matter [pp. ]Modern Yugoslav Drama [pp. 1-18]Josip Jurcic, The Slovene Scott[pp. 19-33]A Polish Lenore: The Flight [pp. 34-37]The Influence of Adam Mickiewicz on the Ballades of Chopin [pp. 38-50]Primitive Civilization of the Eastern Slavs [pp. 51-87]Polish Scholarship and Pushkin [pp. 88-92]Bits of Table Talk on Pushkin. I. One More Polemic of Pushkin with Mickiewicz [pp. 93-110]The Influence of Schiller in Russia 1800-1840 [pp. 111-137]Lavrov, Chaikovski, and the United States [pp. 138-161]What a Russian Schoolboy Learns about American History [pp. 162-175]College Russian: Objectives and Methods [pp. 176-186]Study of Scientific Russian in American Universities [pp. 187]Dezso Kosztolanyi, Hungarian Homo Aestheticus (1885-1936) [pp. 188-203]ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 204-205]Review: untitled [pp. 205-206]Review: untitled [pp. 206-210]Review: untitled [pp. 210-212]Review: untitled [pp. 212-221]

ObituariesHenry Lanz [pp. 222]Roman Dyboski [pp. 222-225]George Zinobei Patrick [pp. 225-227]

Back Matter [pp. ]

Documents

The Influence of Adam Mickiewicz on the Ballades of Chopin