United States or Uganda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Whether Chopin played at Court, as he says in a letter to Gutmann he expected to do, I have not ascertained. Nor have I been able to get any information about a dinner which, Karasowski relates, some forty countrymen of Chopin's got up in his honour when they heard of his arrival in London.
Karasowski also reports as a "fact" that To the unjust reproaches which she made to him, he merely replied: "I shall immediately leave your house, and wish henceforth no longer to be regarded by you as living." These words were very welcome to her; she made no objections, and the very same day the artist left for ever the house of Madame Sand.
The above and all the following letters of Chopin to Fontana are in the possession of Madame Johanna Lilpop, of Warsaw, and are here translated from Karasowski's Polish edition of his biography of Chopin. Many of the letters are undated, and the dates suggested by Karasowski generally wrong.
That Chopin had a programme, a definite one, there can be no doubt; but he has, wise artist, left us no clue beyond Mickiewicz's, the Polish bard Lithuanian poems. In Leipzig, Karasowski relates, that when Schumann met Chopin, the pianist confessed having "been incited to the creation of the ballades by the poetry" of his fellow countryman.
Karasowski relates that when one of Chopin's French pupils played his compositions and the auditors overwhelmed the performer with their praise, the master used often to remark that his pupil had done very well, but that the Polish element and the Polish enthusiasm had been wanting. After revealing the mystery of Chopin's tempo rubato, Liszt writes in his book on this master:
Chopin's love for George Sand was not instantaneous like that of Romeo for Juliet. Karasowski remembers having read in one of those letters of the composer which perished in 1863: "Yesterday I met George Sand...; she made a very disagreeable impression upon me." Hiller in his Open Letter to Franz Liszt writes:
Karasowski, it is true, quotes four letters of Chopin to Fontana as written from Nohant in 1838, but internal evidence shows that they must have been written three years later. We know from Mendelssohn's and Moscheles' allusions to Chopin's visit to London that he was at that time ailing.
At the twentieth bar Klindworth differs from the original as follows. The A flat Polonaise, op. 53, was published December, 1843, and is said by Karasowski to have been composed in 1840, after Chopin's return from Majorca. It is dedicated to A. Leo. This is the one Karasowski calls the story of Chopin's vision of the antique dead in an isolated tower of Madame Sand's chateau at Nohant.
It was composed in 1831 in Stuttgart, shortly after Chopin had received tidings of the taking of Warsaw by the Russians, September 8, 1831." Karasowski wrote: "Grief, anxiety and despair over the fate of his relatives and his dearly- beloved father filled the measure of his sufferings. Under the influence of this mood he wrote the C minor Etude, called by many the Revolutionary Etude.
Although Karasowski and Kleczynski give to the A flat major Polonaise the honor of suggesting a well-known story, it is really the A major that provoked it so the Polish portrait painter Kwiatowski informed Niecks.
Word Of The Day