Experiencing Chopin by Christine Lee Gengaro

Author:Christine Lee Gengaro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

Boyhood Crushes

The Chopin house was the family home, but was also a boarding house for some students of the Warsaw Lyceum, where Chopin’s father Mikołaj taught. Tytus Wojciechowski was one of the boarders in the Chopin house in the fall of 1824. He was one of four boarders who would remain friends with Chopin for the rest of his life, although these two kept in touch mainly through correspondence. Tytus was two years older than Fryderyk, and was in many ways his opposite, the yang to Chopin’s yin. While Chopin was thin and pale, Tytus was hearty and strong. Chopin was indecisive and uncertain, Tytus was calm and self-assured.

The bond between the fourteen-year-old Chopin and the sixteen-year-old Tytus was formed quickly. Chopin considered him a trusted confidant, and shared many thoughts and feelings with him. Chopin trusted Tytus enough to tell him that he had a crush on Konstancja Gładkowska (discussed below), a singer at the conservatory, but Chopin was also effusive in his feeling toward Tytus. It seems that theirs was a passionate connection. There’s no proof of any physical interaction between them, but Chopin wrote to him things like, “I wanted to please you because I’m madly in love with you”; “Tonight you will dream that you are kissing me”; “I love you to distraction.” Such uninhibited and unreserved writing was certainly common at the time, and Chopin was a particularly sensitive and demonstrative teenager. Chopin scholar Pierre Azoury, who wrote about Chopin’s friends and contemporaries, said of this relationship: “There is no proof that Tytus and Chopin were ever lovers in the physical sense. It seems more likely that Chopin’s idée fixe on Tytus was simply an extreme form of dependence.” Chopin biographer Ruth Jordan states, “it would not be wrong to say that Tytus was Frederick’s first love, in the confused and non-physical sense which is often characteristic of a first awakening.”

After Tytus finished at the Warsaw Lyceum, he saw Chopin only a handful of times. Tytus studied law at Warsaw University from 1826 to 1829. In 1828, they saw each other at Konstanty Pruszak’s country estate in Sanniki nad Wisła, and in 1830, Chopin visited Tytus in Poturzyn, where the Wojciechowski family had their land. Shortly after that the two traveled to Vienna. When the Polish uprising began in November of 1830, Tytus returned to Poland, while Chopin remained in Austria. Tytus was a second lieutenant in the Polish–Russian War, and was decorated with the Gold Cross of Military Virtue. In the 1860s, he was a leader in the White party. While Chopin turned to a career in music and his destiny in Paris and the world stage, Tytus continued his involvement in politics, and became a very successful agriculturist. He grew beets, adopted the practice of crop rotation, and eventually opened a successful sugar factory in Poland.

Tytus was the dedicatee of Chopin’s Variations on Mozart’s aria “La ci darem la mano,” which was one of the very first pieces Chopin composed for the orchestra.

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