Chopin in Paris: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer by Tad Szulc

Author:Tad Szulc [Szulc, Tad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1999-03-12T03:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

THAT THE STUDENTS—the aristocratic daughters from Faubourg St. Honoré and Faubourg St. Germain, and young Polish emigrés—chose to come to Chopin for their lessons when he returned to Paris was no great surprise. Having taught the piano there for eight years, he had now attained the pinnacle of recognition as one of the greatest pianists and teachers of his time, as well as an enormously admired composer. Only Liszt could claim comparable artistry in all three realms, but in truth he did not possess Chopin’s extraordinary pedagogic gifts—and he knew it. Yet, curiously, he succeeded better than Chopin in molding pupils into famous virtuosos. “Chopin was unfortunate in his pupils,” Liszt, his friendly rival, once remarked. “None of them has become a player of any importance.”

Though teaching was Fryderyk’s principal source of revenue, far exceeding the income from his published compositions, he was extremely selective in accepting pupils. He far preferred “professional” pianists and very advanced students (for what today would be called master classes), albeit he took on highly talented “amateurs,” and fellow Poles enjoyed priorities. Children were excluded as a matter of principle, but there were two striking exceptions: Carl Filtsch, a GermanHungarian music prodigy, whom Chopin agreed to teach when the boy was eleven—he sensed genius and saw himself in Carl—but the boy died from consumption at fifteen; and Adolf Gutmann, whom he regarded as his favorite pupil and started instructing when he arrived from his native Germany at fifteen. In general, Chopin was partial to female candidates for pupils.

To be Chopin’s pupil was a mark of distinction, and Fryderyk was generous enough not to embarrass those who claimed, falsely, to have received his tutelage. “I have not given him any lessons,” Chopin said about an unnamed person, “but if it may be useful to him to pass for my pupil, leave him in peace.”

Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, a leading Chopin scholar, estimates that between 1832 and 1849, the years spanning his Parisian period and his death, Fryderyk probably had around 150 students, “if by pupil one understands every person who has benefited from his advice,” although “this number is certainly below reality.” Chopin kept no records, and the only surviving trace of his lessons is a page from his pocket notebook listing students over six days of his London stay in 1848, a year before he died. There also exists a list of twenty pupils and their parents, obviously very far from complete, made by his Scottish student, friend, and sponsor Jane Wilhelmina Stirling sometime in the late 1840s.

The most helpful aid in reconstructing Chopin’s teaching years, however, is the rich repository of remembrances by his students contained in volumes of memoirs and correspondence, ranging from Princess Marcelina Czartoryska to Wilhelm von Lenz, his most faithful interpreters in his lifetime. Their accounts, on the whole, are remarkably consistent in praising Chopin’s teaching methods and recounting his occasionally strange behavior. But they also record his collapsing health. Friedrike Müller Streicher, who studied with him on rue Tronchet in 1839, remembered: “Alas! he suffered greatly.

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