Chopin Intime » The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

 Drodzy są i widziani we śnie przyjaciele…
[Dear are friends seen in a dream….]

 — Adam Mickiewicz, Forefathers’ Eve

I

Hanging in the brightly-lit Gallery of Polish Art of the Nineteenth Century, on the third floor of the National Museum in Poznań, is Teofil Kwiatkowski’s masterpiece Polonez Chopina (Bal w Hôtel Lambert), or Chopin’s Polonaise (A Ball at the Hotel Lambert in Paris). Executed in watercolor and gouache in 1859, Chopin’s Polonaise is a dreamlike vision of a grand masquerade held in the Hôtel Lambert, the residence of the exiled Polish Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, with none other than Frédéric Chopin (Fryderyk Szopen) providing the musical entertainment.

Situated on the eastern tip of the Île Saint-Louis, the Hôtel Lambert functioned as the unofficial headquarters of those Polish émigrés who gathered in Paris after the anti-Russian November Uprising of 1830, a safe harbor where they could plot against the czar, a political salon where they could mull over the la question polonaise, and the ideal setting for the annual Polish Refugee  Ball, one of which Kwiatkowski chose for his subject.

Chopin’s memorable performances at these charity balls provided a theme Kwiatkowski returned to repeatedly, once in oil (presently in the collection of the Polish Library in Paris), and three times in watercolor (on display in the Museum of Princes Czartoryski in Kraków, the National Museum in Warsaw, and the National Museum in Poznań). It is the Poznań Polonaise that is best known, and with good reason.

It is an evocative depiction of those famous gatherings, full of celebrity cameos — the elderly Prince Adam Czartoryski is there, enfolded in a long flowing cloak, as he leads a procession including his wife, Anna Zofia Sapieha, who is dressed as the sixteenth century Queen Barbara Radziwiłłówna, and his son, Witold, who is in the garb of a knight of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The poet Adam Mickiewicz is present, alongside the novelist George Sand and the pianist Marcelina Czartoryska. Teofil Kwiatkowski has also inserted himself, albeit modestly, barely visible in the shadows.

Frédéric Chopin has been afforded pride of place, naturally, seated at his piano, performing one of his Polonaises, most likely his Polonaise in A major, the “Military Polonaise” later described by Arthur Rubinstein as the “symbol of Poland’s glory,” an ancient glory further underscored by the sheer number of guests at this fancy-dress ball decked out in the guise of Winged Hussars.

Or, perhaps, it is the rather more mournful Polonaise in C minor, the contrasting “symbol of Poland’s tragedy,” as Rubinstein put it. Kwiatkowski only tells us that it is a Polonez Chopina, so we are free to choose for ourselves. In any case, the scene is bathed in an ethereal golden light, emanating from no obvious source, and gradually the viewer begins to pick up on an essential unreality to the mise en scène. To wit, a barefoot girl in a pure white robe, her hair in long twin braids, is standing near Chopin. What is this young Mazovian peasantess, this otherworldly muse, doing in the Hôtel Lambert? And wasn’t the ball usually held in the well-ventilated courtyard of the palace, and not in this oppressive crypt-like setting, with its thick masonry vaults and dark recesses?

It is worth noting that between November 8, 1838 and February 11, 1839 the tubercular Chopin found himself convalescing in Mallorca, at the Charterhouse in Valldemossa, together with his lover, the French novelist George Sand (Aurore Dudevant), and it was there that he was said to have experienced a shining vision of Polish kings and cavaliers marching to the tune of a stately Polonaise in triple time.

Thus did Chopin’s famous twin Polonaises (Op. 40 Nos. 1&2) come into being, the first in all its martial glory, the second in all its melancholic grandeur. Bearing all of this in mind, the true subject of Kwiatkowski’s painting starts to come into focus. The setting is not the Hôtel Lambert in Paris, but the Carthusian monastery in Valldemossa. And Chopin is not playing a grand or concert piano, but a diminutive pianino, either the decrepit local one he was obliged to use for the first part of his Mallorcan working vacation, or the lovely pianino that he ordered from the French piano manufacturing firm Pleyel et Cie. and had delivered to the Balearic Islands (only to be hit by a massive customs duty). Kwiatkowski’s Polonez Chopina (Bal w Hôtel Lambert) is dreamlike precisely because it is a dream, Chopin’s dream in Valldemossa’s spare monastic Cell No. 4, with the heroes of Polish history commingled in his mind’s eye with the masqueraders of the Polish Refugee Ball.

II

The presence of the pianino in Kwiatkowski’s painting is of particular interest, since we are accustomed to thinking of Chopin blazing away on grand pianos manufactured by John Broadwood & Sons or Pleyel et Cie., yet the Polish-born composer also appreciated the delicate, intimate soundscape made possible by upright pianinos, with their smaller size and delicate rabbit-fur felt hammers. To get a sense of what Chopin performing on one of these pianinos might have sounded like, either in a Carthusian monastery or a Parisian salon, I would highly recommend listening to the Franco-American keyboardist Justin Taylor’s recent recording Chopin Intime, released by the music label Alpha Classics on May 9, 2025.

Taylor, playing an 1844 Pleyel pianino of six and a half octaves, channels a more intimate, if  no less virtuosic, Chopin. The sound is sometimes crystalline, silvery, harp-like, and at others soft,  satiny, and warm; Taylor himself has called the pianino’s effects “velvety and veiled.” It is not a sound to fill a ballroom or a concert hall, but it is ideally suited for a domestic setting. The Australian musicologist Michael Moran has complained that

The completely physical and percussive treatment of the instrument in Chopin interpretation today is beginning to depress me inordinately. Many young pianists possess such fabulous technique that has required enormous work and personal life sacrifice to achieve. Why waste it thundering away? Is Chopin’s music only to be offered up on the altar of egotistical virtuosic display, competition career building, pedagogical snobbery and monetary gain?

There is no better corrective to this unfortunate phenomenon than Justin Taylor’s gorgeous, understated treatment in Chopin Intime. One of my favorite classical recordings is Alain Planès’s Chez Pleyel (Harmonia Mundi, 2009), performed on an 1836 Pleyel, but Chopin Intime surpasses even that, representing as it does the ideal conjunction of composition, instrument, and artist.

There are too many highlights in Taylor’s program to name, though the included Preludes (Op. 28) are all perfect glittering little musical jewels, and the Nocturnes, Études, and Mazurkas together give the effect of warm honey drizzled over one’s temporal, frontal, and limbic systems. But the revelation, for this listener at least, was Taylor’s rendition of the Polish song “Wiosna” (“Spring”), composed just before the infamous trip to Mallorca and reworked throughout Chopin’s lifetime. Clocking in at a mere one minute, seventeen seconds, “Wiosna” is based on a poem by Stefan Witwicki (1801-1847) which begins

Błyszczą, krople rosy,
Mruczy zdrój po błoni,
Ukryta we wrzosy
Gdzieś jałowka dzwoni.

Piękną, miłą błonią
Leci wzrok wesoło;
W koło kwiaty wonią,
Kwitną gaje w koło.

Paś się, błąkaj, trzódko,
Ja pod skałą siędę,
Piosnkę lubą, słodką
Śpiewać sobie będę.

[They shine, the dewdrops,
Spring murmurs in the meadow,
Hidden in the heather
Somewhere a heifer calls.

A gentle, verdant meadow
Paints a pretty picture;
Flowers fragrant all around,
Trees in blossom all around.

Graze and wander, little herd,
While I sit beside a rock,
And a sweet, lovely song
I’ll be singing to myself.]

Each and every note played by Justin Taylor, in that “sweet, lovely song” of a Polish Spring, represents one of those silvery dewdrops scattered about the heather. Yet these are not mere melodic fripperies, and here we are reminded of Robert Schumann’s astute 1836 assessment of Chopin’s work: “If the mighty autocratic monarch of the north [the czar] knew what a dangerous enemy threatened him in Chopin’s works, in the simple tunes of his mazurkas, he would forbid this music. Chopin’s works are cannons buried in flowers.” It is a curious effect, one which becomes even more apparent coming from a humble, tinkling pianino, instead of an ornate grand piano with all its over-the-top romantic sonority.

III

Teofil Kwiatkowski and Frédéric Chopin were bosom companions, the former present during the latter’s last moments on earth, along with Aleksander Jełowicki, Marcelina Czartoryska, Wojciech Grzymała, and Chopin’s sister Ludwika. It was a scene Kwiatkowski would memorialize in his haunting 1849 Chopin on His Deathbed, commissioned by Chopin’s Scottish student and friend Jane Stirling. Kwiatkowski would become the guardian of Chopin’s personal memorabilia, entrusted to him by the composer’s family, and he continued to paint posthumous portraits of his friend for decades to come, the most stirring of which is surely Polonez Chopina. Yet the most poignant memento of all might be Chopin’s handwritten sheet music for “Wiosna,” today found in the Warsaw’s Chopin Museum, which bears the dedication written in the composer’s elegant, flowing calligraphic hand, in dark sepia ink:

Kochanemu Teofilowi Kwiatkowskiemu F Chopin 4. Sept. 1847. Paryż

[To the beloved Teofil Kwiatkowski F Chopin 4. Sept. 1847. Paris]

It was a favor the painter sought to return until his own death, more than four decades later, still in French exile, still dreaming of Polish meadows and Polish songs.

As for Chopin, to borrow Stefan Witwicki’s words in “Wiosna,”

Tam swą piosnkę głosi…
I ziemi śpiew tkliwy
Do niebios zanosi!

[His song is still being sung
Carrying the earth’s tender music
All the way to heaven!]

READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky:

Confronting the Shadows: Shūsaku Endō’s Rediscovered Masterpieces

Sede Vacante: China’s Provocations Against the Vatican

A Precious Cornerstone: Unearthing Lublin’s Lost Jewish District