Chopin: Genius or monster?

Everyone knows Chopin, yet of all the great composers he's the least well-known. This is thanks partly to the myths that have accrued about him, and partly to the paradoxes in his music and character. The stock images are of the staunch Polish patriot, and of the hypersensitive aesthete coughing his heart out as he pens his romantic melodies. Yet in truth Chopin was a political arch-conservative, an artistic and social snob, and a dandy who hated contact with the rest of the human race.

Moreover, though his music may have been revolutionary, he was a stern Classicist, despising the Romanticism of his friends Liszt, Schumann and Mendelssohn. Meanwhile, his phenomenal reputation as a virtuoso rested on a mere 30 concerts. None of this fits the stereotype.

Chopin's character still troubles even his most ardent champions. "A very strange person, very hard to like," is the verdict of Andras Schiff, who plays his music with rare insight and sensitivity. Anti-Semitism was only one of Schiff's charges: after researching him in depth for a biographical film, he found he didn't like the man at all.

This feeling would have been echoed by the 19th-century Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, for whom Chopin was a "moral vampire". Mickiewicz was one of two Polish exiles who called on Chopin at the height of his fame, and he didn't even answer the door to them. Chopin's heart had bled for his native Poland in 1831 as the Russians advanced on Warsaw, but all thoughts of revolution, indeed of any kind of political instability, horrified him. As an exile, he desperately needed the reassurance of a fixed social order.

Chopin's Polish childhood had been very happy: he was feted as a prodigy, and loved by his family and friends. But ever since his talented elder sister Emily died when he was 14, tuberculosis had burdened him with the guilt of the survivor. His addiction to solitude went hand-in-hand with a fanatical dandyism, but his need for exquisitely tailored waistcoats, gloves, and boots was probably dictated by something deeper and darker than mere vanity. In her brilliant book Chopin's Funeral, Benita Eisler argues that this dandyism was a flight from rage and melancholy. For Schiff, the freshly laundered white gloves that Chopin put on each day signalled his horror of human contact.

And Chopin's treatment of Schumann, who eulogised him, was sadistic: when Schumann sent him one of his own works, Chopin contemptuously dismissed it as "no music at all". Liszt had been Chopin's flatmate but Chopin's envy of Liszt's success, and his open contempt for the "vulgar" cadenzas Liszt inserted into Chopin's concerti, put an end to their relationship.

Listen to a clip of Radio Three Award-winning performance of Piano Sonata No 3 In B Minor Op 58 Allegro Maestoso by Ingrid Fliter, courtesy of EMI Classics.

Though Chopin had droves of fainting female fans, little is known about his sex life before his fateful relationship with the writer George Sand. So it's no surprise that attempts should have been made to embellish the myth, most notably by the "discovery" in 1945 of some scatological letters allegedly sent by Chopin to the Polish singer Delphina Potocka. Though these are now generally regarded as fake, a number of biographers have been taken in by them.

Sand seems to have given Chopin the stability and maternal love he needed: their ill-starred sojourn on Majorca resulted in a rich crop of compositions. Sand may have been heroically supportive in the early years of their relationship, but her eventual dismissal of him, after robbing him of his dignity, was breathtakingly callous. And his end had terrible pathos: dying destitute at the smartest address in town, publicly shunned by a lover to whom his devotion had never wavered.

Since much of Chopin's oeuvre is largely unknown today, Radio 3's Chopin Experience is going to be at least as interesting as the BBC's wall-to-wall efforts with Beethoven, Bach, and Tchaikovsky. Chopin's commodification by advertisers will here get a comprehensive riposte.

If his music has an exhilarating freshness and irresistible charm, that's just his genius: phobic in front of crowds, he was happiest performing for intimate gatherings of friends, and this crucially shaped his art. His style of playing was by all accounts infinitely subtle, masking huge technical difficulties with a beguilingly velvet touch. The sound-world he created in his nocturnes paralleled the visual world of Whistler and the poetic miasmas of Baudelaire; the heroism he evoked in his polonaises, the epigrammatic poetry of his preludes, the operatic eloquence of his concertos – all this was completely new, and still startles today.

The Chopin Experience is on Radio 3 on 17 and 18 May. To purchase the performance from which the clip in this article was taken, click here

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