Alexandria Victoria had ascended to the British throne to become Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791-1872) had filed a caveat at the patent office in Washington for an apparatus he had developed the previous year for a magnetic telegraph, Thomas Carlyle had written his influential work, The French revolution, and in the world of music, Berlioz had composed his immortal Requiem.
By 1837, Chopin had met Madame George Sand :"How unsympathetic she is, that Sand woman! Is she really a woman? I am beginning to doubt it."
His engagement to Marie Wodzinska - "our joy is indescribable. We drink and eat together, we coax and brow-beat each other. my happiness is supreme" - had ended, perhaps more through differences of class and almost certainly because of his health, having by this time begun to spit blood, and also, because her family had returned to Poland. The year 1837 also saw Chopin in London.
Mendelssohn to Hiller: " One evening he payed magnificently at Broadwood's and then slipped away again. He was, it seems, very unwell."
"It must be a charnal house" said Chopin of the opening of his famous Scherzo in Bb minor - presto and sotto voce : "For Chopin it was never question enough, never piano enough, never valuted (tombe) enough, never important enough."
Dark, fateful, silent elements - all tragic to hear. These, from one about whom we are told could expel reams of laughter from his family and friends with his innate sense of mimicry and child-like hunour.As was once said of Charles Dickens : "Beneath his sparkling, clear and sunny utterance, his sympathy with everything around him, there were dark, fateful elements - tragic to look upon."
G.C.Ashton Jonson: "It is a weighty question, a question of the riddle of existence asked of fate with bated breath by some perplexed soul standing in a vaulted antechamber to the grave."
And yet, one can see a smile creep across the face of this music.
"The impassioned character of the Scherzo reminds us more of its predecessors; it is a highly attractive piece, so overflowing with tenderness, boldness, love and contempt, that it may be compared, not inappropriately, to a Byron poem. Such a one does not please everyone tobe sure." (Schumann)
PHILLIP WILCHER
