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Final two years

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In February 1848, Chopin gave his last concert in Paris. To escape the hard times caused by the French revolution of 1848 and like many other artists, he travelled with his former pupil Thomas Tellefsen to London in April.[1] His former pupil Jane Stirling had found him an inexpensive apartment in London at Bentinck Street.[2] Soon after, he met the celebrated soprano and wealthy philanthropist Jenny Lind (1820-1887) who was adored by Queen Victoria and other monarchs in Europe.[3]. Chopin’s letters to family and friends tell upbeat about their many encounters in London and Scotland.[4] The possibility of a romance was apparently first seen in 1932.[5]

Although Chopin admits to be considered “some sort of amateur”[6] John Broadwood & Sons, Appointed Pianoforte Manufacturers to Queen Victoria, assisted him generously with grand pianos and public performances in London and Manchester and during his nearly three-month sojourn in Scotland.[7] However, Chopin’s ill health took a bad turn, and after a last appearance at the Polish Ball at Guildhall in London on 16 November 1848,[8] he returned later in the month to Paris where he was unable to teach or perform anymore.

In May 1849, Chopin was visited by Jenny Lind who, with Queen Victoria in the know, now wanted to marry him.[9] When it failed and Jenny Lind had fled the cholera epidemic in Paris, Chopin continued apparently to benefit from her financial patronage.[10][11]

In early August, Chopin’s sister Ludwika managed to come from the Russian-occupied Warsaw and nursed him in his new apartment at the prestigious Place Vendôme.[12] There in the small hours of 17 October 1849, Chopin died – apparently of tuberculosis. Later that morning, Auguste Clésinger made the death mask and casts of his hands. Before Chopin's funeral and pursuant to his dying wish and fear of being buried alive, his heart was removed and his sister took it in an urn to Warsaw. It remains sealed within a pillar of the Holy Cross Church (Kościół Świętego Krzyża) on Krakowskie Przedmieście, beneath an inscription from Matthew VI:21: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

According to Paris and London press reports and Frederick Niecks’ biography of Chopin[13], the funeral at the imposing Église de la Madeleine was attended by nearly 3,000 people who did not all know Chopin.[14] Giacomo Meyerbeer led the funeral procession together with Prince Adam Czartoryski.[15] In the aftermath of the popular insurrection and street fights and the rampant cholera which afflicted Paris in 1848-1849, the city is said not to have seen a funeral of such pomp and circumstance since 1838 and 1842.[16]

Chopin had apparently requested that Mozart's Requiem be performed at his funeral. Its movement Tuba Mirum for four voices[17] was sung by the bass Signor Lablache, the tenor Alexis Dupont and – concealed behind a black velvet curtain – the mezzo soprano Pauline Viardot and a soprano whose identity has not been confirmed.[18] Chopin’s Funeral March from Sonata Op. 35[19] and Preludes no. 4 in E minor and no. 6 in B minor were also performed at the ceremony.

Chopin was buried at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery close to Vincenzo Bellini’s tomb.[20] At the graveside, the Funeral March was played again. Later, some of Chopin's Polish friends journeyed to Paris with a jar of earth from their native land and scattered it over his grave so that Chopin would lie under Polish soil. Chopin's grave attracts numerous visitors and is invariably festooned with flowers, even during the winter. – Jenny Lind continued for the rest of her life to pay tribute in many different ways to Chopin's musical legacy.[21] Institutional participation in the continued research on artworks commemorating Chopin well into La Belle Époque would be welcome.[22]

  1. ^ Thomas Tellefsen’s handwritten letters to his parents, August and on 26 November 1848: “Well! I made the journey with Chopin” to London, where “I visited him every day and had lunch with him all the time” (copies obtained by Icons of Europe from the National Library of Norway).
  2. ^ The Scottish spinster Jane Stirling (1804-1859), a Calvinist, lived an unassuming life on an annual annuity of £ 300-400 (source: her father’s original will of 1816, her own original death certificate, her unmarked grave, and Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle by Thomas Carlyle (London 1883, vol. II, p. 113-114).
  3. ^ Jenny Lind was court singer to the King of Sweden and Norway (Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte), the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia. They knew well Emperor Nicholas I of Russia and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte who became president of the French Republic in December 1848.
  4. ^ Chopin and The Swedish Nightingale by Cecilia and Jens Jorgensen (Icons of Europe, Brussels 2003, ISBN 2-9600385-0-9), which sees a romance develop.
  5. ^ Martial Douël in The Musical Quarterly, XVIII, 1932, p. 423-427, but he assumed that Jenny Lind returned to Stockholm in the summer of 1848 and left it there.
  6. ^ Chopin’s letter of 2 June 1848 to Wojciech Grzymała, which also says, “… to have any success you must play Mendelssohn”.
  7. ^ Chopin’s letter of 19 August 1848: “Broadwood … has been the kindest and most generous of friends” [he was also a friend of Jenny Lind since 1847]; and Frederick Niecks, The Life of Chopin: Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician, Novello, Ewer & Co., London and New York, 1888, 1890 and 1902 (and Leipzig 1890)., vol. II, p. 288 including note 16.
  8. ^ The London Illustrated News, No. 344, Vol. XIII, 18 November 1848 (p. 314): “M. Chopin, the celebrated pianiste, was also present, and performed some of his beautiful compositions with much applause”.
  9. ^ In Paris, Jenny Lind was accompanied by Mrs George Grote and her marriage counsellor, the distinguished Nassau W. Senior. His handwritten letter of 28 May 1849 tells Mrs Grote who is still in Paris with Jenny Lind: “Lord Liverpool says that Jenny ought to write not direct to the Queen, but to G. Anson [the Queen’s Privy Purse] – to say that as Her Majesty had done her the honor to express a wish to be informed when this marriage was to take place, he thought it wise to tell to him for her Majesty’s information that it will never take place” (copy from The National Archives, Wales, obtained by Icons of Europe).
  10. ^ Jenny Lind is presumed to be the donor of the anonymous gift of 25,000 francs he received in July 1849 (Chopin in the World (2003/2004, p. 25-26), the annual Journal of the International Federation of Chopin Societies; and the article “Frycek ze Szwedka” in Polityka, the Polish weekly magazine, Warsaw, 6 March 2004, p. 64-65).
  11. ^ Having reviewed Icons of Europe’s updated research paper early 2005, Prof. Dr hab. Mieczyslaw Tomaszewski, Akademia Muzyczna, Kraków wrote in his letter of 18 April 2005: “Je l’ai lu avec grand intérêt et je vous félicite.”
  12. ^ Hôtel Boudafort de Saint James at 12 Place de Vendôme housed the Russian embassy in 1839-1849 (Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris, 1985 by Jacques Hillairet).
  13. ^ Information on the 1848-1849 period and later years in Fr. Niecks biography of Chopin of 1888 should be used with caution, because in the Preface he cites Jenny Lind as one of his few surviving “chief sources of information”, but the book refers scantly to her acquaintance with Chopin to hide their true relationship. Moreover, Niecks was at the time not yet an Edinburgh University professor as commonly believed, but an unknown German viola player who had “a modest position as organist and teacher in Dumfries” (source: Preface and Note of his only other biography, Robert Schumann, London 1924).
  14. ^ The Musical World (10 November 1849) notes: “Many, perhaps, had never heard of him [Chopin] before”. Feuilleton du Siècle (4 November) observes that “women were in very great majority” and “some had come from London, Vienna, and Berlin”. Feuilleton de la Presse (5 November) adds: “… the colourful and gay toilettes of some of the ladies were not suitable” for the occasion.
  15. ^ Meyerbeer was a longstanding friend and former patron of Jenny Lind, but not of Chopin: Fr. Niecks, vol. II, p. 169 and p. 325 note 20. Giacomo Meyerbeer: A Life in Letters by Heinz and Gudrun Becker (Wilhemshaven 1983) contains no reference to Chopin.
  16. ^ The Historical Archives of the Paroisse de La Madeleine gave on 25 January 2006 two earlier examples of such a grand funeral, which must have required special permission and a large budget: Prince de Talleyrand at the Notre-Dame in 1838, and the minister of finance Georges Humann at La Madeleine in 1842.
  17. ^ Fr. Niecks, vol. II, p. 325.
  18. ^ Fr. Niecks cites “Madame Castellan”, a not well known French soprano. However, research in 2004-2007 by Icons of Europe says that it was more likely Jenny Lind singing and that she apparently arranged the whole funeral with high-level permission.
  19. ^ The Funeral March was played in Napoléon Henri Reber's instrumentation Fryderyk Chopin 1810-1849: A Chronological Biography.
  20. ^ Fr. Niecks (vol. II, p. 322-323) argues furiously against such a wish, but Franz Liszt says earlier in Life of Chopin (New York 1863, p.191): “Chopin desired to be buried by the side of Bellini”.
  21. ^ For example, Jenny Lind sang to her own arrangement Recueil de Mazourkas de F. Chopin twice for Queen Victoria in 1855-1856 (the Queen’s private Journal, The Royal Archives) and during her concert tour of Russian-occupied Poland in 1858 (the musical journal Ruch Muzyczny), and she worked in 1879-1887 with Frederick Niecks on his biography of Chopin.
  22. ^ Icons of Europe has discovered unpublished information on, for example, Chopin’s monument at Père-Lachaise, his cut portrait at the Louvre, and Félix Barrias’ painting La mort de Chopin, and the sculpture at Royal Łazienki Park in Warsaw.
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