Searching for Chopin, Finding Poland’s Past
The now almost-empty Pilsudski Square, where Chopin first lived when he moved to Warsaw. More Photos >
WARSAW — When President Obama announced last week that he was canceling plans to place missile interceptors in Poland, aggrieved Poles, who wanted them partly because Russians didn’t, noted the date, Sept. 17. It was the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland.
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About all that remains of Chopin in Warsaw is his heart, which is interred in the Holy Cross Church, above. More Photos »
As Roger Cohen wrote in The International Herald Tribune, it was “the rough equivalent for the Poles of their announcing concessions to a U.S. foe on 9/11.”
It’s nearly impossible not to run into some ghosts of the past here, even if you’re just a cultural tourist. The other day I went looking for what still exists of Chopin’s trail. Next year is the bicentennial of Chopin’s birth. Concerts, congresses and the famous Chopin piano competition, held here every five years, are all planned for the spring, along with the opening of a refurbished Chopin museum next to the Warsaw Conservatory, where he studied.
“Chopin is our symbol and tourist product but more than that,” said Albert Grudzinski, deputy director of the Chopin Institute, who oversees the competition, “even during Communist times culture was what kept people together here. It was our window to the world.”
And it’s of course the reverse too, a window onto Poland from the outside. Warsaw is where Chopin spent roughly half his life. He moved to the city from the countryside as an infant when his father, Nicolas, started teaching French at the Warsaw Lyceum, then established himself as a homegrown prodigy at the keyboard and as a composer.
But the Warsaw he knew turned to rubble and was only partly rebuilt. Paris has Chopin’s grave, where fans leave cough drops. In London a plaque marks the town house where he spent a few miserable weeks, ill and huddled in his overcoat in front of a fire, from which he briefly roused himself for what would be his last public performance, a benefit for the Friends of Poland in 1838. (He “played like an angel,” reported his best student, Princess Marcelina Czartoryska.)
Warsaw, on the other hand, has surprisingly little that is authentic left of its most famous artist. Looking for where he grew up reveals not many original sites from his past but, as in a W. G. Sebald novel and maybe more usefully, a palimpsest of ruin and memory.
Wojciech Mlotkowski, a young Polish tour guide, was standing in Pilsudski Square carrying a hand-held GPS program of Chopin landmarks around the city. Its virtualness turned out to be a nice metaphor.
“This is where Chopin first lived in Warsaw,” he said, sweeping his hand across a broad stone plaza, occupied only by a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The Saxon Palace used to be here, Mr. Mlotkowski said. It housed the lyceum where Nicolas taught and a few apartments for teachers’ families, including Chopin’s. When the Nazis occupied Poland, they renamed this Adolf Hitler Platz, then blew up the palace and most of the rest of the city in response to the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. The tomb is nearly all that survived from what had been the palace arcade.
In front of it, where the plaza now faces a new Norman Foster-designed office building, John Paul II, in 1979, just after his election as pope, exhorted thousands of his countrymen to stand up to Communism. On the very same spot, decades before, the huge onion-domed Alexander Nevsky Cathedral towered over the city. Built by the Russian imperial rulers of Poland, and finished in 1912, it was demolished less than 15 years later in an act of vengeance by newly independent Poles. There’s talk these days about rebuilding the Saxon Palace but not the cathedral, whose destruction is an embarrassment the Poles would evidently prefer to forget.
“All very interesting,” I said. I was gazing at nothing. “But what about Chopin?”
Mr. Mlotkowski shrugged, as if to say, What did I expect?
A few blocks away a small sign advertised Chopin’s salon in the Czapski Palace. Like the rest of this part of the city, the palace is a postwar reconstruction. The building Chopin knew was flattened by the Germans. The composer wrote his two piano concertos and first mazurkas in a room in the original palace that hasn’t been reconstructed.
Instead what’s supposed to be the Chopin family’s second floor drawing room, based on a sketch made a dozen years after Chopin left town, passes for an ersatz shrine to the composer. Empire chairs and gilt-framed mirrors, none his, face a Pleyel piano, also not his. A wood chest, according to a label, comes from the estate of the great-great-granddaughter of Chopin’s sister Ludwika. The whole room has the faded, musty air of a bygone Soviet hotel.
At least Chopin left his heart in Warsaw. Sheila Cleary, a tourist from Wicklow, Ireland, was looking for it at the Holy Cross Church the other morning. After Chopin died in Paris, his sister brought his heart back here, as he wished. It was interred in the church. A music-loving German general — a notorious war criminal, as it happened — helped save it when the Nazis leveled the church after the uprising.
“I wanted to find something,” Ms. Cleary said, her voice trailing off. She had spent a couple of baffled days, apparently, looking for but more or less not finding Chopin.
He was a die-hard nationalist. He even declined to arrange a return to Poland so long as Russia occupied the country, which meant that having left in 1830, at 20, he never saw his homeland again. Maybe he would have appreciated how his absence now speaks volumes about what happened here later.
Then again, he’s ubiquitous anyway. A pair of Russian pianists, Nikolai Lugansky and Vadim Rudenko, gave a recital in the Warsaw Philharmonic Chamber Hall as part of an annual Chopin festival the other evening. They played the Rondo in C before a packed house full of young people.
The piece is pure fluff, utterly forgettable, but everybody listened in rapt silence. Even what you might call, substance-wise, the musical version of Chopin’s ghost stirs Polish pride.
Warsaw might have suffered plenty since he died. But at nearly 200, he’s doing just fine.
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