#Stay Home with Chopin

Let’s begin with an invitation. For informal meetings, Chopin used to send a small card with a few words scribbled on it and a simple, unpretentious massage. Look at the visiting card of his publisher Camille Pleyel who accompanied him during his 1837 trip to London.

Chopin wrote: ‘We await you at 5pm’ and signed the message with his characteristic signature. The card was taken by a messenger to Stanisław Egbert Koźmian who acted as a guide during Chopin’s first visit to England.

And this is a letter of invitation sent to a befriended musician Charles-Valentine Alkan. Chopin writes:

Dear Friend,
Today we are dining with Liszt in a larger company and we count on you. – The randez-vous is at my place at 6pm. You will meet Berlioz and Schoelcher.

I expect you and kiss you with all my heart.
FFChopin
Liszt was to write as well.

Salons had a semi-private character. The audience attending salon concerts could be best described as belonging to an elitist club of people who might not know each other personally but at least knew about each other and could easily tell who was who. Of course, social circles would differ from one salon to the other.

What was it like to listen to music in such circumstances?

In the lithograph after a painting by Henryk Siemiradzki, you can see young Fryderyk Chopin among such a gathering in the salon held by Prince Antoni Radziwiłł. Let's look at it carefully, while listening to Chopin's Polonaise in B flat major composed at that very period.

Chopin sits at the piano, in a spotless elegant outfit, his hands on the keyboard.

Princess Eliza Radziwiłłówna stands at the other side of the piano looking at the pianist, their eyes meet. It was her who made a pencil drawing of him at the piano.

Princess Wanda, her younger sister to whom Chopin gave some piano lessons, sits at the front watching her teacher intently.

Prince Antoni Radziwiłł sits close to the instrument, deep in his thoughts.

There are women, younger and older, who have gathered around the piano, as close as they can, leaning towards the virtuoso not to miss the smallest note.

There are young men, standing at the distance, looking on the scene with visible jealousy.

And there are others, whose attentive faces show that they listen to music carefully.

This is how you would listen to music in the salon. There were many good ways to do that, and not all of them involved a full concentration on the flow of music.

The others are similar in that they are sketched in pencil, drawn quickly during the listening. One had to be a member of the salon society to draw Chopin at the piano.

Now you can feel similar proximity to the masterful pianists of our time. Thanks to the streaming of concerts initiated by the Chopin Institute during the first strike of the covid-19 pandemic, you can invite the greatest artists directly to your home.‘We await you... online. You can choose the time and place’. This is what the Chopin Institute writes now, repeating the words of its patron.

The main difference between Chopin’s world and ours is that, nowadays, the access to the greatest music and performances is much more democratic. Everyone can listen to it on their phone or laptop. Why not try and make a social affair of it, once more, in the way that the artists of the past could not have imagined?

We can now consider two options of meeting with the artists in our living rooms: the more traditional would be to watch the concert during an informal meeting of friends and relatives; the more modern would be to connect with each other via Internet coummunicator.

To make this music part of our social lives would mean to engage in a historically informed practice of listening. The rendez-vous, this time, is at your place.