Chopin & the Parisian Salon

Chopin & the Parisian Salon

“But if indeed he wrote for a salon of any sort,  

it was for a salon frequented exclusively by geniuses.” 

— Heinrich Schenker

Koncert Chopina by Henryka Siemiradzkiego (A concert given by Chopin in the salon of Duke Radziwiłł in 1829)

The music of Frederick Chopin has been so successfully adopted into our twenty-first century culture of large-scale recitals and international competitions that it is worth revisiting the social setting in which his music was first performed. It was not the concert stage where Chopin was most comfortable; he had, in fact, a genuine distaste for concerts, remarking how ‘the crowd intimidates me, its breath suffocates me, I feel paralysed by its curious look, and the unknown faced make me dumb.’ [1] It was, rather, the intimate setting of the Parisian salon where the composer-pianist felt most at home. Writers on music have frequently emphasised the importance of the Parisian salons in the shaping of Chopin's career; the German-Bohemian critic and philosopher of music Eduard Hanslick went as far to say that ‘the Salon forever remained the essential foundation of Chopin's triumphs.’ [2] 

While the elusive and exclusive nature of salon culture makes it a perplexing object of study for the modern scholar, the salons frequented by Chopin can be understood through their social function as ‘part-intellectual and part-social gathering[s] in a domestic (aristocratic or bourgeois) setting: a peculiarly nineteenth-century phenomenon principally found in the larger European capitals.’[3] In Paris, in particular, the rise of the upper-middle class following the July Revolution of 1830 came after decades of a fragmented and convoluted aristocracy whose eventual absence was felt profoundly enough that Astolphe de Custine would later write that ‘Paris no longer had a centre, or, at least, the centre is everywhere and the limits nowhere.’ [4] As much as de Custine’s words attend to the dramatic social shifts taking place in the capital, they also offer an exciting perspective of a changing cultural landscape. By the time of Chopin's arrival in Paris in October 1831, the new musical dynamism taking place in the salons had ‘made Paris the musical capital of Europe for two decades.’ [5] 

The Polish aristocracy with which Chopin would have been acquainted with upon his arrival in Paris constituted a fractious group of relocated émigrés who had fled their homeland following the November Uprising of 1830-31 (the news of which supposedly inspired the Étude in C minor op. 10 no. 12 “Revolution”). Chopin may have felt more at home around his compatriots, but socialising with the Polish aristocracy also served as a springboard into the more cosmopolitan factions of the city. It has been supposed that it was Prince Walenty Radziwill who first introduced him to James Rothschilds, one of the most prominent Parisian bankers and freemasons of the nineteenth century. Whether or not the story is true, prominent scholars such as Jolanta T. Pekacz have suggested that ‘Radziwill's connections to the circles of Parisian bankers and freemasons did mean more to Chopin at that time than did the influence of the Polish aristocracy.’ [6] 

In January 1833, Chopin wrote to his close school-friend Dominik Dziewanowski that he had found his way ‘into the very best society—among ambassadors, princes, and ministers. . .’ The composer had very quickly infiltrated a nouvelle élite whose desire for a status equal to that of the old aristocracy focused part of their interests towards the art of music, a contemporary lingua franca that created a network between the upper middle-classes of Europe whilst also providing them with intellectual stature and cultural recognition. Chopin’s prominence as both a pianist and teacher in the salons frequented by prominent cosmopolitans of the time such as Auguste Leo, Adolph Eichtal, and James de Rothschild, is suggestive of both the composer's business acumen and the high value placed on music and musicians as a status symbol for the newly emerging elite bourgeoisie. 

While the salon was Chopin’s ‘natural setting’ [7], his reluctance to embrace the concert stage inspired in the public consciousness the image of a reticent, insecure artist riddled with debilitating illness. The idea of Chopin’s suffering, both mental and physical, was perpetuated in particular salons in a choreographed romantic discourse of disease. In the salon of Chopin's friend and patron, Princess Cristina di Belgiojoso, [8] the physically ill were enlisted in a performance in which ‘physical discomfort promoted the inimitable inner sense of the fragility of life.’[9] Belgiojoso herself was partial to the poison Datura stramonium to induce ailment which was en vogue in many Parisian salons at the time.[10] With his pervading illness of both body and mind, Chopin was quickly recruited into this calculated gossip, and was regarded all the more human for it in a city that was becoming increasingly removed from ‘feeling.’ Marcel Proust would later poeticise this phenomenon when he claimed ‘happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind,’ [11] and George Sand, Chopin’s famously androgynous lover, quickly juxtaposed these themes with the angelic and heavenly, extending the metaphor beyond the physical to the spiritual.[12]

Cristina Trivulzio Belgiojoso, an 1832 portrait by Francesco Hayez

In one of the first biographies of Chopin in 1888, Frederick Niecks remarked of the pianist that ‘there was then, and there remained to the end of his life, something of a woman. . .in this man’. [13] The miniature forms in which Chopin predominantly wrote—the mazurkas, etudes, preludes, nocturnes and polonaises—were specific to a larger repertory of ‘salon music’ that was generally associated with women. Indeed, nineteenth-century salons had been the site of new found musical opportunities for women and represented an important domain of feminine culture and expression. [14] 

In the first half of the nineteenth-century, the concepts of ‘salon music’ and the ‘salon composer’ were regarded positively; Robert Schumann, for example, wrote of a ‘fashionable elegance’ demanded from the salon composer. [15] By the middle of the century, however, this gendered association with the salon was used by male critics to denigrate the status of ‘salon music’ and imply marginal artistic activity. As Frederick Niecks goes on to say; ‘Among Chopin's nocturnes. . .the most widely-prevailing idea of his character as a man and musician seems to have been derived from them. But the idea thus formed is an erroneous one; these dulcet, effeminate compositions illustrate only one side of the master's character, and by no means the best or most interesting.’

Portrait de George Sand (1838), by Auguste Charpentier

However much Chopin appreciated the intimate atmosphere of the salon, we might also assume his reasons for being there were pragmatic in the context of a society whose relations between musician and patron had been severed by political instability. In the newly competitive economics of middle-class commercialism, Chopin was wise in securing a reputation with some of the most reputable and wealthy families in the city. But as well as Chopin’s music, it was the ‘idea’ of Chopin himself—as virtuoso, as diseased and as effeminate—that were performed and sculpted in the Parisian salon.

[1] Frederick Niecks, Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician, (Enlarged Edition), Vol. 1, (Paganiniana Publications), 253.

[2] Andreas Ballstaedt, Chopin as ‘salon composer’ in nineteenth-century German criticism, ed. John Rink and Jim Samson, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 21.

[3] J. Barrie Jones, Understanding music: elements, techniques and styles, (Milton Keynes, 1994), 19. 

[4] Steven D. Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004), 114.

[5] William Weber, Music and the Middle Class, The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna, (London, Croom Helm, 1975) 48.

[6] Jolanta T. Pekacz, ‘Deconstructing a “National Composer”: Chopin and Polish Exiles in Paris, 1831-49’, 19th-Century Music, Vol. 24, No. 2, Special Issue: Nineteenth-Century Pianism (Autumn, 2000) 168.

[7] Jim Samson, Chopin (Master Musicians Series), ed. Stanley Sadie, (Oxford University Press, 1996), 127.

[8] Belgiojoso’s salon was notorious as a site of the Italian exiles in Paris, and would also be the setting for the duel between Liszt and Thalberg. See Mary Ann Smart, 'Parlor Games: Italian Music and Italian Politics in the Parisian Salon', 19th-Century Music, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Summer 2010),  36-60.

[9] J. Q. Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance, (University of California Press, 2014), 58.

[10] Arsene Houssaye, Alexandre Dumas, Ligaran, Les Confessions: Souvenirs d'un demi-siecle 1830. Vol. 2, (Primento, 2015), Section 1. 

[11] Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 2: Within a Budding Grove, (Vintage Classics, 1996), 62.

[12] Jeffrey Kallberg, Small Fairy Voices: Sex, History and Meaning in Chopin, (Harvard University, 1996), 69. 

[13] Frederick Niecks, 258.

[14] Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 105.

[15] Anne Swartz, 'Maria Szymanowska and the Salon Music of the Early Nineteenth Century', The Polish Review, Vol. 30, No. 1 (1985), 52.