Chopin, Mahler, Brahms

The next day, Tuesday, August 16th, Agnieszka drove us about an hour out of town to the small village of Zelezowa Wola. There, on either February 22, 1810 (my –141st birthday) or March 1, 1810 (depending on whether you trust church records or family memory), was born Fryderyk (as the Poles call him) Chopin. His father was a French immigrant, while his mother was a woman of the impoverished Polish nobility, living on the estate of one of her much wealthier friends. Only a few months after Chopin was born, the family moved to Warsaw. In the late 18th century, Poland had been divided three times among Russia, Prussia and Austria, until in 1795 there was none of it left. But at the time of Chopin's birth, it had been temporarily revived as a dependency of the Napoleonic Empire. Unfortunately for the Poles, two years later, in 1812 (to be celebrated in an overture by another Romantic composer), Napoleon lost his Grande Armee in Russia. Then, in the fall of 1813, he lost another army, including, heroically, much of his Polish Legion, at the “Battle of the Nations” at Leipzig, and while, afterwards, part of Poland had a nominal autonomy under the Tsar, that ended with a revolt in 1830.

The Polish national anthem, by the way, is the song of the Polish Legion, which can be translated to begin “Poland is not yet lost”—a rather low level of aspiration, but fitting with the nation’s situation at that time.

In 1830, the same year as the revolt, the 20-year old Frederic Chopin, already acclaimed as a musical genius, left his homeland forever, ending up in Paris. His heart, however, following a deathbed wish, has returned and is now in a pillar in the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw.

In the intervening years, Chopin and his family had visited their friends at Zelezowa Wola a number of times, but the place did not play a major role in his life. The estate was sold off, and the building where he had been born, which was not the main building , and had included a bakery, fell into some disrepair. In the 1890s, the Russian composer Mili Balakirev made a pilgrimage to the site and was shocked. He wrote a letter to the newspapers, and, as a result, money was raised, the building was bought, and by the 1930s the whole area had been transformed. This is not a historically accurate recreation of the place where Chopin was born. Instead, it is a sort of shrine to his glory. The house, really more of a farm estate outbuilding, was prettified. The surrounding grounds were made into a gorgeous park, with walkways among the gardens and trees and down to a gently-flowing small river, with several picturesque footbridges. There is a heroic (though not as heroic as the one we’ll see tomorrow) statue of the great man. There is a reception center with a short film, restaurant, gift shop and restrooms. There is a separate cafeteria on the grounds. You can take an audio-guided tour of the house (all five rooms) and grounds—it doesn’t provide much information, because there’s not much to provide. As you stroll around or eat your lunch, loudspeakers discreetly play the same short piano piece over and over.

We had lunch at the cafeteria. Agnieszka insisted that we have golabki (pronounced “go-WAHMP-kee"--cabbage leaves stuffed with meat and rice—and a cold, pink, vegetable cream soup. It was all very good .

We went back to Warsaw and took the bus downtown to the Warsaw Philharmonic's concert hall, where we heard the opening concert of the Seventh International Chopin and His Europe Festival. The orchestra was the Witold Lutoslawski Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of Wroclaw. The first piece was a marvelous rendition of the Chopin 1st Piano Concerto by the young Bulgarian pianist Evgenii Buzhanov. Mary Joy said that this performance was a revelation to her of unexpected sides of a familiar piece.


During the intermission, I went to the restroom. Seeing a sign for Toaleta, with a circle above it, I entered an outer room, only to notice that everyone there, going and coming, was female, and there appeared to be only one inner sanctum. I turned and left, and across the entrance hall found another Toaleta, this time with a triangle above the word. Since everyone entering and leaving this was male, I assumed, and was later assured by the laughing Agnieszka and Mary Joy (who had read Rick Steves more thoroughly than I had), that a circle must be the equivalent of a stick figure with a skirt, while a triangle must mean the opposite.

The remainder of the concert was a long drawn-out anti-climax—a performance of the reconstructed Mahler 10th Symphony, led by a conductor who Mary Joy said didn’t have the least idea how to conduct Mahler. “Too long,” said Agnieszka. The whole concert ended up being more than two-and-a-half hours.

We rushed over to the Holy Cross Church (mentioned above as the last resting place of an important element of Chopin’s circulatory system), to hear the Festival’s second concert, a free (standing-room only, and we started out standing) performance of the Brahms “German Requiem,” by combined choirs from Ghent, Belgium and Siena, Italy, accompanied by the Chamber Orchestra of the Champs Elysees, from Paris. It was wonderful.