'My ideal, whom I faithfully serve' - Chopin and his first unrequited love for Konstancja Gładkowska (1810-1889)

The embrace of the romantic landscape of Fryderyk Chopin and Poland continues to evolve. A most beautiful and moving festival has just begun at her final home in the historic town of  Skierniewice about 90 kms from Warsaw. As we are not taking a romantic carriage ride in the manner of Madame Bovary, the motor car journey takes a little over an hour.

This first recital given by Kevin Kenner was personally a deeply moving musical and personal experience for me. The association with Chopin and his illusioned adolescent love, so poignantly expressed in his letters, touched me profoundly in a manner the details of which I cannot reveal.

In 1824, Konstancja Gładkowska began studying singing at the Warsaw conservatory under Carlo Soliva. After completing her studies, she joined the ensemble of artists of the Warsaw opera theatre. From her first performances, she was considered an exceptionally talented singer. On 21 April 1829, at a concert of soloists from the Warsaw conservatory, she met the young Fryderyk Chopin. Their acquaintance lasted for a year and a half, until Fryderyk left the country on 11 October 1830. The young people kept in touch by letter for only a year.

Konstancja's promising career came to an end when she married Józef Grabowski in Warsaw on January 31, 1832, and moved to his Raducz estate. The marriage turned out to be a success, and the Grabowskis had five children.

In 1845, Konstancja unexpectedly began to lose her sight. Although she visited several outstanding ophthalmologists in Poznań and Paris, they were unable to save her from going blind. After her husband died in 1878 and Raducza was sold, she moved to Skierniewice, where she lived until 1889 when she died.  [Parisian Romantic Salons - paryskiesalonyromantykow.pl

Konstancja Gładkowska (1810-1889)

There are numerous letters and accounts testifying to Chopin's love and concern for the soprano Konstancja Gładkowska, (whom he met as a fellow music student at the age of 19) as well as exquisite musical testimony to his affection contained in the Larghetto and Romanze. Larghetto second movements of his piano concertos. This surely is some of the most sensitive music of illusioned youthful love ever written. In a letter to his close friend Tytus Woyciechowski on 3 October 1829 he writes: 

'You yourself no doubt sense the necessity of my return to Vienna, not for the sake of Miss Blahetka, about whom, as far as I can remember, I have written (she is a young person, pretty, a pianist), because I already, perhaps unfortunately, have my ideal, whom I faithfully serve, not having spoken to her for half a year now, about whom I dream, with thoughts of whom the Adagio from my Concerto came to be...' [Concerto in F-minor Op.21, the first to be written]

Chopin's second teacher, the neglected Silesian composer Józef Elsner (1769–1854), one of the seminal figures in Polish music, taught him advanced composition, harmony and counterpoint in Warsaw. Elsner introduced Chopin to the art of bel canto song. Chopin’s early love for this beautiful singer flowered alongside his love of the voice, which later developed into a passion for Italian opera, in particular Bellini and Rossini. Elsner's succinct final report on his pupil observed, ‘Szopen Frideric – Particularly talented. Musical genius etc.'

Again to Tytus of the E Minor concerto Op.11 [the second concerto to be completed], Chopin writes on 15th May 1830: 'It is not meant to create a powerful effect; it is rather a Romance, calm and melancholy. It should give the impression of someone looking gently towards a spot that calls to mind a thousand happy memories. It is a kind of reverie in the moonlight on a beautiful spring evening.' 

One cannot help wondering about the source of these 'happy memories' and imagining the romantic nature and occurrences that may have given rise to them.

and again :  

‘Involuntarily, something has entered my head through my eyes and I like to caress it’. 

The entire musical population of Warsaw was drawn to the National Theatre for the premiere. One young singer participating in the concert, who preoccupied Chopin's heart, was a certain Konstancja Gładkowska. ‘Dressed becomingly in white, with roses in her hair' as he wistfully described her. 'She sang the cavatina from Rossini’s La donna del lago. as she had never sung anything, except for the aria in (Paer’s) Agnese. You know that 'Oh, quante lagrime per te versai'. She uttered 'tutto desto' to the bottom B in such a way that Zieliński (an acquaintance) held that single B to be worth a thousand ducats’. 

This 'farewell' concert was only three weeks before Chopin left Warsaw and the subsequent November 1830 uprising burst upon the city. 

‘The trunk for the journey is bought, scores corrected, handkerchiefs hemmed… Nothing left but to bid farewell, and most sadly’. 

Konstancja and Frycek exchanged rings. She had packed an album in which she had written the words ‘while others may better appraise and reward you, they certainly can’t love you better than we’. Only two years later, Chopin added: ‘they can’ which speaks volumes.

Vienna from the Belvedere Palace cir.1760 - Bernado Bellotto (1722-1780)

On Sunday morning, Christmas Day 1830 in Vienna, Frycek writes to Jaś Matuszyński: Today I sit all alone in my dressing gown, I chew on my ring [the ring he received in exchange from Gładkowska when he departed Warsaw]. On 26th or 29th December 1830 he writes to Jaś enquiring of Konstancja: 

'Has she not been ill? I could easily assume something of the sort from such a sensitive creature. Did it not seem so to you? Perhaps the fright of the 29th [the beginning date of the November Uprising] May God forbid it's because of me!  Reassure her, tell her that so long as I have strength..., that unto death...But that is all too little'.

One must never forget that in 1830 partitioned Poland did not exist as a sovereign nation state on European maps. The sector around Warsaw was referred to as 'Congress Poland' or 'Russian Poland', nominally and more formally as the 'Kingdom of Poland'. Effectively the country remained a phantom presence in the mind of its inhabitants under Hapsburg, Russian or Prussian domination, effectively 'partitioned', until regaining independence in 1918. The moody Grand  Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, commander-in-chief and de facto viceroy of Tsar Alexander I to the Kingdom of Poland, often asked the Wunderkind to play for him to ‘soothe a savage breast’. He  was collected in a sleigh from his home in the Saxon Palace and drawn through Warsaw streets by four horses harnessed abreast in the spectacular  Russian  manner  and  taken  to the Belvedere  Palace. From his earliest years Chopin was exposed to the refinement  and ease of the  highest  echelons  of  society. This remarkable social milieu formed both his cultivated temperament and musical tastes.

At Stuttgart, in his album written before 16th September 1831, he reflects on the imagined horrors of the Warsaw Uprising, of being a dying man, being a corpse with many lugubrious reflections on having left his country, his family, his love and friends to further his musical career. 

'I know how you love me [referring to his family] She [Konstancja Gładkowska] only pretended - or she is pretending - Oh that is a problem to be solved ! - She does, she doesn't, she does, she doesn't, she does, hand to hand...all fall down! Does she love me? Does she love me for sure? - Let her do what she wants. Today I have a higher feeling, higher, I have a feeling far higher than curiosity in my soul. 

After 16th September 1831, again from Stuttgart, we have a desperately fractured journal entry that possibly chronicles the inspiration of the composition of the 'Revolutionary' Étude in C minor, Op. 10 No 12. 'What is happening with her? - Where is she? - Poor thing! - Perhaps she is in the hands of the Muscovite! - The Musovite pushes her - strangles - murders, kills her! - Oh my Life, I am here alone - come to me - I'll dry your tears, I'll heal the wounds of the present - recalling the past to you.[...] I'm not Grabowski [Gładkowska married Józef Grabowski in January 1832]

Stuttgart-Berg: Lithograph cir. 1830 

[Copyright Landesmedienzentrum Baden-Württemberg]

There are also letters which indicate, despite his romantic, idealized Platonic love for Konstancja, that he must have allowed his exploratory youthful high spirits full reign in Parisian bouts of nostalgie de la boue. On 18th November 1831, Chopin wrote in a letter describing life in the French capital to Norbert Alfons Kumelski (1802-1853), a naturalist, zoologist, geologist and travelling companion, at that time living in Berlin. Chopin had recently left Stuttgart and Strasbourg. 

'You find here [Paris] the greatest splendour, the greatest swinishness, the greatest virtue, the greatest vice, every two feet there are posters concerning venereal diseases - more shouting, uproar, rattling and mud than you can possibly imagine. [...] How many charity girls! [prostitutes] They chase after people, and yet there's no lack of stout Hasdrubals; [muscular soldier types] I regret the fact that the souvenir of Teresa, in spite of Benedykt's endeavours, who nonetheless considers my misery a very small thing, does not allow me to taste forbidden fruit. But I already know several female singers - and the singers here, even more than the Tyrolean ones, are eager for duets.'

Paris - Les Halles et la rue de la Tonnellerie (1828) Giuseppe Canella the Elder (1788-1847)

It appears Chopin had contracted gonorrhea between Vienna and Munich and his doctor Benedict had treated him for it. During the early 1800s, long before germ theory and antibiotics, pharmaceutical treatments for gonorrhea mainly focused on reducing the inflammation and discharge caused by the infection. For treatment, two of the most common drugs were Copaiba balsam and sandalwood oil. Both were either taken internally in capsules or painfully injected as a solution without syringes (not yet invented) into the urethra. Certainly such an unpleasant experience may well have dissuaded the fastidious, hypochondriac Chopin from indulging a great deal in any future promiscuous sexual activity. This and his perhaps surprisingly pious, nineteenth-century religious beliefs which are too often neglected as significant in our largely secular musical assessment of Romantic composers.

There was much speculation later in his life concerning his physical relationship with George Sand. Despite lurid innuendo, we shall never know the full, truthful details of their sexual relationship. She imposed a period of chastity on him with her for some years and wrote in February 1839 'I care for him like my child and he loves me like his mother'

[Letters translated from the Polish originals by David Frick in Chopin's Polish Letters, The Fryderyk Chopin Institute, Warsaw 2016]

The final home of Konstancja Gładkowska in Skierniewice

The Dworek on the night of the recital

Kevin Kenner at the C. Bechstein piano

As might be expected from his unrivaled knowledge of the music if Chopin, touching sensibility, taste and the inherent romanticism of his temperament, Kevin Kenner gave a wonderfully uplifting recital. The Larghetto was particularly heart-rending as knowledge of Chopin's destiny was laid over the music like the wings of a fluttering moth emerging from a chrysalis. The simplicity of his encore of the Chopin song 'Spring' (Wiosna) (1838; WN 52) was deeply affecting in that historic place. 

Below is the list of planned performances in this remarkably romantic initiative by the National Chopin Institute