Original subtitles

GENTLE MELODIC MUSIC

This is the unmistakeable sound of Frederic Chopin.

A shy and private man,

his music speaks of raw emotion

and his sublime compositions for the piano inspire profound passion in both players and listeners.

Chopin wrote over 250 compositions for the piano

and drew from the instrument an intense singing quality.

The inspiration for his music was not only the keyboard,

but also the human voice, in particular, the female voice.

As we celebrate Chopin's 200th anniversary,

we follow a young pianist as he sets out to discover who put the song into Chopin.

Do I identify with Chopin as a man?

On some level, yeah, of course I do.

It seems like the most arrogant thing in the world to say that I identify with Chopin as a man,

but if I look at the emotions within him, then hell, yeah.

I mean, the kind of malaise that he had,

the awkwardness.

James Rhodes studied the piano as a teenager, but never went to music college.

He went to work in the City, but in his late 20s, he couldn't resist his desire to play any longer.

Now 34, he's a full-time concert pianist with a recording contract

and with a youthful and growing following.

I'm obsessed with music.

I live for the piano.

I am not entirely comfortable with people or in the outside world.

The only big difference I would say

is that I have maybe a thousandth of the genius that he actually had.

Chopin's genius was to create a whole new language for the piano,

a language that was heavily influenced by his passion for singing, opera singing.

Chopin was obsessed with the popular,

vocally athletic Italian opera of the day known as "bel canto",

the opera of Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini.

Now, bel canto, literally "beautiful singing",

the bel canto ethos, as you might say...

..was obviously nourished and to a certain extent formed by what he heard as a child in Warsaw.

But I think it was so much a part of his whole aesthetic background

that had he not heard it, he would have invented it.

SINGS ARIA IN ITALIAN

To Chopin, the voice was the ultimate musical instrument.

It was the ultimate art form.

And he was, I think, fascinated by any woman who could really sing.

Who were these singers that were so important to Chopin?

What influence did they have on his music?

As a Chopin-besotted pianist, James is keen to answer these questions

and has enlisted the help of rising star, 23-year-old Welsh opera singer, Natalya Romaniw.

OK. Right, come on. All right. OK. Are you ready?

SHE SINGS MELODY

Wow! That's really got a lot of legato line in it for the voice.

It's operatic, isn't it? Yeah.

James is undertaking a journey which he hopes will help him to discover the real women

whose voices can still be heard inside Chopin's music.

The journey begins in Warsaw,

the city where Chopin grew up, the city he always thought of as home

and which is now celebrating his 200th anniversary as the nation's great cultural hero.

Chopin was born in 1810 and grew up in Warsaw

where his father was a teacher at a time when Poland was peaceful

and the city was enjoying a cultural renaissance.

This was an era when piano makers, encouraged by composers like Beethoven,

were rapidly modernising the piano,

transforming it into a stronger, more resonant

and increasingly popular and affordable instrument for the educated classes.

In this environment, it was no surprise that Chopin was taught by his mother to play the piano.

What was extraordinary was that by the age of seven, he was already composing on the instrument,

and by the age of eight, he was being feted in the press as a musical genius.

Zofia Chechlinska is a leading academic from Warsaw's Chopin Institute

and an expert on Chopin's early life.

He was surrounded by music.

He was quite young. He was 10, 11, 12

when he started to go to the opera.

He loved opera. There are many evidences that he loved opera. And he loved singing.

There was contact with Angelica Catalani who performed here in Warsaw.

Angelica Catalani, one of the great divas of the early 19th century,

had an astonishing voice famed for its power and range.

Chopin met her in one of the Warsaw salons

where he performed.

She said that he was wonderful and then she gave him a watch.

It is in Chopin's Museum here with the caption,

"To Frederic Chopin, 10 years old, pianist."

Fantastic. Yes, yes.

Chopin's father Mikolaj taught in the main academy for the gentry in Warsaw,

a post that provided his son with access to the city's educated and aristocratic society,

a world in which the opera house played a pivotal role.

Marita Alban Juarez, an expert on Chopin's Warsaw,

took James to visit the reconstructed apartment where he lived with his parents.

The living room. Wow!

So this is exactly where he was... he spent his teenage years.

Because at 17, he was writing his piano concertos already. Yes.

The 2nd Piano Concerto he wrote.

You know, in this room they had the first rehearsal for the piano concerto.

Really? And of course, his piano.

Yes, look, this is the 2nd Concerto. The slow movement. Yes, this is the concerto.

And this is Chopin's handwriting here.

Until the last moment, he was correcting everything.

Yeah, amazing. Every note he thought about.

I'm getting shivers just thinking this is the room it was done in. This is the room. Incredible.

God, it's an amazing view!

This is the gate of the university.

Right opposite? Yes, it was the university campus.

This is amazing. I can't believe Chopin himself would have looked out over here

to see his friends coming over. "Come on!" Yes.

And look at the girls coming out of the university.

At least one movement from one of the concertos that Chopin wrote and played in this apartment

was inspired by a girl he might well have watched from this window.

He wrote in a letter to a friend...

"Because, perhaps to my misery, I already have my perfect one

"whom I have, without saying a word, served faithfully for a year now,

"of whom I dream and in whose memory the adagio of my concerto has been written."

The girl he was writing about was Konstancja Gladkowska.

She was 19, the same age as Chopin,

and an opera singer at the Warsaw Conservatoire.

She sang at the first concert Chopin gave, public concert.

He said that was beautiful.

Also when Chopin was already leaving Warsaw,

she wrote that, "You go abroad, you will be famous,

"you will be well-known, you will make a career.

"But nobody will love you as we love you here."

He was sometimes working as an accompanist also.

It happened, of course, in the conservatoire.

Is that how he met Konstancja?

Yes, he met Konstancja during a recital.

He fell in love and, you know...

It was a very, very sad moment for him because I think Konstancja didn't love him.

OK. He wasn't...

He wasn't happy in his romances.

Yeah. No musicians are happy in their romances, I don't think.

Much of the music that Chopin heard Konstancja sing was by Rossini.

Natalya Romaniw has recently performed in a Rossini opera called La Scala Di Seta

about a girl who marries in secret

and whose husband visits her at night with the help of a "scala di seta" - a ladder of silk.

We'll just play around with it. This is what Chopin would have heard

when he went to the opera or hanging out with his singer friends? Yeah.

So I'll come in at the start of the bar.

HE PLAYS INTRO

That's too slow? Yeah. SHE SINGS RHYTHM

OK... PLAYS MORE UP-TEMPO

# Quanto pena un' alma amante

# Quanto costa in vero amar

# Quanto pena un' alma amante

# Quanto costa un vero amar

# Confusa incerta mi sento vacillar

# Vacillar

# Confusa incerta mi sento vacillar

# Vacillar

# Va-ci-la-a-a Vacillar-lar, vacillar! #

THEY BOTH LAUGH So much fun.

I love the piece. It's like two pages of an ending. It's just one massive ending.

The chords are quite basic, but... Yeah, exactly.

PLAYS PIECE AGAIN

I can really see how...

You imagine in Warsaw or in Paris, a young Chopin with a beautiful singer with an amazing voice,

sitting, just the two of them, with the candle on, singing the most beautiful Italian arias.

It's incredibly intimate. Yeah.

I think his love of bel canto sprung actually more from his love of the voice,

the capability of the voice and the immediacy of the voice.

The voice, after all, is not only the most faithful and immediate servant of our musical impulse.

The voice is the means by which we express throughout our lives almost all of our inner life.

James's trip to Warsaw coincided with the Chopin International Festival

and he met up with one of the great Chopin pianists, Garrick Ohlsson,

to discover how he feels bel canto opera fed into the young composer's music.

Italian opera was the rage in Warsaw, as it was all over Europe.

And he had this... He was imbued with this bel canto idea right from the very start,

his earliest pieces, that he had the idea of the melody and how to accompany it and how to configure it.

I think it was present from the start. It was part of his musical blood and musical essence.

Is there anything you do to get that singing tone?

On the piano, the problem is all you have for a pianist to do is... PLAYS NOTE

You have the attack, whatever that is. Then the piano does...

PLAYS LONG NOTE ..that. The only thing you can control is the release.

You have several complex mechanisms.

You've got a pedal which will release greater combinations of overtones,

but if you want to take a great singing Nocturne, such as the D Flat Opus 27, No.2,

if you play it without anything except just the pedal and the tune...

HE PLAYS PIECE

It's very pretty, but it's naked. Yeah.

But Chopin's piano was developing at the time,

so, because of the possibility of gathering sounds on the pedal,

he took this figure and spread it over more than two octaves.

Which already sets up an aura of sound. Absolutely.

An envelope. A beautiful cushion, a texture.

And of course, incredibly clever, he was more than clever, a true genius,

he understood even how to emphasise certain notes within the texture.

HE PLAYS PIECE

We've had this... We've had plenty of the D Flat which is the bass.

But we've had a disproportionate amount of this F,

which is one octave below the note where the tune starts.

So when you... PLAYS PIECE

The ear is already...

That F becomes a manifestation of the harmony, but suddenly, it's made glamorous.

It's clothed and the overtones... It's up there above everything else.

It's like the singer joining the music.

So, in that way, yes, he did capture the bel canto kind of melody.

Very early on,

once his talent became apparent,

he was anointed to become the Polish national opera composer.

So, not only opera was the place to go and the place to be seen,

not only was it the place where you could learn a lot as a musician, as a pianist,

but it was also the place where he was to hone his skills for the future

as the great Polish composer, opera composer.

But Chopin wasn't ready to write an opera.

On the 2nd of November, 1830,

at the age of 20, he left Warsaw for Vienna

on an educational expedition.

He had no idea that he was never to return home again.

Four weeks later, Poland exploded into a brief, bloody and doomed revolt

against Russian rule

and Chopin's study tour was transformed into exile.

Throughout his life, Chopin retained strong links with Warsaw,

but he never felt able to return.

Instead, he filled his music with Poland,

particularly in his Polonaises, his short, intimate mazurkas,

and this, his stirring Revolutionary Study.

DRAMATIC PIANO MUSIC

Once he had reached Vienna,

revolution broke out in Poland in Warsaw,

so he was stuck there.

His travelling companion, Titus, his best friend,

went back to Poland to fight against the Russians.

And Chopin sat around in Vienna, not really knowing what to do.

Italy was a bit of a no-go area because there were revolutions breaking out there.

Finally, he decided to travel to Paris

which, although there had been a revolution there in 1830, had quietened down a bit.

On the second leg of his journey, James is taking the train to Paris

to explore the world in which the young Polish musician found himself.

Chopin shied away from offering any literal interpretations of his music.

He gave little or no information in the titles of his work

and yet many of his compositions seem imbued with a deep sense of loss and longing,

sentiments often attributed to a lifelong homesickness.

Homesick or not, when Chopin arrived in Paris aged 21, he was filled with excitement.

He took rooms in the heart of the city

and wrote letters home describing the wealth, the filth,

the noise and the restaurant prices.

"You can eat the most hearty dinner for 32 sous

"in a restaurant with mirrors, gilding and gas lighting,

"and the next, you can eat lunch

"where they will give you just enough for a bird to eat and charge three times as much."

If Chopin's passion for Konstancja in Warsaw had been all in the mind,

clearly by the time he arrived in Paris, he was no longer quite so sexually innocent.

An encounter with a girl called Theresa in Austria had left him with some unpleasant side-effects.

He wrote to one of his friends back in Poland...

"The memory of Theresa forbids me to taste forbidden fruit,

"but I already know several lady vocalists

"and lady vocalists here are even more anxious for duets than those in the Tyrol."

But what really excited the young composer about being in Paris was the opera

and the opportunity to hear the world's greatest singers.

Paris in the 1830s and 1840s was the cultural capital of the western world.

This had various implications for Chopin.

For one thing, he could hear the best orchestras in the world which were based there.

Some of the best musicians were based there,

but also he could hear all those who were bound to come through Paris.

When he arrived, he wrote, "She is here, he sings there.

"She... I've heard her singing

"and all at the same place at the same moment, at the same time."

It was really a paradise for him to be in Paris at this time.

There's the premiere at The Opera of Meyerbeer's Robert Le Diable,

which is an opera that is almost forgotten now.

In the 19th century, it was the most performed opera of any work.

The main singer that he liked in Robert was the soprano Cinti-Damoreau.

And he was incredibly taken with her voice.

She was famous for being able to sing chromatic scales as if she were playing them on the piano.

And at a time when it's clear that lots of singers, even some of the most renowned singers,

were not always particularly precise,

people loved the fact, Chopin included loved the fact

that her performance sounded almost like an instrument playing.

It's not that he discovered opera in Paris, but he discovered the best singers.

He discovered the best pieces because he could hear Rossini, Bellini "e tutti quanti".

Really, he could have an access, a direct access

to the core of the inspiration of his own music.

The big question is, why didn't Chopin, the brilliant young composer, write for the opera,

an art form that he clearly adored?

It's very clear that little by little, he recognises that the circumstances have changed.

First of all, the fall of the November uprising meant

that even in Poland, national opera could not be performed.

The fact that he did settle in Paris and did not return to Poland meant

that he would be writing a Polish language opera in France...

..which was meaningless and futile.

But perhaps also his inclination, his natural inclination towards the piano.

This was the medium he was the most comfortable in.

So...I think in some way what he did

is he channelled opera-like narratives into his larger works.

They become miniature operas.

When Chopin arrived in Paris aged 21,

he had already composed a substantial body of extraordinary music.

Within a year, he was a fashionable celebrity,

not just for his composition, but also for his mesmerising and uniquely delicate style of playing.

It was a wonderful atmosphere because Chopin played

and some say he played at midnight, for instance, the Nocturnes.

Can you imagine the Nocturnes at midnight?

It was an enchantment. Really, it was an enchantment because it was private.

The music was for yourself and the people in the salon were very happy.

They were very confident in being the only ones to hear, it was a privilege.

PLAYS LIVELY, DRAMATIC PIECE

The poet Theophile Gautier wrote...

"Chopin stands for a melancholic elegance.

"A dreamy charm.

"A female sensitivity.

"Touched with his fingers, the keys seem to be brushed by an angel's wing."

Thank you.

Instead of writing for the opera house, Chopin's theatre was the salon,

the intimate, sophisticated world in which the aristocracy and the artistic community intermingled.

It was for this audience that throughout the 1830s and '40s

he produced a prolific range of concise, poetic piano music.

Mazurkas, waltzes, atmospheric nocturnes and electrifying studies.

Occasionally, he also found time to compose songs,

usually as gifts for society ladies.

One of these ladies was a young Polish countess.

# Moja pieszczotka

# Gdy w wesolej chwili

# Pocznie szczebiotac i kwilic i gruchac... #

Her name was Delfina Potocka.

She was not only Polish,

she was beautiful, wealthy and clearly a wonderful singer.

She was one of the very first of Chopin's Parisian friends

and remained close to him right up to his death.

This lake at Enghien a few miles north of Paris,

has often been associated with a possible romance between them.

# Nie smiem przerywac

# Nie smiem, nie smiem odpowiadac

# I tylko chcialbym sluchac!

# I tylko chcialbym sluchac! #

TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH: During that period,

she was leading a very liberated lifestyle.

Separated from her husband,

and having scandalous affairs with famous people.

The nature of the relationship between Chopin and Potocka

has been the source of endless speculation and gossip.

One of the most intriguing rumours is that during the summer of 1836,

Chopin stayed in a villa that Delfina had rented by this lake.

A year later, Chopin was passing Enghien with a Polish friend,

who described in his diary how Chopin had "turned my attention

"to the wide lake and on its edge,

"the little villa in which he had spent the previous summer.

"His face became suffused with the pleasantness of the memory.

"It must have been a very happy period of his life."

The story was revived again as recently as the 1940s,

when a mysterious bundle of semi-pornographic letters,

alleged correspondence between Chopin and Potocka,

was discovered by one of Potocka's descendants.

The letters horrified scholars,

mostly because of what was seen as the un-Chopin-like bedroom language.

The letters were dismissed as forgeries, but then tragically,

the relative committed suicide,

and the letters disappeared.

However, the debate about their authenticity still rumbles on.

# Calowac, calowac, calowac... #

TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH: What interests me about the relationship between Chopin

and Delfina is not the possibility of a love affair between them.

In my opinion, it's quite likely that it never happened.

On the contrary, what I'm much more interested to know

is that she put words on one of the last nocturnes of Chopin,

which she played in front of him and which he found,

and I quote his words "ca se chantait bien", it sang itself well.

I think that the fact they shared the same musical ideas

is so much more interesting than the love affair.

Marie-Paule Rambeau's reluctance to accept the idea

of a Chopin-Potocka love affair is based on a simple lack of evidence.

The shortage of information about this or other parts

of Chopin's romantic life

has generated a long-running debate about his sexuality.

How can a man who wrote such passionate music have had

such an apparently limited life?

We'll never know whether he slept with Delfina

or any of the other singers in his life.

but there's no doubting the attraction they had for him.

Much is made of the importance to Chopin of singers in his life.

Relatively few of the singers that he mentions and admires are men.

The vast bulk of them are women.

And I think there was something about the woman's voice

and also the woman's singing

as a means of Chopin being able to approach that woman.

Because Chopin was basically quite shy.

In fact, he was basically VERY shy.

And I think in a strange way, women singing...

Can I be so coarse as to say... turned him on?

The best evidence of Chopin's friendship with Delfina Potocka

lies in the music which he dedicated to her.

Including his great F minor piano concerto.

The slow movement may have been inspired by Constance back

in Warsaw, but when the concerto was eventually published in Paris,

It was Delfina's name that graced the finished work's cover.

Because of his reputation in the salons,

Chopin was in great demand as a piano teacher.

And this became his principal source of income.

In Paris, it was...

Music had become the ultimate... form of art

for not just the moneyed rich,

at the head of whom stood the great bankers such as the Rothschilds,

but also the highest aristocracy,

who all sent their daughters for lessons to Chopin

at unimaginable prices.

He seems to have made very good money from that. And good enough money

that after a year or so of teaching piano,

he could start teaching piano in his own apartments,

once he'd moved to the rue de la Chaussee d'Antin,

which was one of the most fashionable roads to be on in Paris at the time.

Chopin seldom talked about the composition of his music.

But there are many highly revealing accounts

of his approach to playing and teaching the piano.

Yes, Chopin did encourage his pupils to sing with the fingers.

He introduced a new kind of technique,

in which the fingers were not surrogate hammers,

but in which the hand and the arm

and the elbow and everything came into play as a kind of choreography.

A choreography of the entire arm.

He treated the hand as a cast of characters, just as he treated

the scale as a cast of characters.

And his favourite singing finger was the third - this long finger.

And how did that sing best?

Because he used it as the centre

of a kind of stroking mechanism.

And with Chopin, I've adapted this into my own teaching,

I liken it to the stroking of a lion's mane.

He did not come down from it above, he didn't go...

He kept saying in his teaching all the time, "Facilement, facilement!"

"Easily, easily!" Well, he wrote...

His etudes are simply about as difficult as music gets.

They are unbelievably difficult.

And his motto was "souplesse avant tout" -

"suppleness before everything".

And one astounding thing about these incredibly difficult Chopin etudes

is that the testimony of his pupils repeatedly says that he made it easy,

that what they had thought was insurmountably challenging,

became natural and easy.

Now this is really something. I would love to have had lessons with him.

Who wouldn't?

In 1836, six years after arriving in Paris,

Chopin met a female novelist called George Sand.

Sand, at 33, was six years older than him.

A famous bohemian, a political radical,

she often dressed in men's clothes and most notoriously,

smoked cigars in public.

Sand fell passionately in love with Chopin and gradually,

over the next two years, he was seduced.

The most bewildering of the relationships

and the dominant relationship of Chopin's life

was his relationship with the unbelievably scandalous,

highly sexed, extravagant, megalomaniacal George Sand.

To avoid the gossip that their relationship

was beginning to attract, they decided to spend the winter of 1838

together on the then remote island of Majorca,

accompanied by Sand's two young children.

That winter on Majorca, the 28-year-old Chopin

became seriously ill and was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

From this point on, his life was dominated by the progression of the disease.

Because of the locals' fear of being infected by him,

Chopin, Sand and the children were forced to leave the house they were renting and they ended up in rooms

in a deserted monastery at Valldemossa.

Chopin wrote to a friend with his typically waspish humour,

"I have been as sick as a dog these last two weeks.

"I caught cold in spite of 18 degrees of heat,

"roses, oranges, palms, figs

"and three of the most famous doctors on the island.

"One sniffed at what I spat up.

"A second tapped where I spat from.

"The third poked about and listened to how I spat it.

"One said that I had died, the second that I am dying

"the third that I shall die."

Despite his illness, during his time on Majorca,

Chopin completed one of his greatest collections of work -

the Preludes.

24 short poetic masterpieces for piano.

Eventually, Chopin had to be taken off the island

and after a long period of recovery in Marseilles,

they arrived at Nohant in June 1839,

Sand's family home in the heart of rural France.

Chopin and Sand spent the next eight years together

and the long summers at Nohant gave the frail Chopin

a suitably quiet and restorative atmosphere in which to compose.

She created conditions for him to work in, to be happy in.

It's difficult to know who else could have given him

that kind of stability and that kind of security other than her.

It was at Nohant that Chopin formed a close musical friendship

with a protegee of Sand's -

a young singer and composer called Pauline Viardot.

He loved Pauline being there. He always said that she had

such joie de vivre, such elan,

that when she was around, however depressed or lacking in inspiration

he might have been, she could always renew his creative spirit.

She just seemed that sort of person. She would walk into a room

and suddenly you'd feel a light had been turned on.

He felt that she was a really kindred spirit. That right from the word go,

they understood each other musically.

One of the most rewarding aspects of their friendship

was the way they fed one another's musical composition.

This song is a setting of one of Chopin's mazurkas, his short Polish-style pieces.

Arranged and set to words by Pauline.

# Ah, soudain la nuit s'acheve

# Et s'enfuit l'espoir

# A-a-a-a-h

# Helas

# Helas

# A-a-a-a-h

# Chere ame, sans toi j'expire

# Pourquois taire ma doleur?

# Mes levres veulent sourire

# Mes yeux dises mon malheur

# Helas! Loin de toi j'expire

# Pourquoi taire ma doleur?

# Mes levres veulent

# Helas! La mort

# La mort est dans mon coeur. #

It must have been fun for them to collaborate. Oh, yes.

She used to, at first, with a bit of trepidation, show him what she was composing.

And she wrote to George Sand, saying saying she'd written a song called

le Roseau Et Le Chene

and she wanted to show it to Chopin but she was a bit afraid in case he didn't think it was good enough.

Well, he obviously did, because he played it for her in 1842.

# Le chene, un jour, dit au roseau

# Vous avez bien sujet d'accuser la nature... #

At the National Library of France,

Nicolas Dufatel was keen to show James some graphic evidence

of this collaboration between Chopin and Viardot.

They sang at a concert in the Salon Pleyel a melody by Pauline Viardot,

Le Chene Et Le Roseau.

There is a manuscript here in the Bibliotheque Nationale

with Chopin's corrections.

So he helped her for the composition and for the interpretation.

Do you want to see? I'd love to see.

And it has his writing on it? Yes. With a pencil.

So I can't touch it, obviously. Sorry.

This is Le Chene Et Le Roseau.

This manuscript could be the one used for the concert

so it was in Chopin's hands. You see his own writing.

So you see the handwriting, very... because it has to be used.

And Chopin is quite shaky because it was certainly written on the piano.

So you can imagine Pauline Viardot standing up... I do the same thing,

I write on the piano, how to play. Chopin is the same, of course.

During the long summers at Nohant Chopin composed not just exquisite miniatures

but longer scale works -

his fantasies, ballads, the famous B-flat-minor sonata.

One of the last works to be completed there

was the challenging, dreamlike Polonaise-Fantaisie.

Much of Chopin's composition was born out of his extraordinary powers of improvisation

which never failed to dazzle an audience.

A guest at George Sand's salon commented,

"The other day I heard Chopin improvise.

"It is marvellous to hear him compose in this way.

"His inspiration is so immediate and complete

"that he plays without hesitation, as though it had to be thus."

"But when it comes to writing it down and recapturing the original thought in all its details,

"he spends days of nervous strain and almost frightening desperation.

"He alters and retouches the same phrases incessantly

"and walks up and down like a madman."

Chopin and George Sand lived side by side for eight years

both at Nohant and at apartments here at the Square d'Orleans.

But in 1847 their by now uneasy relationship collapsed in bitterness

when Chopin sided with Sand's daughter in a family row.

In June 1848, the year after his separation from Sand,

alone, short of money and in deteriorating health,

things got even worse for Chopin when Paris descended into chaos.

Troops fired on a demonstrating crowd, sparking a new revolution.

The French King Louis Philippe was overthrown

and when he fled to England, the French aristocracy followed swiftly behind

fearing another reign of terror.

Chopin had no choice but to follow his clients to London.

London was where he met the last of the great singers in his life.

Her name was Jenny Lind,

one of the most famous divas of the 19th century.

Lind was born in the backstreets of Stockholm,

a devout Protestant, disciplined and driven,

who went on to conquer the European opera stage whilst still a teenager

and then triumph on a grand tour of America organised by PT Barnum,

where she was seen by over a million people

and paid today's equivalent of more than $5 million.

By the time they met, Chopin had all but finished composing.

But his friendship with Lind reveals the effect a great voice could still have on the composer.

James and Natalya travel to Brussels to meet a Scandinavian couple,

Cecilia and Jens Jorgensen.

The Jorgensens have spent the last seven years

exploring the relationship between Chopin and Lind.

They both had careers in business

but since retiring have been caught up like so many before them

in the mysteries and uncertainty surrounding Chopin's life.

Cecilia became intrigued when she read of Chopin's encounter with her fellow Swede Jenny Lind.

Since then, she and Jens have been working as researcher-cum-detectives,

trying to uncover what happened between these two great musicians.

There's a lot of mystery around Chopin, isn't there? Almost a mythical quality.

You are a bit like Chopin, do you know that?

He writes... He's got a lot of humour

and he's very good at observing situations... Extremely good looking(!)

I was going to add that point. I should cough more.

SVEN: It's a good start.

What fascinates me is, we're talking about the last few months of his life.

What was it that got you to sit up and think,

"Wow! There's something really new here, something really intriguing"?

And you spent, what, eight years now?

Today nobody else has ever spoken about Chopin generally

and no other scholars, so it's new information.

There is clear evidence, of course, that Chopin and Jenny Lind

had a very special relationship

that went far beyond mere acquaintance.

OK.

We can hear from his letters that they had a close relationship.

There is a letter from Jenny Lind to a friend from 9th November 1849,

that's nine days after his funeral,

and in that she talks about her loss of Chopin

and that she feels numb by this loss.

After his death, she wrote music to his mazurkas.

SVEN: Her own arrangement. For voice and piano. For voice and piano.

And it's Faithful Love Will Never Die.

So how did the ailing Polish composer and this young Swedish singer meet?

In April 1848 Chopin arrived in London

where he took an apartment in fashionable Mayfair,

probably paid for with the help of wealthy British patrons.

There was a glut of musicians who poured over from the Continent in 1848

largely to escape the violence and the infighting

that was going on in Paris, particularly.

So you get pianists such as Talberg, Kalkbrenner, Chopin, obviously,

Berlioz comes over as well,

he sees this as a place that offers him refuge.

SVEN: This is 48 Dover Street, where Chopin stayed...

shortly after his arrival.

We know that he came here about a week after his arrival in London

and we know that from the piano firm Broadwood,

from their records, that they delivered a piano on that day,

the 27th April, it's quite interesting.

So it was up there somewhere. Well, probably the modern building.

Chopin writes that, "I finally have a room in which I can breathe and play."

At the point at which Chopin came to London and tried to establish himself in 1848,

he was a very sick man.

He certainly was by the end of several months of trekking round London society,

being introduced to the 'ton', the fashionable crowds.

Probably the most prestigious appearance that Chopin made whilst in London

was his presentation to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert

at Stafford House.

This was at a gathering hosted by the Duchess of Sutherland

and Stafford House was a very, very beautiful - still is - it's now known as Lancaster House.

A very, very beautiful setting for a concert, a stone's throw from St James's Palace

and Chopin was presented to the Queen and the Prince Consort.

His sense was that he was politely welcomed.

By 1848 Jenny Lind was London's most celebrated singer.

She was earning huge fees and her performances were the hottest ticket in town.

Fascinating, this whole phenomenon of Lindmania

and how quickly the merchandising and the marketing started.

She was on the cover of chocolate boxes, there was a tulip named after her,

there was a pub in Hastings called the Jenny Lind, which she would not have approved of.

I'm sure she didn't approve of public houses.

Queen Victoria loved the opera and she loved prima donnas, she loved singers.

Perhaps most significantly, Jenny Lind.

So when Jenny Lind finally came to London

and took up an engagement at Her Majesty's Theatre,

she was captivated and I think she attended

every single one of Jenny Lind's performances that season.

On May 11th 1848,

Chopin heard Jenny Lind sing for the first time at Her Majesty's Theatre

in a performance of Bellini's opera La Sonnambula.

Ed Gardner, Music Director of English National Opera,

is working with Natalya on the most famous number from Sonnambula,

an aria indelibly associated with Jenny Lind and her distinctive style of singing.

Where does it come in the piece and what is the character feeling when she comes to sing it?

It comes quite near the end and she's sleepwalking,

so she's being quite honest, I would imagine.

She doesn't know that anyone's listening to her.

So it's private, in a way. Very intimate.

That private, that kind of chambery colour, I guess,

is something which I think is a real fingerprint of the piece

and something I think Chopin said about Jenny Lind's singing,

that it has a sort of finesse in its piano about it. Yes.

An evenness but a finesse as well.

Amina in La Sonnambula by Bellini was probably her most famous role.

La Sonnambula, The Sleepwalker.

It just sort of fitted her personality in the most wonderful way.

It's about a very pure village girl in Switzerland

who is thought to have been seen in a gentleman's bedroom.

And her honour is impugned and scandal threatens.

SHE SINGS IN ITALIAN

You sing it beautifully.

It turns out that she's a sleepwalker

and, em, everybody's very relieved

that, in fact, she turns out to be, em, absolutely the unsullied virgin

and of course, this fitted the whole Jenny Lind mythology to a tee

apart from the fact that I think the music obviously suited her beautifully.

Why does he write these breaks after, "Si presto estinto?"

What are those rests for?

Em...

Emotion. Yeah. That's it, because you can't carry the phrase on.

No, yeah. We need to hear them.

It can't feel too comfortable in the way that you sing it. Shall we try it again? Yes.

HE PLAYS PIANO

SHE SINGS IN ITALIAN

'It was one of those voices like Maria Callas's,

'which was instantly recognisable.

'Of course, there are no recordings of it,'

so we don't actually know what it sounded like,

but Chopin said it reminded him of the northern lights

and other people said that it reminded them of the smell of pine trees.

There was something very, very... fresh, something very, very cool,

something very, very pure about it.

SHE SINGS IN ITALIAN

In a letter back to Warsaw, Chopin was unusually effusive about Lind.

"She is enormously effective in Sonnambula.

"She sings with extreme purity and conviction

"and her piano notes are steady and even as a hair."

The night after Chopin heard Jenny singing La Sonnambula,

he was invited to a small supper party with her

at the Belgravia home of their mutual friend, a Mrs Grote.

So what happened in Mrs Grote's house that evening?

LAUGHTER A very leading question!

But what we know is that they played together,

they were sitting at the piano, both of them,

from 9.00 till 1.00 in the night. That's four hours.

We know that Mrs Grote arranged for Chopin, she invited him

to a dinner and when he got there,

the only other guest was Jenny Lind.

You think she was playing a matchmaker?

Yeah and I think Jenny Lind must have expressed a wish to see him.

She's not a matchmaker, but it is to make these two great musical personalities to meet

because clearly Chopin was impressed by Jenny Lind's performance.

Do we know what they played or...?

No, we can only... She usually played "Swedish things" as he talks about it

because they do meet soon after again, where he says, "She played me Swedish things till midnight."

SHE SINGS

'Chopin alludes to the fact that she had taken, as it were,

'the music of Scandinavia, the melodies of her country,

'and translated them into something else.'

He thought he perceived in her,

something very akin to what he was doing

and it was an extraordinary musical experience for him,

'which was saying quite a lot because not much was exciting him by then.

'He was pretty jaded, pretty depressed,

'so the fact that Jenny Lind made such an impression

'says a lot about...about her and how he understood her.'

SHE CONTINUES TO SING

The Jorgensens' research has led them to develop a new theory

that Chopin and Lind had some kind of romance in the summer of 1848.

Although Jenny was on tour around Britain and Chopin was mostly in Scotland,

the Jorgensens are convinced that their letters reveal clues of powerful emotions.

"Miss Lind came to my concert!

"She never sings anywhere but in the opera, but she would have sung for me according to Mrs Grote...

"Jenny Lind and Mrs Grote, who I met at the station, have been here and have gone on to Glasgow...

"If I were younger, if I were not prostrate under my affections as I am,

"I might be able to start life again."

Chopin writes already in June in London,

"I prostrate under my feelings, I wish I was younger."

Now...that...is open for a very clear interpretation of what he's talking about there,

so, er, the romance started...already in London, clearly,

and continued - there were all sorts of opportunities.

There is no hard evidence of a Chopin-Lind romance,

but it's not difficult to understand why there might be speculation.

Clearly her voice made a huge impression on Chopin.

In November 1848, despite very poor health,

Chopin played at a grand Polish ball at London's Guildhall.

He played at the concert on the way back from, em, Scotland.

He was very ill. He'd caught a chill on the way back to London.

Em, and he was effectively providing music from an anteroom.

He played for about an hour, em, his usual short characteristic pieces

and nobody really paid him any attention

and certainly we don't get comment in the press.

You'd have thought that

such an event would have been a great platform for him,

that he would have been a great centrepiece,

his performance would have been a great centrepiece at this event,

but unfortunately, it almost passed without notice

and he left, returned to Paris,

and that was his last public performance.

Although this last performance may have been a dismal event,

Chopin's final years as a composer

produced some of his most powerful work,

some of the great masterpieces of the piano repertoire,

including a work about which James is passionate -

the fourth Ballade.

There are plenty of wonderful moments here.

Looking at the Ballade with his Italian teacher Eduardo Strabioli,

James is exploring how to bring out the bel canto line within the piece.

HE PLAYS THE PIANO

Yeah, but I felt that you cut a couple of times with the long line...

Yeah. ..which I don't think we need.

I mean, because the bel canto is to be easy to follow and somehow this...

Of course I know that is important to notice, but not to stop the line.

The upper line has to...

'The whole concept of the piece is really taking a line from a song

'and turning it into this maelstrom of variations and notes.'

Be careful not to make accent on the short note.

Because I can feel a PA-dam, PUM-peem...PUM-pum, PUM-pum...

This happens because we have not the voice.

EDUARDO HUMS WITH PIANO

'The theme has a hugely song-like quality.

'Even though it is the simplest of themes,

'it is one of the deepest pieces.

'I don't think he ever exposes himself more than in that piece.'

Emanuel Ax is one of the world's greatest Chopin interpreters.

James met up with him

while he was rehearsing at the Barbican in London.

The trick is to slow down here...

He asked him how important he thinks the singing line is

throughout the Chopin repertoire.

If you play anything of Chopin very slowly

it still sounds good.

You know, all the fast Etudes that are meant to be played

at an absurd rate of speed,

especially if you follow his metronome markings,

which are, I think, impossible for any human being,

but in fact, if you're just practising,

if you just play slowly,

it sounds so good.

You know? It sounds like a beautiful singing line

at a slow tempo.

So I think he was always thinking that way.

And in the fourth Ballade too, of course.

In that piece, in particular,

what I've always felt

is that he seems to somehow find a way

of going from absolutely the most simple

and, kind of, not outward music,

to something that is completely passionate

and then actually goes haywire.

You know, so you start with... PLAYS SHORT EXCERPT

Just that.

And then the next time you add a little bit...

Buh-buh-buh-buh...

And the next time you add a little bit of that...

And then the next time you start going a little bit mad...

..everything actually not in units of four or eight,

but always seven, or ten, or something crazy, you know?

And then, eventually, comes the coda.

Which is literally berserk.

Especially after the calm.

So I think in this piece it really goes from that, to...

And the more you can find a way of doing that,

I think, the grander the performance becomes.

So it's difficult at the beginning, especially, to find a way

of playing really, really beautifully, and really simply.

I don't know. I haven't found it yet! But that's what I'm looking for!

The main thing we can be sure of in Chopin's personal life

is that we don't know the whole story.

But in his music, although we don't get answers,

we do get a sense of the sheer depth of his emotional experience.

And it is this that is so relentlessly attractive

to artists like James.

In November 1848,

in failing health, Chopin returned to Paris

to consult his doctors.

Intriguingly, Jenny Lind made an unexpected visit to Paris

the following spring, as soon as she had completed her contract

at Her Majesty's Theatre.

This was despite the fact that she disliked Paris,

and at the time of her visit the city was in the grip

of a severe cholera outbreak.

For three weeks, she stayed in a house on the Champs-Elysees

and Chopin wrote in a letter that she had visited him,

and sung in his apartment.

Eventually, fearing for her health,

Jenny left the city.

She must have been painfully aware

that she would probably never see him again.

Shortly after her departure,

Chopin received a mysterious package containing 25,000 francs

to cover his considerable debts.

The money may have come

from his Scottish piano student, James Stirling.

but Jenny Lind was famous for her wealth and philanthrophy.

Was this perhaps a farewell gift from her?

Jenny Lind wasn't the only one of the singers who rallied round.

Pauline Viardot was in regular contact

and sent reports of his health to George Sand.

And his old friend,

the beautiful Polish countess Delfina Potocka's name

appears regularly in the correspondence of his final months.

In September 1849,

Chopin's friends rented him a small apartment

in Paris's grandest square,

the Place Vendome.

It was situated in the magnificent building that is now home

to the ancient French jewellery house of Chaumet.

What an incredible place!

Yes. It's enormous!

Yes. There's a view of the Place Vendome.

According to Beatrice de Plinval,

Chopin was accommodated in a small apartment on the ground floor.

This grand salon was at the time rented by Delfina Potocka.

She wrote that, on the 15th of October 1849, on that day,

she is visiting Chopin,

and he was...he was terribly...anxieux. Mm.

And he ask her, "I don't... I don't want to leave the life

"without the song of my piano.

"Could you manage something for me?"

So she decided to move the bed of Chopin where was the piano - it means here. Mm.

And he spent the last three days of his life here.

So in a such beautiful room, with that view on the Place Vendome,

we have all...

We live with Chopin here. Mm. Yeah.

You feel it. Yeah, absolutely.

On the 15th of October, as this painting describes,

Delfina Potocka sang to Chopin

as he lay dying on his bed, here in this room.

People argue over what she sang and who else was here

but what's most fascinating is that Chopin's last request

was not so much to hear a piano, or his own music,

but the sound of a woman's voice.

It's my little office.

Beatrice had one more thing to show James and Natalya.

Show me your hand.

That's a beautiful hand. Oh, well, thank you!

Mine is here because I have a little problem, which is...voila.

Wow. Look.

Look here. This is the hand of Chopin.

HE GASPS

Amazing. Can I put mine on top? Yes. I'm shaking, can you see?

Ama... It's very similar.

It's not so different, ah? Yeah, no so different. Wow.

Long fingers. Very, yeah. And very skinny.

Yes, that's why... He was... tuberculosis. This is a cast at the end of his life.

It's almost like a child's hand.

Yes. Yes, but look how delicate it is.

Yeah, and the wrists too, like mine, very small and thin. Very similar.

And you see...

Oh, that is just...amazing.

Amazing.

Living here myself since 40 years,

I have...the emotion.

This is the test of the genius. Mm.

When you live on the Place Vendome and when you live in this...salon,

and when each day you have the emotion...

Yeah.

..that's it. SHE CHUCKLES

Very good.

Ahhh.

Even you.

Around two o'clock in the morning of October 17th 1849,

Chopin died.

He was 39 years old.

Chopin was very famous being a teacher, being a pianist, being a composer,

but when he died, I mean, it was the true beginning of his...legacy.

Chopin's funeral was an extraordinary and spectacular affair.

The facade of this grand church, the Church of the Madeleine,

was draped with huge black velvet cloths.

In the centre, a large badge,

embroidered in silver with the initials FC.

The church was packed with up to 3,000 people.

French and Polish aristocrats and fashionable society

far outnumbered Chopin's friends and fellow musicians.

The ceremony began with a momentous orchestral arrangement

of Chopin's own B Flat Minor Sonata.

The highlight of this grand ceremony

was a full performance of Mozart's Requiem.

Among the soloists was Chopin's friend and collaborator Pauline Viardot.

The magnificence of Chopin's funeral

gives some indication of the strength of his reputation at the time of his death.

The astonishing thing is that he managed to impose his own method

and his own will and his own standards

and his own way of doing things

on the musical world.

He turned himself into a kind of... a sort of untouchable, in a way.

By the beginning of the 1840s, in Paris,

he had a completely unique position.

He didn't have to give endless concerts to prove how good he was.

He gave pitifully few concerts and was heard by very, very few people,

and yet the entire musical world was utterly convinced that he was, er...

right up there as possibly the greatest.

He ceased to be a human being in the eyes of his audiences,

in the eyes of Poles,

of the Polish intelligentsia in particular, long before he died.

He became an idea. He became a...monument.

After his death, Chopin's heart was removed from his body

and taken to Warsaw to be venerated in a special tomb,

currently being renovated in time for the grand bicentenary celebrations.

This canonisation of Chopin

is undoubtedly one of the reasons why the history and the legend of Chopin's life

are sometimes hard to unravel.

Certainly, the details of Chopin's relationship with all of the singers in his life

remain tantalisingly incomplete.

What's undeniable is their legacy.

Chopin's great achievement was to find not just a new musical language

but a new voice for the piano.

Through his singing style of composing and playing,

he discovered an almost organic human sound within the instrument

and it's this echo of the human voice within his music

that gives it a power that still mesmerises us today.

Although we will never know exactly what the voices of Konstancja Gladkowska, Delfina Potocka,

Pauline Viardot or Jenny Lind really sounded like,

their singing is immortalised somewhere deep inside Chopin's music.

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