CHOPIN AND LISZT, A FRIENDSHIP THREATENED BY LOVE
This is the story of the friendship between two of the greatest composers of all time: Frédréric Chopin and Franz Liszt. The story of two great geniuses who lived most of their years together in Paris admiring each other’s talent and who let their lovers, George Sand and Daniel Stern, interfere with their relationship.
The two composers had a very similar life, since their early youth. Chopin was born on March 1st 1810 in Zelazowa Wola in Poland. Liszt was born less than one year later, on October 22nd 1811, in the village of Doborjan in the Kingdom of Hungary. They both came from families where the love of music was of extreme importance and which soon discovered their sons’ talent. Their fathers, in fact, decided to invest most of their money to provide them with the best possible education in music.
Since a young age they started performing live, Chopin in Warsaw and Liszt in Wien, and they soon caught the attention of the international press that started comparing them as young prodigies. They first met after moving to Paris, where Liszt attended the first live performance of Chopin on February 26, 1832 at the Salle Pleyel, and they immediately started worshipping each other’s talent in music, becoming great friends. From that moment, they became the centre of the attention in live performances during aristocratic parties, salons and charity events to which participated the most prominent figures of the XIX° century’s Parisian aristocracy. Among those, Prince Adam Czartorisky (former head of government in Poland, at that time emigrated in Paris) and the countess Delfina Potocka, a close friend and muse of Chopin, who had been her piano teacher during her youth.
Even though Chopin and Liszt have had very similar lives, they had very different personalities. Chopin was extremely shy and constantly afraid of performing on stage. His live performances were - in fact - reduced to the minimum, also due to his fragile health; on the other hand, Liszt was extrovert and magnificent in front of an audience. In 1835 Liszt started a period of travelling, first in Switzerland and then in Italy, and, as a consequence, their friendship started wavering. At the end of that very year, Chopin and Liszt both fell in love with two very similar women: Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin (better known under the pseudonym George Sand) and Marie d’Agoult (otherwise known as Daniel Stern). They couldn’t know that their love relationships would have changed their friendship forever.
George Sand and Daniel Stern were both very independent women, thinkers ahead of their times and novelists who hided themselves behind masculine pseudonyms. They were also extremely jealous and their behaviour brought Chopin and Liszt even farther apart.
George Sand and Chopin had a very tumultuous relationship: she was much stronger than the fragile pianist with whom she shared neither the temper nor the political opinions; however their relationship lasted for ten years, up to 1847, year during which they separated. On the other hand, Liszt and Daniel Stern had a much less complex relationship that led to the birth of three children: Blandine, Daniel and Cosima, who later became be the wife of the German composer Richard Wagner. In 1839 Liszt and Marie separated.
When their relationship with the composers ended, the two lovers both wrote novels about their stories, trying to deny all the responsibilities and putting them in a favorable light in front of the reader.
After these years of separation, caused by the respective women, Chopin and Liszt tried to rebuild their friendship, but jealousy was threatening this reconstruction. Chopin envied the glory that Liszt had achieved thanks to its extrovert nature, while Liszt envied the greater success that Chopin’s compositions had achieved. The years spent apart had created a distance too big to overcome, regardless of the efforts of the two composers.
They last met on December 1845, and in October 1849 Chopin died in Paris, probably of pneumonia. Liszt spent the following years writing a biography of his dear friend that was published in August 1851 in “La France Musicale” and later in 1852 as book. Liszt continued travelling across Europe until July 1886, when he died of pneumonia at the Bayreuth Festival, hosted by his daughter Cosima in honor of her husband Richard Wagner.
– G