200 years later, Poland claims home is where the heart is

WHEN Susan Sontag wrote that tuberculosis ‘speeds up life, highlights it, spiritualises it’, one of those she had in mind was Frederic Chopin. The prodigious, sickly composer was born two hundred years ago this year in a small town outside Warsaw, emigrating to France only on the eve of the unsuccessful November Uprising against Russian rule in 1830. Nineteen years later he died in Paris, leaving behind music which defied personal sensitivities to reflect the passions and sensibilities of a bifurcate life. But it is what happened next which has allowed one man’s soul to trace the dark contours of modern European history.

As he lay being consumed in October of 1849, Chopin entrusted his sister Ludwika with returning his heart to Poland after his death. Despite an adult life spent largely in Parisienne salons, Chopin never felt *à l’aise* in French and often held concerts in aid of the Polish cause. Between the years 1795 and 1918 Poland did not exist, and seeing their country first sliced and then consumed, ex-patriots like Mickiewicz and Chopin would pour their angst into their art. Spirit and expression were complementary. As his powers waned in the last year of his life Chopin wrote to a friend, ‘where has my art gone? And where did I lose my heart? I can hardly remember how they sing back in Poland’.

The plane crash in April this year which killed the Polish president and 95 other leading figures shocked the world, though for Poland – who lost 18 percent of its population during the Second World War – the catastrophe was seen in context. Within hours people had gathered in Place Pilsudski (named after the General who inflicted a rare defeat on the Russians in 1920), to join hands and sing the favourite folk songs of Pope John Paul II under a giant cross. In a country that has been called to suffer more than most, art and religion are prized for their status beyond the reach of those who would see the nation dismembered. Chopin’s contribution, wrote the poet Norwid, was to ensure that ‘in the crystal of his own harmony he gathered the tears of the Polish people strewn over the fields, and placed them as the diamond of beauty in the diadem of humanity.’ Faced with the inevitable death of the body, the Polish spirit has been forced to take on other forms. The idea of Poland as the ‘Christ of Nations’ is not without its sacraments.

A less magnanimous explanation for Chopin’s decision to have his heart removed is taphophobia – or the fear of being buried alive – which was prevalent at the time partly thanks to advances in the art of resuscitation. During Chopin’s lifetime there were stories of coffins being opened to find evidence of futile attempts having been made to crawl back to the surface, and of people bursting back to life – as Poland did in 1918 – after mistakenly being pronounced dead. Such concerns were enough to prompt the ignominious last words of George Washington in 1799; “Have me decently buried, but do not let my body be put into a vault in less than two days after I am dead... Tis well.”

Whatever the cause, in Chopin’s case, the effect was a funeral in Paris attended by the likes of Delacroix, but without the vital organ which the examining Dr Cruveillher concluded was probably the immediate cause of death. Today a pair of elegant, elongated hands lies across an empty chest in Père-la-Chaise cemetery beneath a suite of Polish flags, placed as a gentle reminder to tourists not to laude the great *French *composer. In 1849, with her brother’s heart beside her in a jar filled with alcohol, Ludwika Chopina went home.

For years the heart was kept in an urn at the Church of the Holy Cross in central Warsaw, just ten paces from the apartment where Chopin had lived, studying Bach and dazzling audiences with the precocious compositions of a teenager. The location was kept secret however amidst fears the heart would be seized by tsarist authorities as a quintessential symbol of the country that wasn’t.

The fear was not ill-founded. As the Germans advanced on Warsaw in 1939, local radio played Chopin to show the world that Poland remained free, thus ensuring his music was banned during the occupation. During the 1944 Uprising however, while Hitler’s army razed one of Europe’s great capitals, an absurdity of war meant the heart was saved.

A German chaplain named Schulze approaches his Polish counterpart Father Alojzy across the rubble of the Church of the Holy Cross, which had seen some of the heaviest fighting. He explains German soldiers have found the heart of Fryderyk Chopin inside a pillar in the church, and as a lover of music he wants to see it saved. A transfer is arranged. The Germans, seeking to use the event to show their empathy for the Polish people, have arranged for film cameras to be present. But at the moment of the handover the lights go out and cannot be repaired. As a result the ceremony is only partially filmed and the heart is removed to the town of Milanowek, 30kms south-west, where it remains in the presbytery until the end of the war.

A member of the committee charged with returning the heart to Warsaw in October 1945 reported that ‘the casket holds a hermetically sealed crystal jar, in which in transparent alcohol, there is the perfectly preserved heart of Fryderyk Chopin’. In 1951 a Soviet doctor who had examined the heart claimed that cognac could be responsible for its remarkably good condition. Considering Polish hypersensitivity to French claims that it was they who tempered and refined Chopin’s Slavic soul, the metaphor seems almost too perfect. But Andrzej Pettyn, a Chopin expert from Milanowek, maintains the specific alcohol is unknown. Like in every creation story, some element of myth must be allowed to endure.

In 2008, a team of scientists requested access to the heart to determine whether its owner died from tuberculosis as had long been believed, or from cystic fibrosis. Given the historical context the researchers’ claim might be seen allegorically. ‘Is it not right’ they asked, ‘to prove to many suffering people that many things count in life much more than a weak physical body, and they are not predestined to vanish without leaving something that will influence, inspire and enrich generations to come?' The government, perhaps with one eye on this year’s bicentennial, rejected the request. The head of the National Fryderyk Chopin Institute, Grzegorz Michalski, added that the tests would furnish no “new knowledge that would have a meaningful impact on the assessment of the figure and work of Chopin.”

We might demur. As Sontag points out, Chopin joined the likes of Keats and later Robert Louis Stevenson, in that canon where the tubercular represent a kind of “romantic agony”. Yet the notorious complexity of his music seems to demand of us more nuance in return. The knowledge that he was afflicted by cystic fibrosis might not just empower those suffering from the condition, but also equip musicologists to better understand the compositions between 1827 and 1835, when the supposed tuberculosis was thought to be in remission.

Perhaps though, Michalski was right in the larger sense. In person Chopin was by all accounts frail and indecisive. He had a long relationship with the fiery George Sand who once wrote, ‘he has never looked straight at realities, never understood human nature on any point; his soul is pure poetry and music and he cannot tolerate anything that is different from himself.’ Yet there is nothing meek about his music. Listening to the *Revolutionary Etude* or his *Heroic Polonaise* it is easy to see why Schumann described Chopin as ‘cannons hidden among blossoms.’ That is why this is a Polish story; the lesson that an insistence on beauty is not the same as weak-mindedness, but rather a rare and invaluable kind of strength.

Vince Chadwick is an Australian journalist and law student, currently based in Warsaw, Poland.

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