Chopin is one of the greatest composers of all time (a genius of a higher order than Brahms, in my opinion) and the 200th anniversary of his birth is a fine cause for celebration. But I'm interested that the subject of his anti-Semitism is so often brushed aside. There are odd references to him being a "virulent anti-Semite", but after a quick denunciation the author moves on without citing chapter and verse. Also, the government of Poland – which has invested heavily in the festivities – understandably doesn't want the subject brought up at all. Ever.
But this rather evades the truth, because it leaves people either not knowing that the poet of the piano didn't like Jews, or assuming that he was a foaming nutjob like Richard Wagner (who couldn't trip on the pavement without blaming Jewish stonemasons).
Chopin's anti-Semitism may have been nurtured in his native Poland, which he left at the age of 20 and never made any effort to revisit (another point the Polish government doesn't emphasise). But according to this account of the year 1824 he was not a bigoted teenager:
When some Jews arrived at the neighbouring manor in Obrów to purchase grain, Fryderyk called them over and played them a ceremonial Jewish song. His playing drove the traders to such ardour and forgetfulness that they leapt and danced in merriment… for he played as if he were born a Jew.
The adult Chopin wouldn't have liked that last comment. As a composer in Paris, he was driven into rages by Jewish publishers, or publishers he imagined were behaving "like Jews". These quotes are from two letters of 1839:
I did not think that Pleyel would play the Jew with me … Get 500 for the ballade from Probst, and then take it to Schlesinger. If I have got to deal with Jews, let it at least be Orthodox ones. Probst may swindle me even worse, for he’s a sparrow whose tail you can’t salt. Schlesinger has always cheated me but he has made a lot out of me and won’t want to refuse another profit. Be polite to him because the Jew likes to pass for somebody …
Good Lord, why must one have dealings with scoundrels! Well, I prefer to do business with a real Jew … I would rather sell my manuscripts for nothing as in the old days, than have to bow and scrape to such fools. And I’d rather be humiliated by one Jew then three… Scoundrels, scoundrels.
This is what we might today call casual racism: it's indefensible, but Chopin doesn't then go off into a rant about how the publishing trade is controlled by Elders of Zion who are trying to bankrupt him. It reeks of the cruel, instinctive, bad-tempered anti-Semitism of Paris in the 1830s and 40s, which Wagner picked up and then developed into something far more monstrous.
So do we conclude that, alas, Chopin simply adopted the stereotypes of Jews floating around the Parisian salons? Perhaps. I did, however, come across an essay by Thurma Jurgrau on anti-Semitism in the letters of George Sand which suggests otherwise.
Sand, who was of course Chopin's lover, went through a phase of saying vile things about Jews, blaming them for killing Jesus. Jurgrau quotes the scholar Georges Lubin, who notes that Sand's outbursts coincided with her relationship with Chopin and claims that he "brought it with him from Poland". But he doesn't offer proof. Indeed, so far as I can work out, relatively little research has been done in this area: entire biographies of Chopin fail to mention his feelings about Jews.
Is that because there is so little evidence in addition to the unambiguous examples above? (Letters he allegedly wrote to the Countess Delfina Potocka, which surfaced in 1945, do contain viciously anti-Semitic comments as well as untypical sexual badinage and have been dismissed as forgeries.) Or is it because we can't bear the thought of this romantic figure – so different from the ugly and sexually perverted Wagner – nurturing such horrible thoughts?
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