If we are to understand the real, the immortal Chopin, we must seek the explanation in the Poland of his childhood. Everything he stood for, everything that emanated from him was insistently, devotedly Polish. His true friendships, his true love affairs:Constance [Konstancja Gladkowska, 1810-89] and Marie [Maria     Wodzinska, 1819-96], his beliefs, his superstitions, his habits of life, his prejudices, even his illness, were formed before he left  the banks of the Vistula [November 2nd 1830].

And, above all, linked mysteriously in an incessant interplay  between nostalgic folksong and the vivid national rhythms which never ceased to crowd his imagination, towered his musical  genius.

He worked to no preconceived artistic creed, but obeyed a vital  spiritual urge. In his inspired outpourings he sought to recreate  the atmosphere of a childhood full of wonder and alive to the   promise of the future... His whole being longed for those places  which he endowed with every delight and surrounded with a regret   that he expressed in a letter to his parents: 'I dream constantly  that I am on my way to you across the unknown wastes that separate  us. I know that they are the wastes of my imagination and that our  reunion will remain an illusion. But does not the Polish proverb  say: 'The crown is only reached by means of the imagination'? - as   for me I am a pure Mazovian' [Nohant, July 20th 1845] *...

... while his body was in France, his heart was in Poland... the praises Paris sang in celebration of his triumphs meant very little to him; it was what Warsaw wrote and thought that really  mattered...

... A kind of second Chopin, unheard by those around him, must have co-existed with the fashionable young artist that appeared in the flesh, a being lost, as he tells us, amid mysterious and  nameless wastes which separate him from his own people and across  which he reaches in vain endeavour to recapture his childhood...

... it is with that secret being who had no contact with material    things, who was able to escape from himself into the world of  unreality, that one feels oneself to be in a state of complete  spiritual affinity.

It is this legendary Chopin that we must cherish. By disregarding  the depreciatory facts of his daily life, but going to the heart of  the essential truth, we preserve the image of a Chopin who answers all our aspirations, a Chopin who existed in a world created by his  imagination, who had no other existence save that of his dreams, no other desire than to relive the enchantments of the past, who by the  outpourings of his genius was able to immortalise the dreams and  longings of countless human souls.

- copyright © Alfred Cortot              Paris 1949, Aspects de Chopin, translated by Cyril & Rena              Clarke as In Search of Chopin, London/New York 1951

* Ethel LilianVoynich's less fanciful alternative translation              (Henryk Opienski: Chopin's Letters, New York 1931) reads:              '... at this moment I am not with myself, but only as usual in some              strange outer space. Granted, it is only those espaces              imaginaires [imaginary spaces]; but I am not ashamed of that;              you know, a proverb has grown up here: - "he went to the coronation              by imagination," and I am a real blind Mazur' AO

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