The liaison between Frédéric Chopin and George Sand

Adapted from their letters and diaries and observations by their circle of friends.

Originally presented at the Westlake Porter Library and the Cleveland Music Settlement’s BopStop

At the time when he came into George Sand’s life, Chopin, age 27, the composer and virtuoso, was the favorite of Parisian salons, the pianist in vogue. His success was due, in the first place, to his merits as an artist, and nowhere was an artist’s success so great as in Paris. Chopin’s delicate style was admirably suited to the dimensions and to the atmosphere of a salon.

The fascination of the languor which seemed to emanate from the man and from his work worked its way, in a subtle manner, into the hearts of his hearers.  One such was the legendary author of scandalous novels and outrageously provocative behavior, Amantine-Aurore-Lucile-Dupin – known to all under her nom de plume as George Sand.  At the outset, Chopin did not care to know this emotionally extravagant and self-assured women who spent much of her life dressed as a man.  He did not like women writers, and he was rather alarmed at this one.

But, through the good offices of their mutual friend Franz Liszt, she made the first advances. It is easy to see what charmed her in him. In the first place, he appealed to her as he did to all women, and then, too, there was the absolute contrast of their two opposite natures. She was all force, of an expansive, exuberant nature. He was very discreet, reserved and mysterious.

Such a contrast may prove a strong attraction, and then, too, George Sand was very sensitive to the charm of music. But what she saw above all in Chopin was the typical artist, just as she understood the artist, a dreamer, lost in the clouds, incapable of any activity that was practical, a “lover of the impossible.” And then, too, he was ill. When her former lover, the poet Alfred de Musset left her, after all the atrocious nights she had spent at his bedside, she wrote: “Whom shall I have now to look after and tend?” In Chopin she found someone to tend. And, eventually, Chopin succumbed to that care and attention.

The portrait WordStage presents of these two dynamic artists, is created from some of the many letters they exchanged, from the beginning of their relationship to the passionate climax it reached on their trip to Majorca.  The deeply personal letters are united by a narrative spoken by another mutual friend, the painter Eugène Delacroix.  Some of Chopin’s most memorable music for the piano underscores and accentuates the text.