There’s nothing guaranteed to cause an argument than to claim a famous person from history was gay, especially if that person is a national hero in a predominantly homophobic country. The most recent argument has been the furore over renewed claims that the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) was gay.
Today is the anniversary of his birth (the date most accepted by historians), so it seems appropriate to have a look at his queer credentials. The latest researcher to fly Chopin’s gay flag up the pole (sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun) is Moritz Weber, a Swiss concert pianist and music journalist.
Moritz isn’t the first person to look at Chopin’s sexuality. There has always been some ambiguous nature attributed to him, even in his own lifetime. He was never in really good health and his physical frame and appearance could be quite androgynous, often described as effeminate by his contemporaries and biographers alike. Chopin’s music was also often described as effeminate, or even childlike.
When Chopin was living in Paris his pieces were popular with female pianists, of which there were many. One music historian, Jeffrey Kallberg, has said that this would have coloured people’s attitude towards Chopin and his music making it less popular with musicians and music lovers who preferred more robust compositions from the likes of Beethoven. Attempts to “butch up” performances of Chopin’s works became common among male pianists in the 20th century.
Chopin’s sexuality has become such a big topic in recent decades. Early biographers often ignored or down-played and sexual aspect in his life, except in two instances which I’ll mention later.
One of the more recent biographies, “Chopin” by Bernard Gavoty published in 1977, took the closest look at that time into Chopin’s sexuality and his supposed love affairs. This led one reviewer to remark that Chopin was portrayed by Gavoty as a “sexually repressed man-child”.
By the end of the 20th century Chopin had become established within the lgbt community. The defunct, though partly archived, website glbtq.com, an online encyclopedia, contained a reference to him in one short matter-of-fact sentence in its article on classical music published in 2002. It said “More certain is the bisexuality of Frédéric Chopin”.
In 2018 Alan Walker wrote “Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times” (Fryderyk is the Polish spelling of his name). Walker addressed the issue of letters Chopin wrote to Tytus Woyciechowski (1808-1879), Chopin’s fellow student at the Warsaw Lyceum and later a pioneering agriculturalist and freedom fighter. These letters are also the ones which Moritz Weber studied but Alan Walker is “much inclined to doubt” that there is anything romantic contained within them.
We have the covid lockdown to thank for the new examination of the letters. While in lockdown Moritz began looking more closely at the composer’s letters. It is known that some were missing. This isn’t unusual considering how long ago that were written. I’m sure most of you have thrown away or lost a lot of the letters you have received.
Another problem with Chopin’s letters is that when they have been translated from Polish the personal pronouns have been changed. The use of gender in grammar affects different languages in different ways. If you’ve ever used a Google translation you’ll know gender pronouns get mixed up in many languages. In pre-Google translations of Chopin’s letters phrases he used in writing to men, such as “I love him”, have usually been translated as “I love her”.
Chopin’s letters to Tytus Woyciechowski have survived but not those from Tytus to Chopin. Because of this there interpretation is based purely on one side of the correspondence. The precise relationship Chopin had with Tytus, therefore, can never be definitively labelled. Despite the romantic overtones in Chopin’s letters there’s nothing to indicate that there was ever any physical relationship, or that Tytus was anything other than heterosexual.
It has been suggested that Chopin was asexual throughout his life though he felt a deep love fore several other men. These included Julian Fontana (1810-1869), a fellow Polish composer and Chopin’s musical executor who lived with him in Paris for two years. There was also Antoni Wodzinski (d.1928), a writer who had also lived with Chopin in Paris. Both of them received romantic letters from Chopin.
Critics of any suggestion that Chopin was not heterosexual point out his love affairs with two women, most notably with a French novelist George Sand, the pen-name of Aurore Dupin (1804-1876). Before that Chopin is supposed to have got engaged to Maria, the sister of Antoni Wodzinski. Maria was one of those many female pianist who loved Chopin’s works. She was also a talented artist. The portrait of Chopin at the top of this article was painted by her when she was 16 years old.
Although most early biographers present the engagement between Chopin and Maria as fact there is no written evidence from either of them that one existed. Likewise with George Sand. There’s no written evidence that they were romantically or sexually involved. True, George Sand wanted a relationship and asked some of Chopin’s friends if he was single. However, for Chopin any relationship may have not been conceivable. After their first meeting Chopin is said to have remarked “Is she a woman?” George often dressed in male clothes and smoked cigars, and she was never regarded as particularly good looking.
Even though the “couple” lived together on Mallorca for a couple of years there was no relationship. Chopin’s health was getting worse at that time and the two eventually fell out and separated.
Today it is generally accepted that Chopin and George Sand were not romantically involved. Even the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, the world’s leading protector of the composer’s legacy, admits there isn’t any evidence of one. I’m sure that opinions and new theories will continue to emerge. For now perhaps we should think of Chopin as a romantic asexual who may never have had sex at all. It seems apparent to me that he was attracted to men more than he was to women, even though he lived in a society where men regularly expressed their affection for each other.
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