In the years before his death, Fryderyk Chopin played regularly for the great and the good of Scotland. And usually to be found at the Polish composer's side was the Scotswoman some thought would one day become Madame Chopin

Published on Thursday 18 February 2010 23:29

IN 4 October, 1848, Fryderyk Chopin, the Polish composer and pianist who had more or less revolutionised classical piano playing, took the stage at Edinburgh's Hopetoun Rooms before the cream of the city's society and gave a performance which elicited effusive reviews from the press, including The Scotsman, whose anonymous critic commented: "The infinite delicacy and finish of his playing, combined with great occasional energy never overdone."

• Fryderyk Chopin

In fact, that fragile figure stooped over the keyboard was a terminally sick man, racked by tuberculosis and mustering all his remaining resources to play. The Edinburgh concert would be his penultimate public performance, and he would be dead in just over a year.

Chopin, who was born 200 years ago, officially on 1 March (although a baptismal certificate written later states 22 February), had come to Britain at the invitation of Jane Stirling, a spirited member of an old and wealthy Scottish family, who, with her widowed sister, Katherine Erskine, first met the composer in 1840 in Paris, where Jane became at first a promising pupil of Chopin's, then a devoted friend and patron.

Her admiration for the composer almost certainly blossomed – on her part at least – into something more, and after his death she became known as "Chopin's widow".

As the musical world celebrates the bicentenary of the composer's birth, it's worth recalling this remarkable and sometimes maligned Scotswoman, whose devotion to the ailing genius could verge on the overwhelming

Jane Wilhelmina Stirling was born at New Kippenross, near Dunblane, in 1804, the youngest daughter of John Stirling of Kippendavie, who died when she was just 12 (a striking portrait by Raeburn shows father and daughter together). Her mother died a few years later and Jane was brought up by her older sister, Katherine. Stirling became an adept student of Chopin's, the composer assuring her that "one day, you will play very, very well".

A small exhibition, Chopin In Scotland, at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, features music for two Opus 55 nocturnes Chopin dedicated to Stirling, plus a facsimile edition of the composer's Oeuvres pour Piano owned by Stirling and annotated by him.

Paris, where Chopin had lived since 1831, was in the throes of the 1848 revolution and Stirling urged him to come to Britain. Chopin was in poor health (there have been suggestions that he may have suffered from cystic fibrosis rather than TB) and still recovering from the end of his intense nine-year relationship with the author and proto-feminist George Sand.

In April 1848, the composer duly arrived in London, where he gave lessons to society ladies and played at private recitals, but the London fogs did nothing for his condition. On 5 August that year, he took advantage of Stirling's invitation and, accompanied by Muir Wood, the son of an Edinburgh music publisher, took the train for the Scottish capital.

In Scotland, he found himself doing the rounds of Jane's extensive network of wealthy relatives, a circuit which would become increasingly onerous to the ailing composer. He spent two and a half weeks as guest of Lord and Lady Torphichen, at Calder House in West Lothian, and then, following an eight-hour journey south to play a concert in Manchester, there was a further round of family seats, including Johnstone Castle in Renfrewshire, Keir House in Perthshire and Strachur House on Loch Fyne.

He found a more relaxing environment, however, in the Edinburgh home of a Polish-born doctor, Adam Lyszczynski, at 10 Warriston Crescent. There, Chopin would play the piano to accompany Lyszczynski's wife as she sang. He was so weak that his Irish servant, Daniel, had to carry him up the house's steep staircase. The current owner of the house, Jane Kellett, shows me a pallid plaster cast of Chopin's left hand. "I would have expected them to cast the right hand, wouldn't you?" says Kellett, a retired university librarian. A previous owner of the house acquired it, she explains, along with a cast of the composer's death mask, which has since gone astray. Her own piano, a handsome Blthner, dates from the 1860s – not quite contemporaneous with the house's illustrious visitor of 1848.

Quite apart from his illness and bouts of depression, Chopin's personality didn't make him the easiest guest – he could be vain, snobbish and anti-Semitic. In Scotland, he was granted lavish hospitality, but clearly found the process exhausting. He loved Keir House, for instance, but, speaking little English, found the after-dinner conversation heavy-going, and he wrote to a friend, "Everything irritates me and I continue to gasp until dinner, after which I must remain seated for two hours with the men, watching them talking and listening to them drinking. Bored to death, I let my mind wander in between making polite gestures and comments in French."

The ever-solicitous attentions of Jane and her sister were starting to pall. "My Scottish ladies give me no peace, and come for me to drag me round all the members of their family. I always give in – they will suffocate me with their goodness, but good manners prevent me from declining."

While he had an interest in folk music, and wrote to a friend, "I listen to lovely Scottish songs", his enthusiasm evaporated at Strachur House when his hostess, Lady Murray, produced a concertina, "and she began to play on it the most atrocious tunes… Every creature seems to me to have a screw loose."

Meanwhile, Stirling's sister, Katherine Erskine, seems to have been determined to make a Kirk convert out of the Catholic composer: "Mrs Erskine," he wrote, "who is a very religious Protestant, kind-hearted, may possibly like to make me into a Protestant – as she brings me the Bible, talks of the soul – notes down psalms for me…"

But did Jane, who at 44 was six years Chopin's senior, entertain thoughts of marriage to him? Chopin himself dismissed any such possibilities by commenting in a letter: "I am closer to a coffin than to a marital bed."

"Jane absolutely adored Chopin, and I think she fancied she could be a second George Sand to him, but Chopin definitely wasn't interested," says Iwo Zaluski, a London-Polish pianist and author, who in 1993 co-wrote with his late wife, Pamela, The Scottish Autumn of Frederick Chopin (John Donald Publishers; currently unavailable). "I think she managed to find a way to his heart just by appreciating him and his music and being so solicitous, nothing was too much trouble. But what I feel was missing was a really close friendship.

"She seemed oblivious to what all the socialising and carting about was doing to him, although who knows what might have happened if his health had been better?"

A biographer of the composer, Herbert Weinstock, summed up the relationship: "Jane Stirling was both good and bad for Chopin. She was nearly six years his senior, a woman of commanding physical presence, fine intelligence and unbounded goodness of heart… Chopin knew that she was devoted to him, not only as a musician but as a man… his sense of debt to her was not altogether pleasant and its irritating content was exaggerated by his realisation that he could not reciprocate her love."

Although he stayed at Keir House, near Dunblane, Chopin never visited Jane's birthplace, at New Kippenross a few miles away. A visit was planned, but he was ill and the heating at New Kippenross seems to have been problematic. Today, at the neighbouring family mansion of Old Kippenross, Susan Stirling-Aird remains highly doubtful as to whether Jane saw herself as a potential Madame Chopin. She says: "I always understood that there was never any question of Jane seeing herself as a potential wife to him.

"She was a girl studying under a brilliant piano tutor and she was very fond of him, but I think it is highly unlikely that she ever thought they might get married."

It wasn't all socialising, however. In Glasgow he played a concert in the now-demolished Merchant's Hall, which was well received, although the Glasgow Herald tempered its enthusiasm by remarking that "Mr Chopin is evidently a man of weak constitution… We incline to the belief that this master's compositions will always have a far greater charm when heard en famille, rather than in the concert room."

His illness was making it increasingly hard for Chopin to perform at all, but The Scotsman's review of the Edinburgh concert a week later found his style a refreshing contrast to "the Donner und Blitzen school of pianists".

"Chopin had tuberculosis and was far gone," says Dr Colin Kingsley, a pianist, Chopin enthusiast and retired lecturer in music at Edinburgh University. "so he disappointed people to a certain extent because he couldn't play very loud. It was beautiful, but muted.

"He was very different from anything that had gone before," adds Kingsley, who is currently reviving the Chopin Circle of Scotland. "His immediate contemporaries were Felix Mendelssohn and Schumann and, slightly earlier, Weber, but Chopin was in a class of his own in terms of sheer originality."

Chopin's Scottish performances were effectively his swansong. Before returning to Paris, he played at a Polish charity ball at London's Guildhall, but the noisy crowd were more intent on dancing and socialising than listening to the fading master.

He left London on 23 November for Paris, where he died on 17 October the following year. Jane and her sister helped to pay for the lavish funeral at the Church of the Madeleine, which was the first occasion on which Chopin's own Sonata no 2 in B flat minor, now universally known as a funeral march, was played as such.

Jane bought up much of Chopin's music and possessions, including his piano, to send to what would become a museum to the composer in Warsaw. In Chopin's tomb in Pre Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, she secreted – along with a note of the "correct" date of Chopin's birth – a petal of a rose from her family home at Kippenross.

It is said she wore black for the rest of her days.

&#149 The National Library of Scotland's Chopin In Scotland exhibition runs until 17 March