独钟情于钢琴的音乐家——肖邦

It was in mid-September 1831 that Frederic Chopin arrived for the first time in Paris. He was twenty-one years old-a thin, sickly young Pole with a pale face, a long nose that curved like a scimitar, and large, pouting sensuous lips. He was a sad young man; for he was bewildered, alone, and without money in a strange city which knew nothing of his talents as pianist and composer. His loneliness was aggravated by homesickness of the most poignant sort. Only a few weeks before a calamity had befallen his native land. The Russians had captured Warsaw. The thought of that devastation, and the possible fate of his family and friends, had left his mind in torment. He looked upon the gaudy French metropolis with mingled emotions. He wrote: “There is the utmost luxury, the utmost swinishness, the utmost virtue, the utmost ostentation; at every step advertisements of venereal disease; shouting, racket, bustle, and more mud than it is possible to imagine; one can perish in this paradise, and it is convenient, from this point of view, that nobody asks how anybody lives.” He noted the hordes of “shabby individuals with wild physiognomies”, but also the “host of interesting people here, belonging to the various professions”.

1831年九月中旬弗雷德里克·肖邦第一次来到巴黎。他是一位只有21岁的波兰人，一副羸弱多病的身躯，苍白的脸上挂着短而尖的长鼻子和厚实丰满的嘴唇。怀着一颗悲伤忧愤的心，这位年轻人住在一个对他的钢琴演奏与创作才华一无所知的陌生城市，茫然和孤独，且身无分文。他的落寞感由于极端的思乡之情而加剧。在几个星期以前，一场灾难已降临他的家乡。俄国人占领了华沙。那种被毁灭以及亲人和朋友随时可能遭受厄运的想法，让他的心备受折磨。看着繁华的法国都市，他百感交集。他写道：“这里有最极端的奢侈、最惊心的卑劣、最高尚的美德、最可恶的卖弄，每走一步都会看见与性病有关的广告，吵嚷、喧哗、热闹的活动与地上的泥土一样多得无法想象，活在这样的乐土里的人们随时可能变得腐败，这样说来，最好就不要过问其他人是如何生活的。” 他不但注意到这儿“一群群寒酸的人们乱七八糟的面相”，而且还有 “一些来自各行各业的有趣的人们。”

Chopin did not know it then, but he had found his spiritual home. Paris was to be his headquarters for the remainder of his life. His work there was to make him one of the most influential creative musicians of the century, the supreme composer for the piano, and one of the greatest Poles of modern times.

那时候的肖邦当然还不知道，他已经找到了自己的精神家园。巴黎即将成为他度过余生的地方。他的任务就是要让自己成为当世最有影响力和创作才华的音乐家、最优秀的钢琴作曲家以及近代最伟大的波兰人之一。

Chopin became music’s outstanding specialist. His range was not panoramic but confined; his frail body and essentially limited mental scope reduced his interests to a narrow field. That field was a single instrument – the piano – but he understood it so profoundly that in a comparatively few years of work he almost exhausted the things that composer could do with it. Chopin was one of the most original of musicians. He was also a stylist, the first modern stylist in music.

肖邦成为了音乐界杰出的专才。他的创作范围不是面向所有乐器而是受限制的，他羸弱的体质和确实有限的精力使他把兴趣局限于一个缩小的领域里，一种单独的乐器——钢琴。但他对钢琴精辟独到的理解，使其在一个相当短的几年内就把钢琴音乐艺术发挥得淋漓尽致。肖邦是当时最具独创性的音乐家之一，同时他也是一位风格塑造大师，堪称当代首位音乐风格塑造师。

He was born in a village near Warsaw, on February 22, 1810. His mother was Polish but his father was a Frenchman, who taught the French language for a living and held a professorship in several important Polish schools. Frederic’s unusual musical talent was discovered when he was six years old, and thereafter his family gave him the advantage of the best teaching available in Warsaw. When he was nineteen he heard Hummel, a noted pianist of the day, and Paganini, who set the violin afire with virtuosity. That decided him on being a pianist. Before he came to Paris he had given concerts with mild success in Warsaw, Vienna, Prague, Teplitz, and Dresden.

1810年2月22日，肖邦出生于华沙附近的一座村庄里，他的母亲是波兰人，但他父亲却是一位以教法语为生的法国人，在波兰几所有名望的学校中担任教授之职。弗雷德里克非凡的音乐才华在六岁时就被发现，此后，他的家人给予他在华沙能受到的最好的教育。当弗雷德里克19岁的时候，他听说当时有位享誉盛名的钢琴家叫做胡梅尔，以及一位技艺精湛的小提琴家—帕格尼尼。于是，他下定决心要成为一名钢琴家。在来巴黎之前，他就已经在华沙、维也纳、布拉格、特浦里以及德累斯顿举办过音乐会，并获得了不小的成功。

It is a tribute to Chopin’s sanity and sincerity as an artist that in an age of poseurs, and in the Paris that was a hive of mountebanks, he never succumbed to a pose. Nevertheless, he too was an odd man. For one thing there was ingrained in his soul a deep strain of melancholy. His whole life after childhood was colored by it; his music, of course, was drenched and tear-stained by it. Part of his mental suffering was the result of a sensitive mind being placed in a sickly body. The last half of his life was a struggle against tuberculosis. Psychologically there was something within him that was badly warped. He never married, but all through his life he suffered from the frustrations of love. There exist passionate love letters which he wrote as a boy of eighteen to another young woman. When he was twenty-four he fell in love with Maria Wodzinska, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Polish count. She was a flighty, coquettish girl who led him on; but her family objected to her romance with a musician, and a sickly one at that. A few years later their engagement petered out. After Chopin’s death all the letters of Maria and her family and a faded rose she had given him were found carefully wrapped in a an envelope marked, “my sorrow”.

在那个人人都喜欢故作姿态、骗子云集的时代的巴黎，肖邦却从未屈从于这样的装腔作势，这充分体现了他作为一名艺术家所拥有的明智和真诚的本质。然而，他还是一位古怪的人，一是由于他心中有抹不去的哀伤，他童年以后的整个人生都带有那种忧伤的色彩，当然他的音乐也为此充满忧伤与催人泪下的感情。生性敏感和体弱多病是使肖邦精神备受折磨的部分原因。他的后半生是在与肺结核作斗争的过程中度过的。心理上的某些疙瘩使肖邦表现反常。他一生未婚，但终其一生却不断遭受爱的挫折。这可以在他18岁时写给一位姑娘的热情洋溢的情书中看出来，当他24岁的时候，他爱上了波兰伯爵19岁的女儿沃德津斯基·玛利亚，她只是一位让人误以为是好女孩其实不过是一位轻浮的水性杨花的女子罢了。但女孩的家里反对她与音乐家，并且还是一位体弱多病的音乐家的恋情。几年之后他们的婚约就不了了之了。肖邦死后，人们发现那些写给玛利亚和她家人的信件，以及玛利亚曾送给他的已枯萎的玫瑰，这一切都被精心的珍藏在印有“我的悲伤”的字体的信封里。

These affections, however, were merely a prelude to the great love of his life, which began in Paris in 1838, when he was twenty-eight. This was his affair with George Sand. It lasted for eight years. Its final rupture brought first his creative career and then his life to an end.

然而，这些感情事不过是他真爱的前奏，1838年，28岁的他与乔治·桑邂逅，这场爱情维持了8年。这一最后的快乐时光给肖邦带来了辉煌的创作生涯，接着是他生命的结束。

Chopin’s talent as a pianist was one of the most remarkable and one of the rarest in the history of the instrument. He was a brilliant technician, but he suppressed that side of his art for the exquisite and the subtle. Lacking the physical strength of Liszt, who could (and often did) smash the insides of a piano at a blow, he developed instead a marvelous fluency and a control of tonal color that was unique. Some critics complained of his extreme pianissimos that hardly rose above a whisper and the intense refinements of his style; but most listeners were impressed. They had never heard tones of such singing quality or such ethereal delicacy drawn from the instrument.

谈到作为钢琴家的才华，肖邦是乐器史上最为杰出和罕见的一位。他是一位才华横溢的技师，但他却抑制这个方面的技艺转求获得精致而细微的效果。他缺乏像李斯特那样一口气就可以（经常这样做）横扫钢琴键盘的体力，相比之下，肖邦的演奏所表现出来的不可思议的流畅程度和对音色的把握却是无人能及的。有些乐评家对他那比低吟强不了多少的极弱节奏以及极度细腻的风格抱有怨言，但绝大数听众却对此留下了深刻的印象。他们从未听过这种如歌般的音色质量，也从来没有欣赏过如此轻柔空灵的乐器演奏。

原文请参考：

Leonard, R. A. (1967). The Stream of Music. London, Britain: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd.

翻译：杨斯毅 (Sim Yang)