Countess Skarbek ordered a piano placed out on the lawn under the beech trees so the young Chopin could play to her household in the evenings. We also know that in Zelazowa Wola he listened to wandering gypsy bands playing mazurkas and other country dances that he was to immortalize in his compositions.
A VILLAGE ECHOS CHOPIN'S THEMES
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PAUL LEWIS is a correspondent in Paris for The New York Times. By PAUL LEWIS
T he first sounds the infant son of Nicholas and Justina Chopin heard when he entered the world on Feb. 22, 1810, were the lively peasant tunes of the fiddlers and pipers of Zelazowa Wola, a melodiously named village not far from Warsaw. By a happy coincidence, so the story goes, the village musicians were passing his mother's bedroom on their way to festivities at the nearby manor house of Countess Skarbek.
Today, a hugh white urn, filled with flowers in summer and with grasses and evergreen sprigs during the long Polish winter, stands in the bedroom alcove where Frederic Chopin was born. From concealed loudspeakers, the piano music of Poland's greatest composer, so heavily spiced with the rhythms of the countryside, drifts constantly through the small cottage on the old Skarbek estate and out over the gardens and woods beyond.
Chopin's birthplace, to which he often returned as a guest of the Countess during his adolescence, is preserved as a museum, a concert center and a place of pilgrimage for musicians and music lovers from all over the world. But in Poland's present crisis the cottage and the copious gardens that now surround it take on a special significance.
In a country worn threadbare by economic hardship, they are a haven of tranquillity and beauty. But they are also an eloquent reminder of Poland's long and tragic struggle to defend itself against the acquisitive advances of its neighbors, a struggle that seems far from over today.
Driving out to Zelazowa Wola one warm Sunday this fall, I found it chilling to recall how little the country's problems had changed over the centuries. I had left behind a Warsaw awash with rumours of an imminent Soviet invasion, a concern that would not have surprised Chopin. By the time Chopin was five years old, Czar Alexander I of Russia had formally declared himself King of Poland, having already grabbed much of the country in the company of Austria and Prussia.
On entering the cottage for the first time, it was moving beyond words to be greeted, through an extraordinary fluke, by the thunderous chords and angry cascade of semiquavers that mark the opening of the ''Revolutionary'' etude in C Minor. Chopin was an ardent nationalist and this work expresses the rage and frustration he felt after the brutal Russian suppression of the 1830-31 Polish uprising. ''Oh God, you exist and yet you don't avenge,'' he wrote from Stuttgart at the time. ''Have you not had your fill of Moscow's crimes?''
Like everything else in Poland these days, getting out to Zelazowa Wola is not easy, but dollars help. Public transportation does not exist, so the best idea is to take a taxi, offering the driver dollars or some other Western currency that he can spend in Poland's well-stocked foreign-currency shops. After initially demanding $25 for the half-day trip, my driver settled for $15.
Zelazola Wola is only about 40 miles from Warsaw, but the one-hour drive is a journey back in time. Soon the shabby blocks of workers' apartments give way to narrow, bumpy country roads running past rows of neat peasants' cottages, many of them beautifully carved wooden buildings that date from the 19th century.
In October, during what the Poles call their ''golden autumn,'' their gardens are a mass of roses and marigolds. Conical hayricks dot the fields like oversized molehills, while long, thin horse-drawn carts that have not changed in hundreds of years roll slowly along, loaded with potatoes, beets and cabbages.
The village is on the Masovian plains, an area known as the ''Heart of Poland.'' The landscape is absolutely flat but crisscrossed by meandering streams lined with willow trees. More than one biographer has heard some echo of the delicate strength of these Masovian willows in Chopin's music. And Chopin himself wrote, ''I am a true Masovian.''
The single-story cottage, a long, ivy-covered building of six rooms, is surrounded by gardens that dip down in terraces to a little river. In homage to the composer, botanical gardens all over the world sent more than 10,000 trees and shrubs to be planted when the Polish Government bought the cottage and turned it into a museum in 1930.
In October the path that winds up to the cottage door from the entrance gate is still bordered by banks of chrysanthemums, roses and white irises. (Admission is 20 zloties, less than $1.) Donkeys graze on the lawns beyond, while overhead hugh beech trees, turning gold now, offer shade from the suprising warmth of the midday sun.
Chopin led an exile's life in troubled times, dying of consumption in Paris at the age of 39. His music, of course, is preserved along with many letters. And his heart was returned to Poland for burial in Warsaw's Holy Cross Church. But few other mementos of his life have survived. Although the cottage is furnished as it might have been in Chopin's day, it contains only a handful of items the composer would recognize.
On a sunny day, the cottage seems airy and bright, with white walls and designs painted in delicate colors on the ceiling beams. In winter the rooms are heated by blue-tiled woodstoves. The unpretentious furniture includes an old mahogany grandfather clock, a dining room set of polished black wood, silk-covered settees and 19th-century prints of Warsaw.
The big black Steinway grand tucked into a corner of the music room contrasts with a 19th-century ''upright grand'' that looks like a harp standing on a keyboard in another room. The difference between the full tone of a modern piano and the tinkling noise of the kind of instrument Chopin used makes one wonder whether he would even recognize his own music today.
Some framed musical manuscripts together with several decorated poems, which Chopin as a small boy presented to his parents on their birthdays, provide a direct link with the composer.
So do some of the pictures - not the reproductions of the portraits by Delacroix and Scheffer but less well-known pictures like the two sketches of him at 19 by Princess Radziwill, drawn when he was staying at her family's castle.
''She's young, 17, pretty and it's a delight to guide her fingers on the keys,'' he wrote of the Princess whom he helped with piano lessons. In return she recorded his delicate birdlike profile while he sat at the piano. The other, full-face sketch, in color, noted dark patches under his eyes, a hint of the disease that was to claim him so young.
The portraits of Chopin's parents in the dining room suggest that the composer's powerful nose came from his schoolmaster father, while his sensuous mouth seems an inheritance from his mother, the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat who worked as Countess Skarbek's housekeeper. Chopin's father was a tutor to the Countess's sons.
Countess Skarbek ordered a piano placed out on the lawn under the beech trees so the young Chopin could play to her household in the evenings. We also know that in Zelazowa Wola he listened to wandering gypsy bands playing mazurkas and other country dances that he was to immortalize in his compositions.
So it is fitting that on Sundays in summer, those who make the journey to the cottage should be invited to listen to some of Poland's finest pianists perform Chopin's works out on the terrace under the beech trees, where the master once played. It is a perfect end to a moving pilgrimage.
The Chopin museum is open the year round from 9 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. on weekdays, 9 to 2 on Saturday; from May to September it is open on Sunday from 9 to 4:30. The recitals are given on Sunday from May to September, one at 11 A.M. and another at 3 P.M.
