The sexuality of Chopin
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Sexuality, History, Music, Classical Music, LGBTQ

The sexuality of Chopin

A journalist just demolished centuries of official denial

As a researcher in sexuality, I’ve had my eye on Frédéric Chopin, the 19th century Polish composer. He struck many contemporaries as highly androgynous.

You might even get it from his music—so delicate, magical, energized. A scholar writes in 1996:

“People who heard and saw Chopin play the piano, who encountered his music, or who made his acquaintance repeatedly tried to share their experience by evoking various otherworldly beings, in particular fairies, elves, sylphs, and angels.”

I flip through books on Chopin, finding snippets of commentary over the years, like “Chopin was a man with a woman’s genius,” or “so womanly is he.”

For the most part, though, his sexuality isn’t discussed. That he sells a lot of product, and is celebrated as Catholic, makes it especially tricky.

Maria Wodzinska, date unknown, c.1830

Of course he had a thing with George Sand.

That was a woman novelist, supposedly, who dressed like a man, and was, come to think of it, maybe lesbian—or a man? Their romance was a great love story of the 19th century. Hollywood loved it, like in movies like Impromptu in 1991.

It was beguiling to think of a romance of two androgynous beings, drawn to each other, if never quite to the point of being so vulgar as to be sexual. Sand would write:

“He seemed to despise (in the manner of a religious prude) the coarser side of human nature and to blush for the temptations he had had, and to fear to soil our love by a further ecstasy.”

It was all straight enough for biography, which would never think vulgar thoughts like a gay guy and a lesbian were covering for each other?

Only on occasion do scholars muse on queer possibilities in the evidence of Chopin’s life, like the “erotically charged imagery in the early correspondence with his friend Tytus Woyciechowski,” as a biographer notes in 2003. She adds context on how Chopin was perceived:

“His frail physical presence, the ‘short form’ of his most popular compositions and the lightness of touch at the keyboard evoking ‘small faery voices,’ fused into a single impression: Chopin was not a man. Sand herself called him an angel in the early, most passionate days of her love. In the 1840s, Parisian slang gave only one meaning to the word ‘angel’ (ange): homosexual.”

Here we have a clear case for Chopin being called, in code, a ‘homosexual’ by someone who knew him very well. But there is little effort to identify him, even, as ‘queer’.

He was straight enough for Christianity, which is even better at denial.

It’s quite a remarkable religion for having so many “angels” running around, and being unable to see them? In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI praised Chopin to the heavens:

“May the music of this famous Polish composer, who made such a great contribution to the culture of Europe and the world, bring those who listen to him close to God and help them discover the depth of man’s spirit.”

Gay people often suspected there was more to the story. “Chopin was the nelliest thing that ever existed,” Jobriath says in Interview magazine in 1973. “He got hooked up with the dyke of the century — George Sand. She was just another groupie. They never fucked.”

But gay intuition is little regarded. And scholars don’t like outing people, or looking underneath the layers of codes and subterfuge. Even scholars who supposedly specialize in ‘gender studies’ will omit evidence of sexuality, tuck it away into footnotes, or decline to draw conclusions.

We don’t often find scholars looking for sexuality under the surface of dramas like, for example, Chopin agonizing over his Christianity.

“But in Paris, his faith dwindled, and life became more tormented. Many of his new friends were ‘men and women without principles, or rather with bad principles’.” —J. Huneker, Chopin: The Man and His Music (1918)

A queer dilemma for so many—who often end up home, alone, perhaps, listening to Chopin.

This week we’re seeing the remarkable story of Moritz Weber, a Swiss music journalist.

During the spring lockdown, he thought to investigate Chopin’s sexuality, finding, as he summarizes, a “flood of declarations of love aimed at men,” with Chopin talking of his flings with women being a “cloak for hidden feelings.”

Weber put together a two-hour program on a Swiss public radio channel. It was picked up by the media, and became a ‘story’.

“You don’t like being kissed,” Chopin wrote to his school friend Tytus Woyciechowski in one of 22 letters. “Please allow me to do so today. You have to pay for the dirty dream I had about you last night.” Letters to the friend, who was actively involved in Poland’s January uprising of 1863, often start with “My dearest life” and end with: “Give me a kiss, dearest lover.”

In coverage, The Guardian solicits comment from Chopin scholars, who brush it all away. “The way Chopin uses language is so musical and complicated, to translate all that is madness,” one says.

We realize, if we didn’t know it already, that biographers have openly lied about subjects, even destroyed evidence. Translations of Chopin’s letters, Weber notes, have changed pronouns from male to female.

He discovered that heterosexual evidence had been cited, but to look up the books—it didn’t even exist. He found cultural categories had been employed (“bosom friend”) to minimize the closeness of Chopin with male friends when homosexuality might better describe the motivation. Biographers have used terms like “psychological confusion” and “passing homosexual affair” to neutralize the ‘problem’.

If the relationship with George Sand was important, Weber found that Chopin’s greater love might really be Tytus Woyciechowski, to whom he had dedicated his Variations On “La ci darem la mano”, Op. 2, and composed for him the Waltz Op. 70 №3 in D flat.

Were they queer love letters—hiding in plain sight?

Has Chopin been outed—171 years after he died?

It might have happened sooner, but note that it isn’t easy to get evidence for queerness discussed in public. Weber discovered that references to Chopin’s sexuality, when posted even to the German-language Wikipedia, were instantly removed.

The key to the media coverage now seems to be that Poland, presently, has a conservative Catholic government, and discussing Chopin’s sexuality is thought by liberal media to embarrass them. And so 18th century queer history is bound up into concerns that are fairly remote. I imagine the amusing idea of sex researchers having to campaign for right-wing governments just to get evidence for their subjects acknowledged.

Weber hopes for more research. It might happen? He notes a sea-change in understanding classical music might might be called for, as many beloved composers seem to look a little funny. There’s Schubert? We have little evidence of his life, but he seems to be off with the boys most of the time.

I think everyone has given up on Tchaikovsky. But there’s polite silence about Handel. And on and on, to the point that music itself, as Jobriath would say, seems “a very feminine thing,” and often practiced by men who led—strange lives? More so than we knew how to conceptually manage, and there was strangely little interest in doing so.

And is there something about the human race that we’re missing? D.H. Lawrence, the 20th century’s great thinker on sex, writes in 1913:

“I should like to know why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not…”

If someone was interesting, magical, energized—there might even be a presumption they were . . . “that way”?