Years of refuge: 1839–45.

A new routine now developed for Chopin, where the summers (apart from 1840) would be spent in Nohant and given over largely to composing, while the winter season would see him in Paris, teaching and occasionally playing. Whatever may be said of Chopin's relationship with Sand, it did provide him with a stable home life – the first since his Warsaw days – and consequently with the ideal material and emotional conditions for sustained composition. Much of his greatest music was composed in Nohant, beginning with that first summer of 1839, when he wrote the Mazurkas op.41, the second of the two Nocturnes op.37, the F major Impromptu op.36 and the remaining three movements of the B minor Sonata op.35. Yet even during his first visit there Chopin quickly became restless and constantly needed congenial company. He found himself hankering after the city, his real milieu, and when they returned to Paris in October, he remained there for the next 18 months. He took rooms at 5 rue Tronchet and spent his days teaching there until around four, before making his way to Pigalle, where Sand had rented two twin-storey summer-houses. It was a comfortable routine, which enabled Sand and Chopin to maintain a degree of independence, which both of them clearly needed.

From the start there were tensions in the relationship. For one thing they moved uneasily in each other's social circles. Sand had little time for Chopin's ‘society’ friends, nor for the Polish clique, Grzymał a apart. Nor did Chopin warm to Sand's artistic, often rather bohemian, milieu, though he made an exception of Delacroix and engaged in lengthy (and revealing) debates with him about art and music. He had little interest, moreover, in the literary and political projects which occupied so much of Sand's time and energies; and where he did engage with them his innate conservatism stood in sharp contrast to her own radical agenda. There were other, more personal tensions. Increasingly Chopin was prone to petty and obsessive jealousy and suspicion about Sand's friendships with others, fuelled no doubt by her colourful reputation and by the fact that physical relations between the couple lasted for a relatively short time. It seems clear that – for Sand – a maternal feeling was the dominating factor (‘I look after him like a child, and he loves me like his mother’), but it is far from certain that Chopin shared this view. Unhappily much of the correspondence between them was destroyed by Sand, so our picture of the relationship remains incomplete. But it does seem that, for all the difficulties, the bond between them was powerful. As late as 1845 she was able to write, ‘Love me, dear angel, my dear happiness, as I love you’, scarcely the language of detachment.

Although Chopin's critical standing as a composer grew steadily during the 18 months he spent in Paris from October 1839 to June 1841, it was in reality a far from productive period. It seems that around this time he engaged in a major re-examination of his artistic aims, and it was only when he returned to Nohant for the summer of 1841 that the results became evident. Interestingly he requested treatises on counterpoint almost as soon as he arrived, and by the end of the summer he had completed the Prelude op.45, the Nocturnes op.48, and two major works, the A Ballade op.47 and the F minor Fantasy op.49. He was increasingly perfectionist about his art at this time, writing of the Ballade and Fantasy, ‘I cannot give them enough polish’, and his compositional process became correspondingly slow and laborious. The richness and complexity of the music of the 1840s is a testament to this, almost as though the difficulty of composition and the resistance it set up wrested from him only music of an exceptional, transcendent quality. The following summer in Nohant (1842), part of it spent in the company of Delacroix, produced some of the great works of his later years, including the Mazurkas op.50, the A major Polonaise op.53, the F minor Ballade op.52 and the E major Scherzo op.54.

When Chopin and Sand returned to Paris in August 1842 they moved to new accommodation in the Square d'Orlé ans, close to their friends the Marlianis, and also incidentally to Kalkbrenner and Alkan. It was a satisfactory domestic arrangement. But Chopin's health was giving cause for real concern, and the relationship with Sand was deteriorating, partly due to growing tensions within the family. All of this, together with his inability to recapture his earlier fluency in composition, contributed to his low spirits in the winter of 1843–4. But the hardest blow of all came in May 1844, when he learnt of the death of his father. Sand immediately whisked him off to Nohant, but he refused to be consoled until his sister Ludwika, to whom he had always been close, announced her intention to visit France with her husband that summer. They met in Paris in July and the visitors divided their time between there and Nohant until they departed for Poland in early September. ‘We are mad with happiness’, Chopin wrote. But it was not to last. The winter season brought further strains in his relationship with Sand, and when they set out for Nohant in June 1845 tensions within the family circle were beginning to come to a head.

Chopin, Fryderyk Franciszek