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Helena Paderewska: Memoirs, 1910â"1920

Hoover Institution Press

Husband, Artist. Patriot

On New Year's Day, 1920, in Warsaw, in the Sala Malinowa of the Hotel Bristol, Mr. Paderewski has been listening to the addresses made by the leaders of the various clubs and societies that that morning had paraded in his honor. In his brief answer, it seems to me that he struck the keynote of his entire life. He said that he considered himself on that day the happiest of men because God had allowed him to realize his most ardent wishes, because his constant prayers since boyhood had been fulfilled. He had prayed that he might be allowed to serve Poland and to be useful to her. Even when as a boy he had prayed that it be granted him to build a monument to Grunwald, so had he asked that he might live to see Poland free and independent, that he might help in its rebirth as a nation. He had asked that, when this moment came, he might stand before his countrymen with clean hands and pure heart. That day had come. His prayers had been answered.

It was a wonderful day, that New Year's in Warsaw, even as the Saturday before had been wonderful in Poznan. The weather was abominable, but under a driving rain thousands had stood for hours in the streets before the Bristol where our apartments were. There had been a great procession in which were men and woman of all walks of life, from the aristocracy to the humblest laborers and peasants. They had come from all parts of Poland, artists, university professors, teachers, students and schoolchildren, trades unionists, and businessmen, and a group of ancient veterans of the Revolution of '63. For nearly two hours Mr. Paderewski had stood on the balcony reviewing the procession and for a half hour he stood bareheaded in the rain addressing the dense masses of people below him. The enthusiasm was tremendous, as it had been in Poznan the week before. It has been given to few men to have the experience that my husband had on these days. Not only did he know that the demonstrations were genuine in their spontaneity and affection, but he was conscious in the depths of his heart that he, who was their object, had done what they said he had done and had done it in absolute unselfishness, without thought of reward, without personal ambition.

New Year's Day had been chosen for the Warsaw celebration because on that day, the year before, my husband had arrived from America. Then he had been greeted as the savior of his fatherland, the man who more than any other man had made possible a free and independent Poland, who had brought back to her Galicia, Poznania, and the other provinces that had been torn from her by the iniquitous partitions, who had again stretched the boundaries of his country to the sea. Even more, he had been greeted as the one man who could bring order out of the chaos into which Poland had fallen since the armistice.

The demonstration in Poznan on the previous Saturday had likewise fallen on the anniversary of his arrival there the year before. They had been memorable days, those we had spent in Poznan at the end of December 1918. The German troops were not yet entirely out of the city, and there was fighting in the streets in front of the Hotel Bazar where we were staying. Some bullets even came in our room, one of them smashing a mirror. When Mr. Paderewski sailed from New York toward the end of November, nothing had been further from his mind than that he would go to Poland, and it was not really until the days we spent in Poznan that he realized that his work of the immediate future lay in his own country.

Until he went to Poland at the end of 1918, the great world knew him only as an artist. It was slow to believe that he could, as it were with the stroke of a pen, cast his career behind him and plunge with success into the greatest political battle history has known. It seems to be the general idea that if a man is an artist, especially a musician, that one fact precludes all possibility of his venturing into other activities with hope of success.

I cannot speak of other artists, but of my husband I can, for I have been his wife twenty years and knew him well long before I was married to him. That he has been more than a musician I have always known. His friends, men who have known him well and intimately, have realized this. That he was able to almost at a day's notice to give up his art, to battle successfully for his country, in America and in Europe, in Warsaw, Paris, and London, to endure without complaint and without loss of courage the bitterest disappointments, to withstand for years without quailing a continuous nervous strain, to meet on equal terms and more than hold his own with the ablest statesmen of our time in questions involving the welfare of millions of people, all this was no surprise to me nor to those who knew him best.

For thirty years he had enjoyed success such as, perhaps, had been given to no other man in the history of his art. He had played throughout Europe and America. He had visited South America, South Africa, and Australia. He had won wealth and honors. He had written much music and as a composer had rivaled his fame as a pianist. His personality had provoked endless comment and had given rise to numberless legends concerning him and his life, more of them fanciful, many of them absurd.

Perhaps I am prejudiced, but it has always struck me as odd that the world was so slow, even unwilling, to grant that a man such as he could do more than one thing well. For so many years it had not only admitted his unusual personality but had insisted upon it, emphasized it, exaggerated it, and yet it could not read the significance of that very personality. I used to be amused, perhaps a little vexed, in America in the winter of 1915 — 16 when even our closest friends were astonished that he knew how to talk to an audience. During that time, in some of the larger cities, he prefaced his recitals by an address in which he pleaded the cause of Poland. As he put it, "I have to speak of a country which is not yours in a language which is not mine." It seemed to be most obvious that if he had the gift of oratory at all, the charm and personal magnetism that were such salient characteristics of his art would be just as potent when he spoke as when he played his piano.

It is not my plan to dwell long on his career as an artist. The world knows what he had been and what he is. The world must know by this time that never had music had a more ardent, devout, and humble servant. If there is one characteristic in him that overtops all others, it is his honesty, and to this must be added his absolute sincerity of purpose. Music, the most jealous of the arts, has never had cause to criticize his attitude toward her. Like all who have achieved greatness in the big things of life, he has always been a most serious man. I do not mean that his face is always long and that he never smiles, for when he throws off his work to play, no one can be more lighthearted and gay, more ready for a frolic; but he has never allowed play to interfere with his work. Few men, I believe, have worked harder than he; from the time as a boy he determined on music as a career and began his studies.

The world knows in a general way the story of his life. God gave him genius, but he developed that genius only by long years of privations and unending work, his capacity for continuous effort having been without limit. He has never spared himself, and only a man with an iron constitution and great physical strength like his could have endured the strain he has put on his mind and body. The greater part of his life he gave to music. There were the early years of hardships, privations, and trials during which he never lost his courage, his will to succeed. He was nearly thirty when success came to him, and with this success the days of privation were past. He had no longer to think of the means of existence; but with that success came more work, greater responsibilities, new tasks. He would not be content to accept himself at the world's estimation. He must go on and on, never satisfied with the goal he had reached. To the very end he prepared for his tours as painstakingly and as conscientiously as he did when he was fighting to secure recognition, always giving his best to his audiences, not only out of fairness to them but out of fairness to his art.

When he was not giving concerts, he was composing, putting into that work the same energy, the same honesty, the same sincerity he had given to his piano. The neuritis in his right arm that so troubled him in recent years and troubles him even today was the direct result of the manual labor involved in scoring his symphony, a great book of four hundred pages, which he did in three months.

During all the years the world knew him simply as a musician, and for many years before, there was another great impulse working within him. I have said quite truthfully that no man has lived more completely devoted to his art and to the best in his art, and yet from the earliest days music had been for him really a secondary consideration, I might almost say a means to an end. The real, final impulse that has ruled him from childhood, which has consciously and unconsciously governed his entire career, which has guided his almost every act, was his desire to serve his country.

The music that he served was in turn the servant of his one great ambition to serve his fatherland. While he gave his best to his art, he made his art prepare him for the day when Poland should call to him, never faltering in his belief that such a day would come. Sometimes I think he must have had an inspired vision. When he was fourteen years old, he had a boyish dream of giving Poland a monument to commemorate Grunwald. That dream he realized in 1910 when the monument was unveiled in Kraków amid festivities and ceremonies such as Poland had not seen even when she was at the height of her power. At that dedication I think it can be said that his real political career began, that for the first time he was accepted as a leader of the Polish people in their ambition once more to be free.

Again as a boy, he constantly dreamed of the return to Poland of Danzig, or Gdansk, as we call it in Polish. Not only has he lived to see this dream at least partly realized, but he himself was the first Pole since the partitions who as a free man, a citizen of free and independent Poland, came to Gdansk by sea, the British cruiser Concord taking him there from London in December 1918, six weeks after the armistice was signed.

And still another instance of his clear-sighted vision. Directly when the war began, he said that Poland's opportunity had come, but if she was to gain from it, there must be a Polish army fighting on the side of the Allies. He insisted always that it must be a Polish army, not an army of Poles, for only thus could Poland secure recognition as a nation, perhaps having in mind the historic saying of Bismarck that Germany would be doomed the day that the Polish eagle spread its wings over the field of battle. Even at the very beginning of thewar, there would have been no difficulty in recruiting Poles to fight under the French flag — in fact thousands did — but for Poles fighting under a foreign flag, the wars of the previous hundred years had shown what little benefit this was to Poland. They had given everything and received nothing. He felt that the time was then not ripe for such an army and he continually combated the idea of Polish legions under foreign colors. When he went to America, the Poles there were keen to send men abroad to help France, and he opposed the idea with all his force, in the end having his way. Although men of Polish blood volunteered to serve in the American army by the thousands — the first American soldier wounded in France was of Polish blood — when America went into the war he knew that the time had come for the realization of his dream, and in a short time the machinery was ready. Before the end of the summer of 1917, a training camp for officers was in full operation in Canada. Twenty-five thousand Poles from the United States and Canada were sent to France, this Allied and Associated Army, as it was called, giving to Poland a place at the council table when the peace was negotiated. Without it, I question very much whether there would have been a free and independent Poland.

His country and its freedom were from his earliest days a veritable obsession. Waking and sleeping, the thought of Poland was always with him. Everything he did had really for its ultimate object the benefit of his country and his countrymen. All the time he was not giving to his music, he was studying Poland, its literature, its geography, its history, its politics, biography,and art, and there are very few men in Poland today who can be regarded as such final authorities on everything Polish.

When he composed, his music was dedicated to the glory of Poland, and, as the world knows, he filled it, saturated it with the spirit of his country as he felt it. A very large part of his fortune he invested in Poland, not because there he could get the greatest returns for it but because he felt it his duty to put as much money as possible into his own country. When the Hotel Bristol was built in Warsaw, he became the principal shareholder so that much needed work could be provided for the unemployed and that Warsaw should have a hotel worthy of a great European capital. And, really, built from plans following his suggestions, it was one of the first hotels in Europe in which were embodied the conveniences and luxuries of the great hotels of the United States. He did not expect to make money out of it and had not been disappointed.

With the same ideas in mind, he built a beautiful sanatorium for Polish people in Zakopane, that lovely resort in the heart of the Tatra Mountains near Kraków. He and I collected a sum of money, chiefly from the sale of his autographs, for the erection in Warsaw of a monument to Chopin. That, by the way, makes an interesting little story. The money had been raised and the commission for the monument given to Szymanowski, a well-known sculptor. A committee was formed in Warsaw to take charge of it. Of course, permission had to be secured from the Russian government to place the monument, and this was thought to be comparatively easy, for Emperor Nicholas himself had a few years before granted permission to the Poles to erect the great monument to their poet Mickiewicz, this in fact being one of the first acts of the tsar after his accession, and every Pole will remember the joy it brought to the nation. Nor was the joy diminished because the governor of Warsaw refused to allow any speeches, any ceremonies whatever at the unveiling.

With this in mind and knowing that Chopin, unlike Mickiewicz, had never been active politically, the committee had little doubt that permission for the Chopin monument would be granted — but it was refused, and, of course, no reasons were given. It had been intended to push the matter further when the war came and drove it out of our minds. I will confess that I had forgotten about it until last spring in Warsaw I discovered that the statue was stored in the city, ready for erection and that the committee was still in existence. It will not be long, I hope, before it will be possible to set up the statue to which so many Americans and English have contributed.

As I have said, from the very beginning he made his music a handmaid to his desire to serve his country. He carried this to a degree that few could understand and many regarded as a pose. But how wisely he built, and how time has vindicated his judgment! He regarded his music not merely as a means whereby he could accumulate wealth, which would enable him to help his country in a material way, but, even more important, he considered the position his art gave him. For over a hundred years Poland had not existed. It was no longer even a name in the family of nations. The thirty million Poles were a subject race, and the world rushing on in its own affairs was rapidly forgetting that once it had been the greatest and most powerful nation of Central Europe, that it had ruled from the Baltic to the Black Sea, that for centuries it had been the barrier between the civilization of the west and the barbarism of the east. Two hundred and fifty years ago its army under Sobieski had saved Vienna and western Europe from the Turks. For over a hundred years its youth, driven from home, had shed their blood for the sake of liberty wherever liberty was being fought for. The world was rapidly forgetting this, and for it Poland had come to be an almost legendary place, which had given it a Chopin, a Sienkiewicz, a Modjeska, a de Reszke, a Sembrich, and a Paderewski.

In the councils of the world, Poland was voiceless. After the last disastrous revolution of '63, Europe forgot her, and there was no one to plead her cause. Her emigrants were scattered to the four quarters of the earth. Over four millions of them were in America, and while they maintained their language, their traditions, and ever nourished the fire of their patriotism, they were lost amid the myriads of people that surrounded them.

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Excerpted from Helena Paderewska: Memoirs, 1910â"1920 by Helena Paderewska, Maciej Siekierski. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Hoover Institution Press.
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