Swiss journalist Moritz Weber caused much angst in Poland this week with a radio broadcast called Chopin’s Men. Chopin remains an icon in the country of his birth nearly two centuries after his death. The notoriously homophobic country celebrates the composer as a national icon.
Frédéric Chopin’s name decorates Warsaw’s largest airport as well as parks, streets and public buildings. Following the success of some early musical compositions, he left Warsaw for Paris and never returned. However, as one of music’s earliest celebrities, Poland embraced him as a national hero following his death.
Although Chopin never married, movies and books over the years made much of his romantic attachments to various women. Moritz Weber could find no actual evidence of any relationships with women, however. Even the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Poland admitted no written evidence exists for the composer’s fabled infatuations with females. They rely on the anecdotal evidence from members of Chopin’s family. The only correspondence ever found between the composer and a female romantic attachment turned out a forgery.
But Weber found ample evidence of homoerotic content in the composer’s correspondence.
Chopin often wrote to his childhood friend Tytus Wojciechowski calling him ‘my dearest life’ and signing off ‘Send me a kiss, dearest lover’.
In one letter, he left absolutely no doubt of his feelings for his friend.
“You don’t like being kissed. Please, let me do it today. You have to pay me for the dirty dream I had about you last night.”
The Fryderyk Chopin Institute did not see that as necessarily indicating homosexuality though.
Musical and complicated
“If you read them in the Polish original, it sounds a little bit different.
“The way Chopin uses language is so musical and complicated, to translate all that is madness.”
Oh! Okay then.
Musical and complicated!
Liberace was always very proud of his Polish roots. We should ask them to explain him!
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