CHILDHOOD OF CHOPIN

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 256, 19 January 1928, Page 16

CHILDHOOD OF CHOPIN

COMPOSER’S FIRST HOME A delightful glimpse of the home into which Chopin was born is given in “Chopin, the Child and the Lad,” by TJminska and Kennedy. The “flat” in a small town on the Mazovian plains, says these authors, was “a long suite of rooms in the long, low annexe of Countess Skarba’s manor-house, and was separated by a hall from the manor bakery and kitchen . . . The Chopins’s three rooms had, as was then the habit, beamed ceilings and whitewashed walls. They were furnished with solid, oldfashioned mahogany furniture. In the one-windowed front room in which Nicholas Chopin, the new-born baby’s father, was wont to sit and study, there were also bookshelves, containing his collection of books, from which he was never willingly separated. The next room, which had two windows, was the largest of all and served as a drawing room. In one corner of it stood a high-backed clavichord. “The third room, which was at the back of the house, had a window looking out on a flower bed, and further, across the River Utrata (Utrata means loss’), which flowed almost under the windows of the house. “In the corner of each of these rooms stood a tall, white-washed brick stove, heated with pinewood logs, which, burning, gave forth a smell of resin, that mingled with th© scent of rosemary and lavender and dried rose leaves with which, according to prevailing fashion, the sofa cushions were stuffed. White muslin curtains covered the windows and on the broad sills stood fuchsia, pelargonium and geranium plants.”

Reviews of the recent appearance of Yehundi Menuhin playing the Beethoven Concerto with the New York Symphony Orchestra echo the sentiments of San Franciso admirers of the city’s most famous artist, states a New York writer. New York and’ Paris have in the past year been added to the music capitals that have acclaimed Yehudi’s geniuses. In a few weeks he will return to this city for further study with Louis Persinger and for appearances in recital and with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Pitts Sanborn, in the “New York Telegram,” described Yehudi’s reception in the simple words: “And so this youngster provoked approving shouts in hard-boiled New York.” All the writers commented on the distinction of the audience. At the end of the first cadenza in the Beethoven Concerto the applause threatened to stop the show, and when he had finished the entire work Yehudi was called out for many minutes. Yehudi Menuhin, although only a boy, has already taken America by storm, and a great future is predicted for him by American writers, -