Romantique
August 1-17, 2003
American Repertory Theatre
Cambridge, Massachusetts

George Sand... Stephanie Zimbalist
Eugene Delacroix... Anthony Crivello
Frederic Chopin... Hershey Felder

Frederic Chopin, George Sand, Eugene Delacroix: three lives devoted to art during the hey-day of French Romanticism in the 1830s and 1840s; three lives joined by companionship and love over the course of a decade or more; three intertwined creative and biographical trajectories that animate Hershey Felder's latest "imagination" with music.  Romantique.

Felder's story leads us to consider a basic question: How do we understand the relationships between life and art?  In the modern imagination, the two categories mingle uncomfortably.  Many people read (or hear, or see) an artwork as revealing something personal about its creator: for them, artistic expression necessarily divulges biographical information.  Others, though, believe that an exultant or melancholic song tells us nothing about the state of mind of the songwriter when she wrote it: an artist's life stands segregated from her work.

But these modern views obscure a messier reality.  The events that anchor Romantique - the merry gatherings, the emotional upheavals, and the personal conflicts that Chopin, Sand, and Delacroix experienced between 1836 and 1849 - show the realms of art and life colliding and fusing.  Chopin and Sand certainly connected with one another profoundly - if eventually most bitterly - through their respective arts.  Sand's love for Chopin's music and Chopin's respect for Sand's craft helped sustain what otherwise seemed a match of opposites (the delicate, sickly, fair-haired Pole who loathed the masses and took comfort in the salons of aristocrats and royalists; the robust, raven-haired Frenchwoman who embraced the causes of the lower classes and found inner peace in the woods and fields near her summer home in Nohant).  And what upheld the relationship also contributed to its downfall: Sand delivered the opening volley that led eventually to her rupture with Chopin not through an argument, or an affair, but rather through the penning of a novel, Lucrezia Floriani, that distilled her frustrations with the composer.  Chopin and Delacroix's friendship likewise found its most comfortable level around the subject of art (with Delacroix apparently showing more sympathy for Chopin's creative credos than the reverse).  Delacroix, too, sought to capture something essential about the Chopin-Sand relationship through a joint portrait that he never could finish (and that someone sundered in two after his death.

Chopin especially confounds the easy segregation of "life" from "art" - surprisingly so, perhaps, for one whose surviving daily utterances concern primarily the prose of everyday life, but whose music evokes the poetry of transcendent experience.  Surely (so many of his biographers imply) his music occupies one sphere, and his life another.  But close attention to his music - the fourth "character" in Romantique - reveals a composer capable of conveying profound intellectual, moral, political, and emotional values.  His music tells us that he thought deeply and engaged complexity in the world around him.  That many of his first listeners invoked the idea of "soul" in response to hearing him play his music suggests an awareness of this quality of his art: "music," like "soul," resists precise definition in words even as it touches the depths of inner and outer experience.  Here, then, lies the emotional glue that bonded Chopin to Sand and Delacroix, and that explains why these searching minds found sustenance in his company: Chopin's music went straight to the heart, and trumped all the personal foibles that the three characters could muster.

Frederic Chopin, George Sand, Eugene Delacroix: three great artists living by and through their arts - three Romantic lives.