Gottfried Benn
Chopin
Not much of a conversationalist,
ideas weren't his strong suit,
ideas miss the point,
when Delacroix expounded his theories
it made him nervous, he for his part
could offer no explanation of the Nocturnes.
A poor lover;
mere shadow in Nohant
where George Sand's children
rejected his attempts
at discipline.
His tuberculosis
took the chronic form,
with repeated bleeding and scarring;
a creeping death,
as opposed to one
in convulsions of agony
or by firing squad:
the piano (Erard) was pushed against the door
and Delphine Potocka
sang him
a violet song in his last hour.
He took three pianos with him to England:
Pleyel, Erard, Broadwood,
for twenty guineas
he would give fifteen-minute recitals in the evenings
at the Rothschilds' and the Wellingtons', in Strafford House
to the assembled cummerbunds;
then, dark with fatigue and imminent death,
he went home
to the Square d'Orleans.
Then he burned his sketches
and manuscripts,
didn't want any leftover scraps
betraying him–
at the end he said:
"I have taken my experiment
as far as it was possible for me to go."
Each finger was to play
to no more than its natural strength,
the fourth being the weakest
(twinned with the middle finger).
At the start, they occupied the keys
of E, F sharp, G sharp, B and C.
Anyone hearing
certain of his Preludes
in country seats or
at altitude,
through open French windows
on the terrace, say, of a sanitorium,
will not easily forget it.
He composed no operas,
no symphonies,
only those tragic progressions
from artistic conviction
and with a small hand.
German, trans. Michael Hofmann
Gottfried Benn, German, trans. Michael Hofmann, Twentieth Century German Poetry: An Anthology, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.