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Summary
Summary
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. The Sunday Times (U.K.) Classical Music Book of 2018 and one of The Economist 's Best Books of 2018.
"A magisterial portrait." -- Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, The New York Times Book Review
A landmark biography of the Polish composer by a leading authority on Chopin and his time
Based on ten years of research and a vast cache of primary sources located in archives in Warsaw, Paris, London, New York, and Washington, D.C., Alan Walker's monumental Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times is the most comprehensive biography of the great Polish composer to appear in English in more than a century. Walker's work is a corrective biography, intended to dispel the many myths and legends that continue to surround Chopin. Fryderyk Chopin is an intimate look into a dramatic life; of particular focus are Chopin's childhood and youth in Poland, which are brought into line with the latest scholarly findings, and Chopin's romantic life with George Sand, with whom he lived for nine years.
Comprehensive and engaging, and written in highly readable prose, the biography wears its scholarship lightly: this is a book suited as much for the professional pianist as it is for the casual music lover. Just as he did in his definitive biography of Liszt, Walker illuminates Chopin and his music with unprecedented clarity in this magisterial biography, bringing to life one of the nineteenth century's most confounding, beloved, and legendary artists.
Author Notes
Alan Walker 's definitive three-volume biography of Liszt, Franz Liszt , received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Biography and the Royal Philharmonic Society Book Award, among others. His writing has appeared in journals such as The Musical Quarterly , The Times Literary Supplement , and Times Educational Supplement . A professor emeritus at McMaster University, Walker was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1986 and was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary in 2012.
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Nineteenth-century pianist and composer Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849) emerges as a reserved, inward man who creates passionate music in this expansive, authoritative biography. Musicologist and biographer Walker (Franz Liszt) paints Chopin, who was born in Poland and spent his adult life in Paris, as frail, consumptive and fussy, with a polite but aloof manner, a dry wit, and an aversion to disruptions and tumults. Though a Polish patriot, he avoided involvement in Polish uprisings against imperial Russian and Prussian rule and the French revolutions of 1830 and 1848. The saga's great adventure is Chopin's years-long relationship with the cigar-chomping, cross-dressing, scandal-courting novelist George Sand; he at first considered her an "antipathetic woman," but she seduced and then became a caregiver to the sickly musician. Walker sets Chopin's life against a vivid re-creation of the culture of virtuoso piano-playing in 19th-century Paris, where Chopin's music stood out for its unaffected delicacy amid the clanging histrionics of rivals. Chopin sometimes seems like a cold fish, but Walker manages to unearth a warm, intelligent soul that matches the sublime music he wrote. The study is packed with information and insightful analyses of Chopin's major works that will interest professional musicians, and even nonspecialists will be entranced by Walker's piquant storytelling and graceful prose. Photos. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Among the greatest composers, Chopin is exceptional. Unlike his peers, Chopin wrote so primarily for the piano that the cello, violin, voice, and orchestra in his few compositions not strictly for keyboard must be performed superbly to stay in the game. Walker, whose writing is as limpid and engaging as his subject's music, punctuates a rich texture of biography and history with discussions of Chopin's technical and compositional innovations and distinctions that neatly show why he is so highly regarded. But this is much less an analysis and appreciation than a life and times, and Walker limns the legion of the people around Chopin, from family, pupils (prevented from concertizing by illness and temperament, Chopin supported himself by teaching), friends, sponsors, and publishers (his music, while difficult, was quite popular) to political and cultural figures, especially fellow exiled Poles but also many in his adopted homeland, France. Although not a participant in his era's revolutions, Chopin became a symbol of proud Poland in his lifetime and forever after; he cemented the polonaise and the mazurka into the classical repertoire. And then there are his love affairs, real and conjectured, the most famous of which was with feminist novelist-celebrity George Sand. Informed by the latest discoveries about the composer, Walker's biography is a towering and beautiful achievement.--Ray Olson Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A secret congregation of politicians, religious officials and scientists gathered near midnight on April 14, 2014, in the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw to exhume the heart of Chopin. No press was invited and word of the event did not filter out until five months late. The visitors did not open the crystal jar contained in a coffin inscribed with the composer'sname. But they examined and photographed the enlarged organ inside, which had been pickled, probably in cognac. Later, experts would say a whitish film coating the heart pointed to a death from tu- berculosis with complications from pericarditis. The archbishop of Warsaw blessed the organ before it was reinterred in a stone pillar bearing a verse from Matthew: "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." The posthumous reputation of Frederic Chopin (1810-49) stands in stark contrast to his music. A lifelong agnostic, he - or at least his heart - is venerated like a relic in Poland. He never wrote an opera, but in his afterlife he continues to throw up scenes of high drama. In his works - almost all for piano - he dispensed with the programmatic titles that many 19th-century composers used to evoke fairy-tale landscapes and picaresque quests. Yet almost from the moment Chopin died, in Paris, legends attached themselves to his name like ivy. There was the handful of Polish soil Chopin was supposed to have hoarded so it could be scattered over his coffin. A forged diary made the rounds. Priapic letters, addressed to a licentious countess, inflamed scholarly minds until Polish criminologists debunked them as fabrications. Even while alive he became a thinly fictionalized character in a novel by George Sand, his partner of nine years. For a biographer, there's a lot to untangle. Alan Walker does so brilliantly in "Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times," a magisterial portrait of a composer who fascinated and puzzled contemporaries and whose music came to define the Romantic piano. (Walker uses the Polish variant of the first name.) Drawing on a wealth of letters and fresh scholarship, Walker creates a polyphonic work that elegantly interweaves multiple strands. He sketches key events in the history of Poland and portrays the burgeoning society of Polish exiles in Paris in a way that lends depth to Chopin's oft-cited patriotism. Chopin left Poland just before the Warsaw Uprising in 1830. The bittersweet pathos that would infuse so many of his compositions based on Polish dances - the mazurkas and polonaises - here appears as the musical expression of survivor's guilt. Another thread that runs brightly through the book concerns virtuosity, and Chopin's place in a music scene dominated by stage animals. This was, after all, the age of the devilishly gifted violinist Paganini and of piano wizards with outsize egos that divided critics and fans. With the exception of Liszt their names - Alkan, Dreyschock, Kalkbrenner, Thalberg and many others - have long been forgotten. But it was in opposition to these acrobats of the keyboard that contemporaries experienced Chopin's playing. Although gifted with prodigious techñique, Chopin stood outside the "flying trapeze school" of pianism. "1 really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris, or whether you can find anywhere more asses and virtuosos," he wrote in a letter that makes his views on the matter clear. "Is there a difference?" Illness is a recurring motif that shaped Chopin's career before cutting it short. Squeamish readers may blanch at the amount of blood-flecked sputum the tubercular Chopin coughs up on the page, and at the procession of doctors with their leeches and milk diets. Unintentional damage came from well-meaning women, ft was Sand who organized the creative retreat on an unexpectedly rain-sodden Majorca that weakened Chopin. Years later in 1848, a wealthy amateur pianist, Jane Stirling, led Chopin on a tour of England and Scotland that so exhausted the composer - ill and weighing some 95 pounds - that servants had to carry him from room to room. There's romance, too - or at least the suggestion of it. Curiously it is here that Walker seems the least confident. The problem begins early, with teenage letters Chopin wrote to a male friend who had been a boarder at the school Chopin's father ran in Warsaw. "Give me your lips, dearest lover. I'm convinced you still love me, and 1 am as scared of you as ever," one missive reads. And: "Today you will dream that you are embracing me! You have to pay for the nightmare you caused me last night!" This episode brings on a bout of handwringing in Walker, who allows for the possibility of a "passing homosexual affair" between the two men but considers it "far more likely" that Chopin's fervent letters were the result of "psychological confusion." Around the same time Chopin had fallen under the spell of the mezzo-soprano Konstancja Gladkowska - feelings that Walker thinks Chopin transferred onto his best friend. Chopin would be romantically linked with other women but his only lasting relationship was with the trouser-wearing, cigar-smoking George Sand. For most of its nine years their relationship was conducted in separate bedrooms, their lack of relations an open secret. Walker is probably right when he speculates that the gaunt Chopin, who erupted in coughing fits at the slightest exertion, wasn't much fun in bed. But it surely seems plausible, too, that his relationship with Sand devolved into platonic companionship because Chopin just wasn't wired that way. Whatever its physical foundation, the odd symbiosis between Sand and Chopin makes for some of the most novelistic and colorful chapters in the book. Much of the time the two artists were like ships passing in the night, Sand emerging from her writing vigils "like a bat coming out of its cave blinking in the sunlight," as Balzac put it, just as Chopin had his morning cup of chocolate and prepared to get down to work. It seems as if many of their most meaningful interactions occurred in her salon in front of an audience of gossipmongers. Fastidious, aloof and touchy, Chopin kept even friends at arm's length. But he was also capable of reducing them to tears with comic impersonations at the piano and his letters show up his caustic wit. Walker offers insightful comments on some of his most important compositions with their pianistic innovations and expressive elegance. But while Chopin's music opens up emotional worlds it spells out nothing. THE ENDURING FASCINATION of Chopinian relics is also the subject of a shorter book by Paul Kildea. In his highly readable if disjointed CHOPIN'S PIANO: In Search of the Instrument That Transformed Music (Norton, $27.95), Kiidea, a conductor and writer, takes on the fate of a humble upright piano on which Chopin composed many of his groundbreaking Preludes during his fateful sojourn on Majorca. As Walker shows in his biography, Chopin cared deeply about instruments to the point of identifying with them. (In a despondent letter from Scotland he compared himself to an old cembalo.) This piano, built by a Majorcan craftsman, gave Chopin "more vexation than consolation," according to George Sand. But it drew some of the most forwardlooking music from him. In 1911 the brilliant harpsichord pioneer Wanda Landowska discovered the piano languishing in the same drafty monastery where Chopin and Sand had stayed. Her effort to bring it to Berlin, its seizure by Nazi officers during World War II and its subsequent odyssey once again show the uncanny ability of Chopin to write operas - posthumously. Chopin was capable of reducing friends to tears with comic impersonations at the piano. CORINNA DA FONSECA-WOLLHEIM is a contributing music critic for The Times.
Choice Review
An international celebrity during his lifetime, Chopin (1810--49) was one of the most famous 19th-century pianists, teachers of piano, and composers for piano. Walker (emer., McMaster Univ., and author of the award-winning Franz Liszt, 3v, 1983--97) explores all aspects of Chopin, including the relationship between his personality and his music. Biographical topics receiving the benefit of Walker's meticulous, richly detailed, and sympathetic attention include Chopin's background and training, his early romantic attachments, his rise to fame in Paris, the support of his closest circle of friends and admirers, his eight-year relationship with George Sand and her children (Solange and Maurice), and his long struggle with tuberculosis. The closing chapters on Chopin's declining health, death, legacy, and posthumous biographical treatment are especially compelling. Walker enlivens his central biographical narrative with broad social and cultural context (including 19th-century Polish politics), thorough research on Chopin's reception during his life and after his death, and perceptive but stinging assessments of Chopin's detractors. Throughout, Walker traces Chopin's development as a composer, virtuoso, and teacher through thoughtful readings of representative compositions. The biography is imposing in size, but Walker's prose is well paced and in turns mellifluous, insightful, and witty. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Stanley Clyde Pelkey, University of Kentucky
Guardian Review
An authoritative, accessible biography details Chopin's personal turmoil and captures his true musical significance Chopin is one of those great composers - Debussy is another - whose supreme qualities have tended to be obscured by the wrong sort of popularity. Partly, I suppose, because he wrote almost exclusively for the piano, his music was for years ghettoised by amateur pianists and sentimental music lovers who found all they thought they needed in his nocturnes, mazurkas and waltzes. The "Chopin recital", Alan Walker reminds us, "remains as popular as ever", while at the same time, the frail tubercular Pole has gone on being reinvented by novelists and film-makers and assorted fraudsters, fake diarists, letter manufacturers and all the other parasites of Romantic art. Walker's is not the first biography to hack through this jungle of misinformation, but it is by far the most thorough and authoritative (in English, at any rate), and, for all its length, by no means the least readable. The broad outlines are familiar enough: the childhood and early triumphs in Warsaw, the first trip to Vienna aged 19, the second (and as it turned out final) departure from Warsaw three weeks before the November uprising (1830-31), the long years in Paris in steadily declining health, the affair with George Sand, the many private and few public performances, the miserable death in 1849 in the Place Vendôme apartment surrounded by a (disputed) handful of close friends, its vestibule crowded with photographers, newsmen, swooning countesses and chattering souvenir hunters. Walker is brilliant on piano technique - free of jargon, easily understood, even by someone who's never played the piano All this Walker describes with the narrative expertise one would expect of the masterly biographer of Liszt, a lesser composer but hardly less complex personality. Some of the terrain is admittedly the same, though Walker scotches the myth of Chopin's intimate friendship with the great keyboard and sexual athlete, who came to represent everything he most detested about Parisian musical and social life. More importantly, the book gives significantly more weight than its anglophone rivals to Chopin's first 21 years in Poland (after all, more than half of his 39 year total). It's so easy, when writing about an eastern European artist whose productive life was spent almost entirely in the west, to skate over the formative years, especially when they require knowledge of a Slavic language. Walker, however, paints a vivid and detailed picture of the composer's early family life and schooling, in what he makes clear was a culturally rich period in the Polish capital, before the Russians - an occupying force - put down the November rising with brutality. Chopin had a loving home life, with parents who believed in and provided a disciplined, rounded education. He left Warsaw only because it could no longer offer a platform for a musician of his brilliance, but it always remained close to his heart. The image of an expatriate composer whose contacts with his native land were confined to the writing of a few mazurkas and polonaises and a tangential involvement with the Polish diaspora in Paris was killed off long ago in the specialist literature but still lingers on in the lay mind. Polish friends were crucial to him throughout his Paris years; he corresponded with his family, holidayed with his parents in Carlsbad - a spa town in what is now the Czech Republic - in 1835, and when his sister Ludwika came to Paris with her husband in 1844, felt, he told a friend, "a happiness enough to send one crazy". She came again when her brother was dying, and stayed to nurse him, to her jealous husband's undisguised fury. The long affair with Sand and its horrendous conclusion also get their due. Walker is excellent on its background and not afraid to digress in the interests of context. But he is at his best in the whole ghastly affair of Sand's illegitimate daughter, Solange, and her marriage to the fortune-hunting sculptor Auguste Clésinger, which culminated in a scene at Nohant worthy of a penny dreadful, with Clésinger threatening George's son, Maurice, with a mallet and Maurice grabbing a shotgun. This is also a musical biography that makes clear why, after all, we should bother to read a book about Chopin. Far from being a salon miniaturist, he was a major artist, a true heir to Bach and Mozart (as well as Beethoven, though he wouldn't have liked it said), a creator of new forms, new modes of expression, and new keyboard techniques and sonorities. Walker rightly indicates Scriabin and Fauré as direct musical descendants, and Debussy as heir to Chopin's discoveries about the piano; and since Debussy drew a new language partly from these findings, Walker might well have claimed (though he doesn't) that Chopin lies behind a good deal of modern music, too. How's that for a salon miniaturist The book makes no attempt to discuss every work, but goes into detail on salient pieces, with music examples, and some perhaps curious omissions - nothing, for instance, on the Ballade in F minor, one of the greatest of all piano works post-Beethoven. Smaller pieces, on the other hand, come through strongly. The strange harmonic effects that abound in the mazurkas appear early on and evidently come from a sense of release from the textbook when dealing with folk materials. Above all, Walker is brilliant on piano technique and its musical consequences. These passages are like talk of pigment and brushstrokes in a book about painting: technical in a sense yet free of jargon, easily understood, even perhaps by someone who has never laid hand on a piano keyboard. With all this, Chopin himself remains an elusive figure: taciturn, discreet, undemonstrative, only completely comfortable at the piano. The most meticulous craftsman imaginable, and a performer of such refinement that his playing could barely be heard from the back of a large concert hall, he seems almost to float through the turmoil - political and personal - of his short life. "Without the music," Walker admits, "the hollowed-out character that remains would contain little to interest us." In fact, this life is compelling. - Stephen Walsh.
Kirkus Review
A sensitively discerning examination of a 19th-century superstar.Citing a proliferation of newly available material relating to Chopin (1810-1849), award-winning musicologist Walker (Emeritus, Music/McMaster Univ.; Hans von Blow: A Life and Times, 2009, etc.) delivers a magnificent, elegantly written biography of the famed composer. Besides Chopin's revealing correspondence and recollections of him by childhood friends, the author's extensive sources include a 26-volume edition of George Sand's letters as well as a groundbreaking biography of Sand, which illuminate the French writer's liaison with Chopin; and two recent, richly detailed studies of Chopin's family and youth in Warsaw. Although Walker admits that Chopin's "life and music unfolded along parallel planes, with no point of intersection," his findings amply support the contention that the composer's works "are woven so closely into the fabric of his personality that the one becomes a seamless extension of the other." Investigating his life and times, the author argues persuasively, illuminates "the conditions that aroused the creative process from its slumbers." Chopin was a prodigy: Before he turned 8, he gave his first public concert, and by 12, he dispensed with lessons, developing into "a fully formed virtuoso" by age 19. Although he gave fewer than 20 public concerts, Chopin became renowned for the grace and sweetness of his technique. "The lightness with which those velvet fingers glide, or rather flit across the keyboard is astonishing," one listener remarked. Chopin the man was hardly sweet: He coveted admiration, became terribly upset over any change to his daily routine, could be irritatingly demanding of friends, and, according to Sand, was "terrifying when angry." But he was indisputably a genius whose composing process, wrote Sand, "was spontaneous, miraculous." Walker authoritatively analyzes his compositions and closely examines his friendships, relationships with family, early loves, tormented affair with Sand, debilitating illnesses, and, above all, his desire to create "a new world" with his composing.An absorbing biography unlikely to be surpassed anytime soon. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin (1810-49) has been called the patron saint of the piano. "Whatever the time zone, the sun never sets on Chopin's music," declares much-awarded Walker (professor emeritus, McMaster Univ., Canada; Franz Liszt, 3 vols.) in what is sure to become the definitive biography on the great composer. Born in Poland, Chopin evinced a talent at an early age and required only minimal instruction in piano. He journeyed to Paris as a young man at the time of the Warsaw uprising against Russia, never to return to his native land. In France, he famously had a long-term liaison with writer George Sand (née Aurore Dupin). Walker effectively weaves here the events of his subject's life with the development of his music, elucidating where appropriate how various life events affected -Chopin's compositions, providing a copious historical backdrop for the unfolding of his all-too-brief existence. Examples of his music are judiciously cited. VERDICT General readers should find this accessible as well as engrossing, despite the abundant scholarly apparatus-annotated contents, list of works, illustrations, musical notations, and genealogical charts. Heartily recommended to everyone with an interest in the subject. [See Prepub Alert, 4/9/18.]-Edward B. Cone, New York © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.