Review by 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
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times 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.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 25, 2018]
Review by 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
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by 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.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by 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.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book 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.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
