This episode brings on a bout of hand-wringing 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.Ĭhopin would be romantically linked with other women but his only lasting relationship was with the trouser-wearing, cigar-smoking George Sand. And: “Today you will dream that you are embracing me! You have to pay for the nightmare you caused me last night!” I’m convinced you still love me, and I am as scared of you as ever,” one missive reads.
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.
Curiously it is here that Walker seems the least confident. There’s romance, too - or at least the suggestion of it.
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. It was Sand who organized the creative retreat on an unexpectedly rain-sodden Majorca that weakened Chopin. Unintentional damage came from well-meaning women. 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. Illness is a recurring motif that shaped Chopin’s career before cutting it short. “I 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. But it was in opposition to these acrobats of the keyboard that contemporaries experienced Chopin’s playing.Īlthough gifted with prodigious technique, Chopin stood outside the “flying trapeze school” of pianism. With the exception of Liszt their names - Alkan, Dreyschock, Kalkbrenner, Thalberg and many others - have long been forgotten. This was, after all, the age of the devilishly gifted violinist Paganini and of piano wizards with outsize egos that divided critics and fans. 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.Īnother thread that runs brightly through the book concerns virtuosity, and Chopin’s place in a music scene dominated by stage animals. Chopin left Poland just before the Warsaw Uprising in 1830. 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. (Walker uses the Polish variant of the first name.)ĭrawing on a wealth of letters and fresh scholarship, Walker creates a polyphonic work that elegantly interweaves multiple strands. 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. Yet almost from the moment Chopin died, in Paris, legends attached themselves to his name like ivy.įor a biographer, there’s a lot to untangle. 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. He never wrote an opera, but in his afterlife he continues to throw up scenes of high drama. A lifelong agnostic, he - or at least his heart - is venerated like a relic in Poland. The posthumous reputation of Frédéric Chopin (1810-49) stands in stark contrast to his music. 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.” Later, experts would say a whitish film coating the heart pointed to a death from tuberculosis with complications from pericarditis. But they examined and photographed the enlarged organ inside, which had been pickled, probably in cognac. The visitors did not open the crystal jar contained in a coffin inscribed with the composer’s name. No press was invited and word of the event did not filter out until five months later. $40.Ī 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. FRYDERYK CHOPIN A Life and Times By Alan Walker Illustrated.