![]() ![]() Chopin had a loving home life, with parents who believed in and provided a disciplined, rounded education. 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. 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. 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). 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. #Chopin music books free#Walker is brilliant on piano technique – free of jargon, easily understood, even by someone who's never played the pianoĪll this Walker describes with the narrative expertise one would expect of the masterly biographer of Liszt, a lesser composer but hardly less complex personality. 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’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 “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. 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. C hopin is one of those great composers – Debussy is another – whose supreme qualities have tended to be obscured by the wrong sort of popularity. ![]()
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