Chopin best biography 2016

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads. English-Canadian musicologist and university professor Alan Walker spent 10 years doing extensive research into vast archives of primary source material on Chopin, allowing him to produce this MRI-thorough biography. It is well known that Chopin, the Polish Mozart, died at a relatively young age — Walker has a difficult assignment because he has to write for three audiences: for the Chopin lovers, like this reviewer; for the musicians and musicologists, curious about his style and technique and the various interpretations of his compositions; and for the art historians who relish the hard-cold facts and anecdotal curios that give insight into the great artists and political figures of the early-to-midnth century.

Of course, no book can be all things to all readers, so some may consider "Chopin: A Life and Times" dissatisfying in parts. However, the young Nicolas left the Alsace region of France for Poland, where he had strong ties, and never looked back.

By the first decades of the 21st century, over a hundred biographies of Frédéric Chopin had been published.

Once on Polish turf, he changed his first name to Mikolaj, to sound more Polish, but inexplicably he did not change his last name. Interestingly, Mikolaj kept his French origins a secret from his sons and daughters most of his life. We experience a rich childhood in Poland, full of loving family and friends surrounding a young boy, preternaturally gifted, with a knack for sarcasm and mimicry, who seemed to simply exfoliate music from the very moment he sat down at the piano.

But Chopin, the genius, his wonderful, love-filled childhood notwithstanding, had lady troubles throughout his life. His first love was a mezzo-soprano, a Pole, named Konstancja Gladkowska. At 19, he was as shy with the opposite sex as he was musical. So nothing came of that. Next was the stunningly beautiful Maria Wodzinska. Then there was George Sand whom he met while playing in one of the grande salons of Paris.