BIOGRAPHY: FERGUS JOHNSTONreviews Chopin: Prince of the Romanticsby Adam Zamoysky, Harper Press, 356pp, £12.99
‘CONCERTS NEVER create real music; they are a form which one has to renounce in order to be able to hear what is most beautiful in art.” One could be forgiven for thinking that this was said by the pianist Glenn Gould, who famously renounced the concert platform in favour of the recording studio when he was at the peak of his performing career, but while the sentiment is one Gould would have agreed with it was made by none other than the golden boy of 19th-century Romanticism, Frédéric Chopin, born 200 years ago this year, a composer whose music Gould thought was full of empty theatrical gestures, and had a “worldly, hedonistic quality” that repelled him.
Chopin's life is the subject of Adam Zamoysky's new biography, which does a fine job of portraying the composer who par excellence represented what the world has come to view as the ideal of the Romantic artist. Perhaps "new" is not the correct word: much of the book was previously published by Doubleday in 1980 as Chopin: A Biography, but this new volume is, according to the author's preface, a completely reworked text and apparently includes much detail that has come to light in the interim, with more space devoted to the composer's health.
One of the suggestions in the book is that he suffered from cystic fibrosis, not, as has always been suggested, pulmonary tuberculosis. It is also suggested that if a sample of DNA was taken from the composer’s heart, (which is preserved in Warsaw), and analysed, it would provide a definitive answer to this question, if it were important. But whether he died of TB or CF is largely a detail. Both deaths are tragic. What matters is that he died too young, at the height of his creativity. He was 39.
The composer's relationship with George Sand takes up much of the book, which is reasonable given both the length of time it lasted (nine years) and the power it had over those who had a prurient curiosity about the affair, one of the most publicised "scandals" of the age. Chopin's closest friends didn't think much of Sand, one describing Chopin as having "a ghoul as travelling companion". There is no doubt that Sand did much to support his frail health and enable him to compose, but at the same time she projected the intimacy of their relationship into the public eye through her characterisation of it in her novel Lucrezia Floriani,readings of which left their house guests in horror. Both Chopin and Sand were seemingly oblivious to this effect.
Zamoysky takes an attractively no-nonsense approach to the myths that surround Chopin. We read: “The various stories that have been dredged up in order to illustrate Chopin’s extraordinary sensitivity as a baby . . . can be disregarded . . . There can be few babies who will not either bawl their heads off or else listen in fascination if a musical instrument is played in their presence”.
But also, early on, we read: “As he listened to peasant girls singing their songs of love and sorrow, to the old women chanting in the fields, and to the drinking songs in the taverns, a whole new world of music opened up before him. When he returned to Warsaw in September, it was with his head filled with these new harmonies”.
The word needed here is “melodies”, or maybe “idioms”, but not “harmonies”, and herein lies a problem. This is a non-musician writing, and it shows in these statements, and in others such as, “He was writing poems in the musical language of Mazovia, or . . . in that of the vanished world of the Polish noble past,” when in fact he was drawing on characteristics common to certain types of Polish folk-musical expression and using them to forge his own musical language. Chopin’s music isn’t great because of its Polishness; it is great because he was Chopin, a prodigy who was composing mature pieces before his age was in double digits.
While there is a long list of sources at the back, divided under the headings of manuscript, printed, and newspaper/ periodical, in the text itself there isn’t enough reference to which sources are being drawn on. Consequently, when one reads a statement such as “Chopin taught his pupils to analyse a work for its inner structure, and to understand its logic and meaning before attempting to play it”, one cries out for more information. It is a fascinating and important observation, indicating the composer at work behind the piano teacher, but where does it come from? The next reference doesn’t appear until four lines later, but in relation to a quote from the composer on a different topic.
Notwithstanding the above, this work is superbly written, with a strong objectivity. The fact that the author is first and foremost a historian rather than a musician means, however, that the book will mainly appeal to those not necessarily interested in the nitty-gritty of musical analysis, as the musical references are effectively limited to what the composer was writing, and where he was at the time.
Fergus Johnston is a composer based in Ireland and Bulgaria. He has just started work on a new piece for string orchestra
