A magisterial account of Chopin’s life and times

Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times. By Alan Walker. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 768 pages; $40. Faber & Faber; £30

THE LINEAMENTS of Chopin’s short, dramatic life are familiar to most classical-music enthusiasts. Born in 1810 in Warsaw to a middle-class family, he was a child prodigy and became a noted pianist and composer of small-scale but exquisite Romantic pieces of music, such as ballades, études, impromptus, mazurkas, nocturnes and polonaises. He was mostly based in France, mingling with the cream of Parisian society and the arts and playing for aristocrats and royalty. The German poet Heinrich Heine reverentially called him “the Raphael of the piano”.

In 1838 he absconded to Majorca with the feminist novelist George Sand, who scandalised French society by wearing trousers and smoking cigars, and subsequently carried on a long and stormy affair with her. Having suffered since adolescence from a wasting disease, probably tuberculosis, he died tragically young, aged 39. By then he was, as he remains, one of Poland’s best-known sons. His music is still played and enjoyed all over the world.

Since his life was almost a Romantic work of art in itself, he has had no shortage of biographers, starting immediately after his death with his fellow composer and friend of sorts, Franz Liszt, and continuing in a steady trickle ever since. So was there a need for another one? Having previously produced a magisterial three-volume biography of Liszt, Alan Walker has searched for new primary sources from Warsaw to Washington, shed new light on many aspects of Chopin’s life and cleared away a thicket of myths. He has much to say, too, about the political, military and social aspects of the age, including two revolutions, various wars, epidemics and natural disasters; he vividly brings to life the delights of Paris salons and French country-house living, as well as the discomforts of 19th-century long-distance travel and the horrors of the era’s medicine.

How far studying a composer’s life elucidates the music is an old and vexed question. Mr Walker identifies two schools of thought. One is that the music could not have existed without the life, “with all its joys and sorrows”, so they are inextricably entwined. The other is that art must always be assessed in “splendid isolation”.

In Chopin’s case, the issue seems moot, because the life and the music are quite unrelated. At times when his experiences were dark, he might write a brilliantly sunny piece, and vice versa. Chopin had no truck with programme music (the sort that tries to conjure up images or tell stories), in which other Romantic composers delighted. He laughed at some of his contemporaries’ attempts to ascribe non-musical meanings to his pieces. Mr Walker’s book contains plenty of analysis of specific works, but he is careful not to suggest any link between music and events.

Scrupulous as it is, this monumental biography is deeply engaging and enjoyable. Chopin mostly comes out of it well, and on closer examination seems a less exotic figure than his reputation suggests. He was a kindly man with a good sense of humour. Despite being something of a loner, he was able to maintain long and strong friendships, many with fellow Poles. He proved surprisingly adept, almost without trying, at attracting the financial and practical support he needed to keep on composing even as his health failed.

And even though he was lionised for most of his life, he never took his gift for granted, agonising over each composition, crossing out, reinstating and crossing out again. However long it took, he laboured until each piece was exactly right. Because of this perfectionism, and the brevity of his life, his oeuvre is relatively small. Before he died, he asked for all his unpublished manuscripts to be destroyed. His sister, who oversaw his estate, demurred, thus saving a few dozen extra works for posterity. The world should be grateful to her.