Tad Szulc

PASS. The author admits a fatal flaw in his ability to write this biography. He is not a musician, and a knowledgeable reader senses he is not well acquainted with music of Chopin’s tImes or before.

Why would anyone write about Chopin’s relationship with his father in Warsaw before he got to Paris. Why would anyone any biographer wrote about Chopin’s years as a teenager: “It does not necessarily follow…that a child [of]..  a secure home environment will become a secure adult or visa versa.” What this sentence allows the author to do is gas on about relationships between Chopin and his parents, which had no input or through put in his music composed 10-20 years later. 

How to write about Frederick Chopin? Have a rudimentary understanding of the music, and music of his times. Chopin frequently did that Beethoven did, play a measure or a phrase – a definite theme or part thereof – and those notes or part of a phrase or the rhythm becomes a full piece of music. This fractionalization of sound into larger music is what Franz Joseph Hayden tried to teach Beethoven in the early 1790s. Beethoven mastered that. Lizst, Chopin’s great peer, occasionally composed this way.

This approach to composition puts theme, rhythm and counterpoint into play. Chopin developed this form further in some pieces by playing two themes, variations of one another, together. For the performer it requires not only a mastery of the notes but also presents a challenge to interpret the music. Many pianists give ordinary performances.

Finally, the instrument, the piano was evolving during Chopin’s life. What was available in 1830 differed in the late 1840s. In the 1830s the French may have manufactured the best pianos, but 15 – 25 years later the Germans were producing excellent instruments. Part of Chopin’s travels and life was finding a reliable piano, so he could hear what his music actually sounded like, especially later in the 1870s and l880s. 

None of these points is in Chopin in Paris.