The Parisian Worlds of Frederic Chopin - Hardcover

Atwood, Dr. William G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300077734 ISBN 13: 9780300077735

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1999

Synopsis

Fleeing the Russian oppression of his native Warsaw in 1831, Fr_d_ric Chopin stopped in Paris on his way to London, became entranced with the city, and remained there until his death eighteen years later. This engaging book recreates the Paris that Chopin knew, providing vivid details about its people, places, politics, and arts, and their influence in the musician during this fruitful period in his career.

About this title

Review:

This book may be of greater interest to the historian--political, social, and cultural--than to the musician. As its title indicates, it is about France, particularly Paris, more than about Chopin, and presupposes considerable knowledge of French history. Chopin wanders through its pages as a peripatetic presence; there are quotes from his letters commenting on whom he meets, where he plays, what he sees and hears, with references to his friends, pupils, and publishers. The author, a New York dermatologist who has written two previous books about Chopin (including Fryderyk Chopin: Pianist from Warsaw), has prodigiously researched every aspect of French life between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. He quotes copiously from contemporary writers as diverse as Balzac, Heine, Berlioz, Mrs. Trollop, and Thackeray. A meticulously detailed guided tour through Paris is followed by an account of several generations of the royal family describing their politics, personalities, fortunes, and misfortunes, as well as their habits, love affairs, interrelationships, hangers-on, and adversaries, resulting in a bewildering profusion of names.

Among the most interesting chapters are those on the Polish refugee community--where Chopin had many friends--and those on the artists, writers, musicians, philosophers, and theologians (including numerous crackpots) who created the city's rich cultural life in its concerts, theaters, operas, journals, and famous private salons. The writing is lively, witty, and informative, marred only by occasional infelicities like "his inseparable sister," and the book abounds with excellent illustrations. Unfortunately, it also abounds with anti-Semitic slurs; Atwood misses no chance to point out, in an insulting manner, the Jewish origin of anyone he does not like, from the Rothschilds to Heine, Meyerbeer, and Offenbach. --Edith Eisler

From Kirkus Reviews:

``An artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris'': Nietzsche's maxim could well serve as the epigraph to this scintillating biography of Chopin and his life in the French capital, in which Atwood depicts the joys of the city in as roseate a light as his hero's talents. Though ostensibly a biographer of Chopin's time in Paris after the composer fled Warsaw to escape invading Russian troops, Atwood, whose scholarly life of Chopin appeared in 1987, appears so mesmerized by the eternal glories of the City of Lights that he almost slights the composer. He begins with a tour of the twelve arrondissements of Paris in the 1830s, a lively and detailed recounting of what we would have found there and whom we might have encountered. The heady worlds of high society and salons, where, for example, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Eugne Delacroix, Honor Daumier, and Honor de Balzac traipsed, traveled, and transgressed provide the backdrop to scandal and art, intrigue and amour. The political milieu of post-revolutionary France contributes as well to a Parisian scene ripe with expectation, plump with possibilities, where the conservative rococos and the romantic dcousus clashed over ideology and aesthetics. In this volatile mix of pomp and personality Chopin remained until his death in 1849. Atwood's keen eye for detail and his fervent zeal for this bygone world create tableau after tableau of Chopin experiencing a society delicious in its many delights, yet transformed by the ramifications of politically revolutionary acts past and present. A life of Chopin that does equal duty as a social history of Paris in the middle of the 19th century. For lovers of the city as well as fans of Chopin, the countless scenes of the Parisian worldwith their photographic clarity and robust characterizationsoffer a delightful flashback to a time long gone but well-remembered. (151 illus.) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0300077734
• ISBN 13: 9780300077735
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400