THE CHOPIN MYTH CONTINUES
List, Kurt
The Chopin Myth Continues Reviewed by KURT LIST CHOPIN, THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC. By Herbert WeiiutocH, New York: U Alfred A. Knopf, 1949. 336 pages. $5)00. ; '", I fTpVHE NONSENSE WRITTEN ABOUT...
...ARE ONLY minor defections...
...also I care nothing for money, only for friendship, for which I beg and beseech you...
...Carriages and white gloves cost more, and without them one would not be in good taste...
...Effeminate, with possible slight homosexual leanings, he came completely under the influence of George Sand, that bulliant...
...Instead, he uses a descriptive method of presentation, telling the reader nothing he could not hear in the music if he is musical and nothing meaningful if he ia not A typical example of this sort of writing can be found in the following passage...
...HOWEVER...
...Looking for the perverse, the evil and the satanic, it alighted upon Chopin, mak* ing him the darling of a society to which his true self had but little to give...
...to be sure a minor figure in music, but a hightly rewarding artist...
...do you think that I am making a fortune...
...It is conceived in two-measure units' so artfully linked as to appear continuous...
...Weinstock has written another correal, conventional biography of Chopin...
...His entire character is summed up in a note written to a ' friend fn Poland: "I have five lessons to give today...
...On the other hand, a drab style of writing and a plethora of documentary evidence do little justice to the colorful character of the composer...
...Yearning for the fashionable he himself made fashion...
...Chopin's tremendous musical gifts were seriously hampered by both the limitations of his character and the early success an essentially ignorant audience had bestowed upon him...
...In the miniature, Chopin has remained the undisputed master...
...There is i Chopin, the revolutionary hero who fought for ^Polish national independence...
...Chopin, the elegant sentimentalist of the Paris salons...
...Weinstock's book fails to fill a void...
...appropriate hero of the French middle-class in Louis Philippe's empire,, a stratum which hardly come to power had already tired of it...
...But the thought of action paralized and repelled him...
...THIS AMBIGUOUS FIGURE was the...
...He was perhaps the first musician to make tuberculosis a necessary concom.tant of ITTc romantic artist...
...Surrounding himself with an aura of mystery, expecting death and destruction at every point of life, interested in politics (though in a vague and misinformed manner), Chopin was truly, as Heine once said of Alfred de Musset, "a young man with a promising past...
...There is very little music in which each note can be traced so accurately to the sociological environment and the characteriological development of the composer as in that of Chopin...
...Chopin's human sympathies drew him to the c£use of Poland...
...Poland...
...and, like all pedants, he rjtanages to accumulate a mountain - of facts which, if read thoroughly, will doubtless serve to establish a saner, more correct view of Chopin in the reader's mind...
...Chopin, the romantic idol of a mauve decode...
...I love the Carlists, I can't endure the Philippists, I myself am a revolutionist...
...Numerous are also the uses to which Chopin's music has been put...
...Weinstock's facts are well known to the professional, neither the scholar nor the casual reader will be wholly satisfied, * * * THESE...
...When ss a young man in Vienna he was informed of a decisive uprising- in Poland he gave the spontaneous order to hitch the horses to his carriage and to return home...
...In the next measure, at constable, the chief melody is introduce'd In thirds...
...Even when such "serious" specialists as Artur Rubinstein or Alexander Brailowski perform Chopin's music at the piano, the listener is aware more of an emotional strip-tease than an offering at" the altar of the arts...
...But where a new biography of Chopin would do the most good—among the music students searching for new vistas or the audiences getting their taste for Chopin solely from the movies and Freddy Martin—Mr...
...W>instock is a stickler fo* the truth...
...Popular tunes, cocktail hour echoes, salon arrangements, stirring marches—they all serve to present the incongruous picture of an habitue —in the drawing rooms of France fighting the cause of independence in...
...energetic, cigar-smoking woman in man's clothing...
...Herbert Weinstock, who has added his own earnest biography and musical analysis to scores of already existing works of similar nature, is neither an iconoclast nor a muckrakcr...
...In reality, Chopin was a weakling as a man end, as a composer, perhaps the most percussive force of the limited epoch commonly known as romanticism...
...Kurt List is the well-known com* poser and pianist...
...I fTpVHE NONSENSE WRITTEN ABOUT CHOPIN, the man, Is legion...
...The variants through which this melody and submelodles arising out of it pass are as constantly inventive and attractive as those in the Berceuse...
...Thus Mr...
...Thus his book, published at the centenary of Chopin's death, lacks the purpose of destroying the popular myth of the'hero...
...Since, moreover, almost all of Mr...
...Thus he retired to the intimate, private sphere of the piano miniature, where liis personal struggles and contradictions could be resolved without much expenditure of aesthetic or psychic energy...
...As an assemblage of data it serves its purpose...
...Yet, Mr...
...Yet, there seemed to be enough in the glittering surface of his music to satisfy a jaundiced audience, which later accepted the writing of the symbolists, the painting of the impressionists and the music of Debussy in a similar spirit of sensationalism...
...Where the book falls dangerous short of serious purpose is in the strict division between the composer and his music...
...Weinstock overlooks all extraneous influences and their aesthetic connections...
...But on second thought he changed his course and, instead of going East, he landed in Paris...
Vol. 32 • April 1949 • No. 16
