A Cannon from Abroad

...Cautious as Szulc is about assigning blame for the breakup, he tends to come down more heavily on Sand...

...But there is something a little oversimplified about the extent to which strong national feelings have been pictured as cooked up—a faint, or perhaps not so faint, Marxist tinge hangs over the enterprise...

...Chopin's works are cannon concealed among flowers...

...The biographer, though, sees Chopin as a bit of a shirker, noting that he applied for a French passport when he could have renewed his own at the Russian Embassy...

...Nonetheless, these are mere quibbles...

...Richard Wagner, for one, nearly starved to death there and was in debtor's prison before heading to Switzerland...

...They split in the summer of 1847, two years before Chopin's death...

...He would agonize over them, tinkering with them endlessly—a trait that Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler shared...

...Chopin seems to have had it easier from the beginning...

...Did he feel a nagging guilt about it...

...Sainte-Beuve, her erstwhile mentor, wrote that she had "a beautiful soul and a fat ass," and that "she devours her lovers, but instead of throwing them later in the river, she beds them in her novels...

...This is certainly not an experience foreign to most students who have studied under a demanding teacher, but Szulc does adduce more compelling evidence...

...I think that I'm leaving to die—and how unpleasant it must be to die elsewhere, not where one had lived...

...His "polonaises and mazurkas" Szulc says, "were perceived as expressions of patriotism at a time when it was vital to keep the [Polish] national culture alive...

...Chopin got off to a fast start: He composed two polonaises at age seven as well as a march for Archduke Konstanty, the duchy's Russian ruler...

...A number of his works, indeed, were only published posthumously...

...as a family friend, and heard him play...

...In his Introduction the author tells us that "as a child in Warsaw, I certainly heard a great deal of Chopin's music...

...Robert Schumann, his staunchest admirer, declared in 1836 that "if the powerful ruling monarch in the North knew what a dangerous foe threatens him in Chopin's works...

...Rather, it focuses primarily "on the 18 years Chopin lived in France, because this was both musically and personally his richest period...

...Chopin, who was notoriously chary of emotional commitments, succumbed to Sand after she pursued him for a year or so...

...In recent years, historians have characterized national identity as a concoction invented by elites, be they in Tudor England or revolutionary France...

...In 1838-39 in Majorca, Chopin completed his famous cycle of 24 Pr?ludes, probably meant as an homage to Bach...

...And the abolition of its monarchy, Acton believed, played a key role in the rise of nationalism that spelled trouble for Europe's other monarchies...

...Moreover, he concluded, Poland's ghost would stalk diplomatic congresses until it was revenged...

...Szulc reports that every proper home had a piano, nine music stores were in business, and numerous virtuosos came there...

...Back home, meanwhile, he was regarded as a hero...

...But it was the mazurka, originally a folk dance named after the Mazury region in central Poland, that Chopin found most alluring...

...Chopin in Paris, by contrast, gets it about right...

...Perhaps this paradox can be traced to the fact that he was the son of a Frenchman who settled in Poland...

...I have entered high society, I sit among ambassadors, princes, ministers," he wrote a childhood friend...

...Despite his fervent patriotism, the composer felt most comfortable in Paris...

...Alas, many of Chopin's improvisations, said by those who knew him to be even more marvelous than his written works, were never transcribed...

...For although other countries had been stripped of territories as a matter of routine, Poland was ultimately wiped off the map by the Prussians, Austrians and Russians...

...Reviewed by Jacob Heilbrunn Senior editor, "New Republic" In his lengthy essay simply entitled "Nationalism"—probably the best thing ever written on the slippery subject— Lord Acton devoted particular attention to Poland...

...According to Szulc, Chopin "learned early in life the importance of top-level friendships and patronage," so in Paris he cultivated his ties to the aristocracy...

...Inrecountingthecomposer's life Szulc properly refrains from reading too many extramusical considerations into Chopin's work, but does leave one wondering about the impact that abandoning Poland had on his music...

...Szulc does not say...

...In today's jargon, he wouldbe known as "highmaintenance...

...I also had the privilege of knowing Artur Rubinstein...

...The emotional roller coasters of creativity that Chopin experienced, though hardly confined to him as an artist, lead Szulc to suspect he suffered from manic depression...

...While illuminating the complexities of Chopin's attachment to the country he left, Tad Szulc illustrates the organic nature of such emotions...

...He has produced a vivid portrait that places the composer in the context of his glittering age, complete with cameos of everyone from Karl Marx to Heinrich Heine to James Rothschild to the Marquis de Custine...

...The British scholar Jim Samson's superb Chopin, published last year by Schirmer, hands down a more somber verdict on both Chopin and Poland...

...The then Russian duchy of Warsaw was something of a musical hothouse...

...Many artists were drawn to the city...

...Chopin is new territory for him and his journalistic skills clearly served him well as he quarried both Polish and French sources...

...Szulc quite rightly points out, too, that Chopin's compositions took a long time to develop...

...Chopin himself reported episodes of hallucination and of losing his sense of his whereabouts...

...Nevertheless, he brought both the nocturne and ballade to new heights, experimenting with dropping harmonization long enough to create a sense of pure, shimmering sound and other shocking effects...

...A former New York Times European and Latin American correspondent and bureau chief, he has written numerous books, including biographies of Fidel Castro and Pope John Paul II...

...Two months before he left for Paris in 1830, he hinted at his ambivalence in a heartfelt letter to his best friend: "I think that I am leaving to forget forever about home...

...Their relationship lasted 19 years, and speculation about whether it was ever consummated is still unresolved...

...The person who did the most maintaining was George Sand, herself no easy customer...

...The extent of Chopin's training as a pianist, like much about him, remains a topic of some controversy, but he was lucky enough to have a teacher who acquainted him early on with Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier...

...Postcards, monuments, national anthems, and the like, all have been accorded pride of place in the effort to confirm the theory...

...While the biographer is very good on Chopin's maneuverings in Parisian society, one wishes he was more forthright about the composer's personality...

...he would have forbidden this music...

...Frydryk Chopin (Szulc prefers the Polish spelling of his given name) was born in a little village near the Polish capital in 1810...

...You play better right away if Princess Vaudemont protects you...

...Suffering from consumption, Chopin was kept going by Sand until the strain grew too heavy...

...Strangely," Szulc observes, "Chopin never returned—by deliberate and unexplained choice—to his homeland...

...Like many composers, he transformed the folk tunes of his youth into masterpieces...

...He was a freedom fighter from behind the keyboard...

...Chopin in Paris is an admirable book that tells us much about the romantic nationalist's effect on music and on Poland...

...He waffles, for instance, on the question of Chopin's anti-Semitism, defending him by citing Schumann's greater intolerance...

...One friend stated that when a pupil made an error "pages from music books flew through the air, and the pupil's ears were filled with bitter remarks and unpleasant words...

...Curiously, Szulc also argues that Polish anti-Semitism has itself always been more humorous than sadistic: "Chopin's attitude toward Jews was in tune with the Polish-language culture of the 19th century (still persisting today) which allowed mocking and patronizing—but seldom vicious—remarks about Jews...

...Furthermore, he "preferred to fire his cannon from among Parisian flowers...

...There is no question," says Szulc, "that Sand was becoming increasingly impatient with Chopin's moods and his constant illness as she nursed him over the years...

...He stresses, however, that his book "is not a study" of the music...