Paul Kildea

A biography of sorts for the Mallorcan piano created by Juan Bauza for Frederic Chopin during his & George Sand's brief stay in Majorca. The main significance of this instrument? It is where about half of Chopin's preludes were sketched and refined, before being finished on a Pleyel piano Chopin ordered from the mainland. The book is divided in two parts: the first, of Chopin's life starting from the Majorca trip and through his death (he left the Bauza in the monastery they stayed in) with thumbnails on the music scene of Paris and how the pianos then were transitioning to the sturdy heavy-hitters of Steinway & Sons' cast iron cross-stringed behemoths; and the second, the life of music scholar, Chopin fan, and gifted harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, also a Pole living in France who obtained the Bauza piano but had to leave it in her French apartment when fleeing the Nazis. Predictably, Nazi seizure makes tracing the instrument hard and still lost, though the paper trail does carry us into the mid-20th century. The seizure and restitution (still ongoing!) of art under the Nazis are yet another reminder of how they're a political group not to be admired or emulated... but I digress.

I would strongly encourage having YouTube and headphones at the ready while reading this, so you can listen to the Preludes when Kildea describes them, especially for where different pianists have wildly different interpretations of these improvisational sketches.… (altro)

A readable, thorough, sympathetic and informative biography of Britten. Although his personal life is there it is a book that focuses very much on the music. Two thhings intrude slightly. In the early parts of the book there is a great deal of focus on Britten's homosexuality. It's an important part of his life, of course, but it's not everything. The other is the apparently incorrect attribution of syphillis as a contributing factor to the heart condition that caused his death. We get a comprehensive picture of Britten the musician but only a partial picture of Britten as a social being and little of his life beyong music, not that there was that much. As you would hope with a biography of a composer it stimulates you to want to listen to more of the subject's music. So that can't be a bad thing.… (altro)

A fascinating fleshing-out of Chopin's biography and art (particularly the Preludes) via his milieu, minutiae and accoutrements. Its raison d' être is the minute detail available but deemed--of necessity, by volume--superfluous to the large-picture biographer like Alan Walker (whose new bio runs to 600 pages without it) and has much to say about his posthumous "life." Terrific on Chopin's piano of choice, the Pleyel. Worthwhile companion work, though it loses some steam after Chopin's death about a third of the way in. Interesting still on the history of the piano, on the Liszt vs. Chopin approach to playing Chopin, embodied later by Anton Rubinstein and Wanda Landowska (with whom Kildea seems quite enamored). Landowska eventually possesses the Bauza piano on which Chopin composed some Preludes in Majorca (which, post-Nazi looting, has gone missing). Retains interest, though it almost becomes two different books.… (altro)