Fryderyk Chopin

A Life and Times

De: Dr. Alan Walker

Narrado por: Corrie James

A landmark biography of the Polish composer by a leading authority on Chopin and his time.

Based on 10 years of research and a vast cache of primary sources located in archives in Warsaw, Paris, London, New York, and Washington, D.C., Alan Walker's monumental Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times is the most comprehensive biography of the great Polish composer to appear in English in more than a century. Walker's work is a corrective biography, intended to dispel the many myths and legends that continue to surround Chopin.

Fryderyk Chopin is an intimate look into a dramatic life; of particular focus are Chopin's childhood and youth in Poland, which are brought into line with the latest scholarly findings, and Chopin's romantic life with George Sand, with whom he lived for nine years. Comprehensive and engaging, the biography wears its scholarship lightly: This is a book suited as much for the professional pianist as it is for the casual music lover. Just as he did in his definitive biography of Liszt, Walker illuminates Chopin and his music with unprecedented clarity in this magisterial biography, bringing to life one of the 19th century's most confounding, beloved, and legendary artists.

©2018 Alan Walker (P)2018 Tantor

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Packed with information and insightful analyses of Chopin's major works that will interest professional musicians, and even nonspecialists will be entranced by Walker's piquant storytelling and graceful prose." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

Very Comprehensive But…

Twenty three hours with this narrator is twenty two and a half hours too long! I am glad I stuck with this one because the book was so informative and thorough. It’s a wonderful view of Chopin’s life and a peak into some aspects of the era, the time’s classical music culture, and Polish culture. Supplemented with music streaming of compositions as they’re accounted in the book - a fabulous experience for a music novice such as myself! But if you have the time I’d recommend a print book.

This narration (and the written style of the book) is very formal, like sitting at tea with the Queen - for 23 hours! Zzzzzzzz. For no fault of hers, this is a narrator I’ll be avoiding now. A different narrator could have livened this up.

What Language Was That?

No matter how interested you are in Chopin, this book will seem endless. It is little consolation to reflect that it at least is shorter than Dr. Walker's previous biography of Liszt, which spanned three weighty tomes -- if you bought the print edition of all three at once they'd have to deliver your purchase with a forklift.

The length becomes wearying in the audible book due largely to the frankly appalling job of reading by the performer. In a book filled with the names of people, places and works in Polish, Italian, French and German, this performer does an oppressively bad job of pronouncing any of the languages. I cut her some slack on the Polish, since no one not born to it can pronounce that language, but alas the performer can't manage any of the others either. Many of her attempts clearly have had re-recordings punched in, but it doesn't help. Particularly annoying is her rendition of the subject of the variations on the Zerlina/Don Giovanni duet from Mozart's opera, which she renders as "LAH ! - ci darem la mano." This, one of Chopin's first big hits, gets many references throughout the book.

The author is first of all a musicologist, and (with so many pages to fill) offers rather detailed musical analyses of many of Chopin's works. If you're not a musician none of this will make any sense to you. My wife and I listened to the book on a multi-day car trip: I'm a musician and she isn't. I could follow along, although there was no score to which to refer (which must have been present in the printed version), but my wife quickly got bored with it all, saying it was just gibberish. (Much musical analysis IS gibberish, but in the present case it seems at least to be competent.) My wife asked me if this was supposed to be a textbook, because it didn't sound quite like a biography. In respect to Dr. Walker's endurance at the typewriter keyboard I described it to her as "an appreciation."

Other fill-up-the-pages material detours you into mini-biographies of all Chopin's ancestors, people he knew, students he had and on and on.

I did find interesting the information about the difference between the pianos of the day (Chopin always used a Pleyel) and the much heavier, stiffer and louder concert grands of today. The author made clear that Chopin could coax untold divisions of nuance and texture from those instruments, and I could almost imagine how he must have sounded. Wish I'd heard it. (The author does not go into tunings that others have said were used commonly in those days, subtle differences from today's normal tempered scale that give each key its own characterestic.)

Without mentioning that it's even a matter of discussion in other accounts of Chopin's life, the author treats as given fact that (1) Chopin was not homosexual and in fact had a sexual relationship with George Sand until she cut him off (for reasons I couldn't quite puzzle out from the book), and (2) That the illness he suffered from most of his life was tuberculosis (evidently all his family had it and many of the people he knew had it -- the COVID of its day it seems). So there.

Don't try the written version unless you have wrists strong enough to stand many MANY hours of holding up the book. For a multi-day road trip the Audible version at least lets you travel with no fear the book will unexpectedly end when you're stuck in traffic. Indeed, you may have rather a lot of book left for your next journey.

Excellent book, annoying reader

This is a well-reserached and well-written book undone by a most annoying reader who pauses to over-prounounces every "foreign" name and phrase. Are there not editors who listen to these things before committing a whole book to such a terrible presentation? Buy the book, it is great. I did finish it and kind of blocked out the terrible reading, but it should never have been recorded with Corrie James.

mistitled

The title really should be: The Adventures and Debates of a Biographer of Fryderyk Chopin. the author is captured by the drama of the research, and frequently loses sight of the story of Chopin. The narrator's extreme efforts to correctly pronounce Polish names are a distraction from the story of the biographer, in turn a distraction from the promised story of Chopin himself. And, no music.

Great biography but would benefit incredibly with music clips

Amazingly researched and written biography of Chopin, but I can’t help but wonder what it could have been if they had included music clips to take advantage of the Audible medium to truly bring this book to life.