Book review: Chopin: Prince of the Romantics

Published on Friday 12 March 2010 18:34

CHOPIN: PRINCE OF THE ROMANTICS BY ADAM ZAMOYSKI Harper Press, 368pp, £12.99

THE bicentenary of Chopin's birth has more commercial potential than last year's more arbitrary celebration of Handel. Chopin died romantically young and had a ravishing love story, unlike Handel, who lived a long, respectable, dull life. Chopin's anniversary is a chance for the world's greatest pianists to display their dazzling dexterity – one of Chopin's critics advised anyone who played his pieces to have a surgeon ready "as permanent finger damage is likely".

It is also a perfect opportunity for historian Adam Zamoyski to recast his biography of Chopin for a hungry new audience.

It is a story made for film-maker Jane Campion. Chopin was raised in Warsaw but spent his creative life in Paris, allowing both cities to claim him. He began composing at the age of seven, and was performing for the Russian Tsar Alexander I by 11. In his early twenties he found his natural home in Paris, which supplied audiences, friendship and soft furnishings for his exquisite apartment.

Zamoyski is terrific at probing the subtle contradictions of Chopin through the observations of shrewd friends. Liszt said Chopin was "prepared to give anything, but never gave himself". He was fastidiously polite, hiding "the secret convulsions which agitated him".

He is an angel racked by physical suffering or a querulous invalid, and sometimes both. The relationship at the heart of this book is between Chopin and the cigar-smoking feminist novelist George Sand, although Zamoyski makes the case that the love between Chopin and male friends such as Liszt or Delacroix was less irksome and perhaps better for his health.

When Chopin first meets Sand he finds her reckless and unappealing. He writes to a friend: "What an unattractive person La Sand is, but is she really a woman?" Later, they are deeply drawn to each other. George Sand writes: "I must say that I was confused and amazed at the effect this little creature wrought on me."

The fascinating question in the book is whether Sand saved or destroyed Chopin. She made physical demands on him, first sexually and then through her impulsiveness.

She was older than Chopin and had children, whom she treated first with benign neglect and then with a distressing selective favouritism. She dragged the whole household off to live in Majorca where Chopin fell ill, but then recovered and composed.

Sand was described as having "a vampiric love" by one of Chopin's friends, although she worked hard to support him, taking care of all the practical and administrative matters, nursing him while trying to fit in her own writing. Eventually she became impatient of Chopin's "near hysterical reaction to minor vexations". She fell out with him over her treatment of her daughter and, according to Chopin's friends, betrayed him by portraying him as a malady-stricken prince in a novel.

Chopin's health problems are interestingly examined; a convincing case is made that he suffered from cystic fibrosis, although it was tuberculosis which dogged him most bitterly. He died aged 39. Sand's daughter asked of him: "Is it because his life was a 39-year agony that his music is so lofty, so sweet, so sublime?"

The process of composition is not profoundly examined, although the circumstances in which Chopin composed are revealing and there are good descriptions of his extraordinary gifts. Sand gives the fitting epitaph for the man she loved but cast off: "I feel he is too fine, too exquisite, too perfect to live long in this crude and heavy earthly world." Yet his legacy is immortal, and good business for writers and musicians.