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Title: Chopin's Funeral by BENITA EISLER ISBN: 0-375-40945-9 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: enjoyable
Comment: very nice book to read. it flows pretty nicely, especially if u don't know music history that well. it's a biography with a story behind it. it doesnt require a special music knowledge.
Rating: 4
Summary: Chopin In Paris
Comment: Eisler's biography is a short (200 pp), well-written, intimate, and moving portrait of composer Frederic Chopin's life in Paris, where he lived from 1831 (age 21) until his death from tuberculosis in 1849. During this time Chopin's private life centered around the notoriously famous woman novelist George Sand, who served as lover, muse, companion, nurse, and substitute mother to the physically weak and emotionally needy composer. The dynamics of this "celebrity" relationship - as spectacular and popular back then as anything in today's tabloids - are traced with empathy and clarity by the biographer, and related in an interesting and defensible way to the works of both participants.
As a biographer, Eisler brings out the positive and the negative traits and behaviors of Chopin and Sand, both as individuals and as participants in the relationship, in such a way that the reader gets to know these troubled, yet fascinating and brilliant, characters as three-dimensional people with all their faults and virtues. By the end of the book, I felt that I had begun to know Chopin and Sand as a friend or close acquaintance might, that is, by feeling and instinct as well as factual knowledge.
Eisler manages to accomplish this feat of empathy while sticking closely to the known facts of her subjects' lives, inventing little, and declining the temptation to flights of theoretical interpretation. The reader is shown everything, and allowed to allocate his or her sympathies where he or she will. The result is a biography which, while it does not break new ground in scholarship, did touch me and acquaint me with the human dimension of these lives.
Rating: 4
Summary: The unromantic daily lives of two pillars of romanticism.
Comment: Focusing on the last fifteen years of Frederic Chopin's life, this biography of the composer shows how his relationship with the "liberated" author George Sand, her household, and her children dominated Chopin's life in France from shortly after his arrival there in 1831 until his death from tuberculosis in 1849. Carefully researched and footnoted, the biography describes this unlikely relationship, sometimes mutually supportive and sometimes strained, either from Chopin's increasing debilitation from his devastating illness or from Sand's promiscuity and desire for excitement.
Confining herself to those details which can be historically verified, author Eisler documents her vivid account of their life together primarily through references to the letters of the participants and eyewitness accounts. Unlike writers of fictionalized biography, she presents the facts and avoids drawing conclusions, even when they seem obvious to the lay reader. The one arena in which she allows herself some imaginative leeway is in analyzing some of the creative works of Chopin and Sand, relating them to events in their lives. For Chopin she suggests that the mood or form of a work might be related to particular events or circumstances, while for Sand she suggests that it might be the subject matter itself.
Straightforward and scholarly, the biography presents facts, rather then bringing events to life, and while some insight can be gained into the participants from their letters, there are some gaps in the historical record which sometimes leave the reader wishing for more transitions, especially as the Chopin/Sand relationship deteriorates and eventually ends. While music history scholars may be familiar with much of this material, Eisler's story is, for the novice, a fascinating glimpse into the life and times of these romantic artists, their friends, and patrons in Paris near the mid-point of the 19th century. Mary Whipple
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Title: ChopinÂs Letters by Frederic Chopin, E. L. Voynich ISBN: 0486255646 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 February, 1988 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Chopin in Paris: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer by Tad Szulc ISBN: 0306809338 Publisher: DaCapo Press Pub. Date: February, 2000 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: George Sand : A Woman's Life Writ Large by Belinda Jack ISBN: 0679779183 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 04 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Clara : A Novel by Janice Galloway ISBN: 0684844494 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 11 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Death of Franz Liszt: Based on the Unpublished Diary of His Pupil Lina Schmalhausen by Alan Walker, Lina Schmalhausen ISBN: 0801440769 Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr Pub. Date: December, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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