Chopin's Piano: In Search of the Instrument that Transformed Music

by Paul Kildea Narrated by Matthew Waterson

Overview

In November 1838, Frédéric Chopin, George Sand, and her two children sailed to Majorca to escape the Parisian winter. They settled in an abandoned monastery at Valldemossa in the mountains above Palma, where Chopin finished what would eventually be recognized as one of the great and revolutionary works of musical Romanticism: his twenty-four Preludes. There was scarcely a decent piano on the island, so Chopin worked on a small pianino made by a local craftsman, Juan Bauza.



Chopin's Piano traces the history of Chopin's twenty-four Preludes through the instruments on which they were played, the pianists who interpreted them, and the traditions they came to represent. Yet it begins and ends with the Majorcan pianino, which assumed an astonishing cultural potency during the Second World War as it became, for the Nazis, a symbol of the man and music they were determined to appropriate as their own.



After Chopin, the unexpected hero of Chopin's Piano is the great keyboard player Wanda Landowska, who rescued the pianino from Valldemossa in 1913, and who would later become one of the most influential artistic figures of the twentieth century. Paul Kildea shows how her story resonates with Chopin's, simultaneously distilling part of the cultural and political history of mid-twentieth-century Europe and the United States.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 06/11/2018
A humble piano that birthed some of composer Frédèric Chopin’s greatest pieces is the peg for a meditation on romanticism in this beguiling study. Composer and pianist Kildea (Benjamin Britten) recounts Chopin’s 1838–1839 sojourn on the Spanish island of Majorca where, confined in a gloomy monastery with his mistress, the novelist George Sand, and her children, he composed several of his most well-known preludes on a mediocre piano made by a local artisan, Juan Bauza. After that atmospheric introduction, the Bauza instrument recedes as Kildea’s biographical sketch of Chopin visits other pianos, including his beloved Pleyels and the innovative Steinways that now define his sound. The book’s second half centers on harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, who bought Bauza’s piano for her collection and lost it when Nazis pillaged her Paris home; Kildea’s account of her championship of historically accurate instruments and performance alongside late-romantic melodramatics anchors his insightful exploration of shifting styles of piano-playing and interpretations of Chopin. Kildea’s loose-limbed narrative includes wonderful evocations of the music (Prelude 18 “is like someone arguing with himself—interrupting, stuttering, slowly gaining in confidence and fluency, prone to wild coloratura declamations”) and luxuriant digressions on everything from piano-tuning tastes to the 19th-century rebuilding of Paris. This is a wonderful, melodic take on Chopin’s genius. (Aug.)

The Spectator - Alan Rusbridger

"An episodic, picaresque tale, woven confidently.… [Kildea] writes knowledgeably and approachably about music and sympathetically about his cast of characters."

New York Journal of Books

"Captivating and intriguing, Chopin’s Piano will most certainly entertain both novice and hardcore music historians."

Financial Times - Jonathan McAloon

"Original, constantly interesting.… Kildea writes fluently about Chopin’s work."

Standpoint - Jonathan Gaisman

"An impressive feat of wide learning intriguingly deployed.… [G]iddily well-informed.… Kildea finds illumination in the detail."

Times Literary Supplement - William Boyd

"Beguiling.… Limpidly written, effortlessly learned, copiously illustrated, Chopin’s Piano is a perfect illustration of how the best histories often emerge from left field."

New York Journal of Books - Michael Thomas Barry

"Captivating and intriguing, Chopin’s Piano will most certainly entertain both novice and hardcore music historians."

Christian Science Monitor - Jonathan Rosenberg

"A sweeping story.… In graceful prose, Kildea explores developments in the history of piano-making, changes in the ways pianists have approached their craft, and, most luminously, the music of Chopin."

The New York Times Book Review - Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

"Highly readable."

Roger Kamien

"This fascinating and beautifully written book will delight music lovers."

Providence Journal - Phyllis Meras

"Even those who are not musically inclined will find themselves reading this book to its very end.… [G]ripping."

Wall Street Journal

"An exceptionally fine book: erudite, digressive, urbane and deeply moving....Mr. Kildea gracefully traverses the decades, his pages rich with period detail....Outstanding."

Times Literary Supplement - Anna Picard

"In tracing the history of the Bauza piano and the lives of those who played it, Kildea achieves a combination of performance and reception history that makes one listen more closely to the music."

The Times (London)

"A wonderful book about music, musicians, cultural similarities and differences, the blood and gore of revolutionary times, and the compensations of high art. Kildea writes with elegance and wit."

Kirkus Reviews

2018-05-15
The destiny of one piano reveals changing attitudes about romantic music.Composer, pianist, and music historian Kildea (Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, 2013, etc.), former artistic director of London's Wigmore Hall, crafts an engrossing narrative focused on a singular piano on which, in 1838, Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) composed 24 astonishing preludes. Living in Majorca with his lover, George Sand, Chopin found a piano made from local woods by artisan Juan Bauza. "Bauza's instrument was out of date before it was completed," writes the author, technologically more primitive than pianos constructed by the respected company Pleyel, in Paris, Chopin's subsequent instrument of choice. The Bauza piano, Kildea asserts, contributed significantly to the unconventional sound of the Preludes, which garnered little attention when they were published in 1839. Robert Schumann was among the few who noticed, writing a "perplexed though ultimately admiring" review, calling them "ruins, eagle wings, a wild motley of pieces," poetic, passionate, yet also containing "the morbid, the feverish, the repellent." Chopin performed selections at private gatherings, eliciting similarly puzzled responses. Kildea offers a close technical and formal analysis of the pieces, concluding that "Chopin really did invent a new genre," constructing patchworks "from the most brilliant but unexpected juxtapositions." Suffering from stage fright, Chopin reluctantly gave public concerts; with the Bauza piano left behind in Majorca, he preferred "the soft attack, the hazy harmonics, the fine gradations between dynamics," and the varying tones in different registers of the Pleyel instruments. Kildea also examines the evolution of piano construction in the 1830s and '40s, "a Wild West" of experimentation and innovation. By the late 19th century, powerful new pianos, such as those made by the American firm Steinway, proved irresistible to pianists aiming for drama rather than the "thoughtful, intimate communications between composer, performer, and listener initiated by Chopin." As the author chronicles many pianists' interpretations of Chopin, Wanda Landowska emerges as an important champion. Besides performing and writing about Chopin's works, she acquired the Bauza piano, whose later provenance Kildea carefully traces.A deeply researched, gracefully told music history.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171447007
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	10/16/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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