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

by Paul Kildea

Overview

“An exceptionally fine book: erudite, digressive, urbane and deeply moving.” —Wall Street Journal

Chopin’s Piano traces the history of Frédéric 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 Chopin’s Mallorquin pianino, which the great keyboard player Wanda Landowska rescued from an abandoned monastery at Valldemossa in 1913—and 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. In scintillating prose, and with an eye for exquisite detail, Paul Kildea beautifully interweaves these narratives, which comprise a journey through musical Romanticism—one that illuminates how art is transmitted, interpreted, and appropriated over the ages.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393357783
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/04/2020
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	403,590
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Paul Kildea, artistic director of Musica Viva Australia, is a conductor, writer, and former artistic director of Wigmore Hall in London. He is the author of Chopin's Piano: In Search of the Instrument That Transformed Music and Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Preface xiii

Book 1 The Lodestar of Musical Romanticism

1 Palma, 1830s 3

2 Palma, Paris, 1838 6

3 Palma, Valldemossa, 1838 17

4 Valldemossa, Marseilles, Nohant, 1838-9 34

5 Paris, 1831-9 56

6 Paris, 1839 74

7 Paris, 1841 83

8 Paris, 1842-8 99

9 London, Scotland, Paris, 1848-9 109

10 Paris, New York City, London, 1851-88 120

11 New York City, 1889 135

12 Paris, Saint Petersburg, Berlin, 1849-1900 141

Book 2 An Old Jewess, Crazy About Music

13 Valldemossa, Warsaw, Paris, Berlin, 1879-1913 159

14 Berlin, Paris, Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, 1914-27 179

15 Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, Paris, 1926-32 188

16 Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, Paris, Banyuls-sur-Mer, 1933-40 197

17 Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, Paris, Banyuls-sur-Mer, 1940-41 206

18 New York City, Paris, Leipzig, Silesia, Raitenhaslach, 1941-4 220

19 Paris, New York City, Munich, 1945 236

20 Los Angeles, Paris, Vienna, 1945-6 245

21 New York City, Munich, Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, 1946 252

22 Moscow, 1950 261

23 Saint-Leu-Ia-Forêt, New York City, Lakeville, 1949-59 266

24 Washington D.C., Valldemossa, London, Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, 2015-17 274

Envoi: Vienna, 1952 287

Acknowledgments 291

Notes 295

Index 329

Editorial Reviews

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

The Spectator - Alan Rusbridger

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

Financial Times - Jonathan McAloon

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

Standpoint - Jonathan Gaisman

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

Times Literary Supplement - William Boyd

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

New York Journal of Books - Michael Thomas Barry

"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."

Christian Science Monitor - Jonathan Rosenberg

"Highly readable."

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

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

Roger Kamien

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

Providence Journal - Phyllis Meras

"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."

Times Literary Supplement - Anna Picard

★ 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.)

Publishers Weekly

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

New York Journal of Books

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

Wall Street Journal

"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."

The Times (London)

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.

Kirkus Reviews