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

“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 astonish...