Book of the Week: 'Chopin's Funeral'

SAN DIEGO, March 25 (UPI) -- In this biography of Frederic Chopin, "Chopin's Funeral," Benita Eisler manages to convey not only a portrait of the life of the famous composer, but also of the society in which he lived and of his famous friends: the novelist George Sand (Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin), the composer Franz Liszt, and the painter Eugene Delacroix.

Biographies of famous people tend to run to 500 pages, but Eisler has managed to compress Chopin's life into just 200, examining not only his childhood in Poland, his life as an exile in France and his turbulent love affair with Sand, but also the style of his compositions and of playing the piano.

I suggest you read this book with Chopin's music playing in the background -- you will gain an appreciation of both the book and the music.

Chopin was born in Poland on March 1, 1810, in a small farmhouse on the Skarbek estate near Warsaw. His father was tutor to the Skarbek children, and Count Skarbek was Frederic's godfather. As Eisler points out, "exile was Chopin's legacy." His father was born in France, and since French was the language of the ruling class and the nobility, both in Russia and in Poland, Nicolas Chopin found employment teaching the language, first as a private tutor, and later as master of language and literature at the Warsaw Lyceum.

Unfortunately, he did not see fit to teach the language to his own children, and Frederic never mastered his father's native French. While in exile in France, he felt doubly isolated, "from his country and from his language. Imprisoned by foreign words, the expressive power of music unbound him."

But it was not exile that inspired him. Chopin published his first composition when he was eight, and still living in Poland, dedicating it to his godfather's sister, the Countess Skarbek. He was learning, along with music, the courtier's skills that would come in handy later in life.

From his father's friends and acquaintances he learned the importance of preserving the language, folklore and music of Poland, a country straining under the yoke of Russian occupation. To young Polish patriots, his polonaise, as Eisler notes, did not represent a dance, but a coded call to arms. Although intensely patriotic, Chopin was never involved in revolutionary activities and was most at ease in the ballrooms and salons of the palaces he frequented all his life. One of his best friends was Countess Marliani, and James de Rothschild was his friend and patron.

Chopin was supremely elegant and spent a great deal of money on his clothes. Eisler lists "the Parisian tailor whose cut, together with the special gray of his suiting, was of such legendary perfection that his clients were instantly recognizable by their trousers alone; Chopin's famous collection of kid gloves, which launched the fashion for his favorite shade --- palest lavender; his friendly rivalry with Delacroix for the most subtle variety of somber yet richly figured silk waistcoats; the caressing fit of boots made by the most fashionable bootmaker in Paris."

Yet, to afford all this and more -- a house in a fashionable district, a horse and carriage, and servants -- Chopin not only wrote music but also gave music lessons, sometimes as many as seven a day. His pupils were mostly wives and daughters of haute bourgeoisie or nobility, and aspiring young professional musicians. His sheet music sold like CDs sell today, and his compositions became instant best-sellers. He rarely gave public concerts, preferring to play for a chosen audience of friends and acquaintances in familial surroundings. These familial salons might include the royal palaces of the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs, but he felt more at ease there than in public concert halls like the Salle Pleyel.

His music was innovative, including wisps of Polish folk songs and echoes of his native mazurkas. He reinvented the étude and the nocturne, giving them his own inimitable stamp, especially in his interpretation. "For the rest of his life as an artist, he applied his endless inventiveness and ingenuity to extending the possibilities of these forms (the mazurka and the polonaise)."

Chopin's friendship with Liszt was intensified by the latter's admiration. Liszt introduced Chopin to everyone he knew and promoted his music by playing his friend's compositions at every one of his own very successful recitals. They were both exiles and had both been child prodigies. But unlike Liszt, Chopin was a very private person, terrified of playing in front of vast audiences.

"I am not fit to give concerts; the crowd intimidates me and I feel suffocated by its eager breath, paralyzed by its inquisitive stare, silenced by its alien faces." His frail lungs suffocated him too, forcing him to leave Paris in the winter and seek refuge in drier, warmer climes.

Sand's home in the Berry region, Nohant, was a regular haven, and he shared her home and her life with Chopin for nine years. She was a maternal presence in his life, solicitous about his health, looking after his interests as well as his physical needs. She put up with his temper tantrums, his mood swings and his constant complaints. Eventually, she would write a thinly disguised roman a clef, "Lucrezia Floriani," that shocked the world, in which she exposed their problems and their disagreements to the public. Everyone recognized Sand and Chopin as the protagonists, and in his cultural column for German readers, Heinrich Heine wrote: "She has treated my friend Chopin outrageously in a divinely written novel."

If Chopin ignored the novel, he could not ignore Sand's treatment of him, and after nine years of love and companionship, they finally parted.

The fall of the Bourbons in 1848 caused Chopin to seek greener pastures in England and Scotland, but the round of concerts and recitals exhausted his already failing health, and he returned to Paris. He died soon after, in October 1849, in the arms of Solange, Sand's daughter, with whom he never lost touch. According to his wishes, his heart was sent to Warsaw, and he was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery, after a magnificent funeral at the church of the Madeleine attended by, as Hector Berlioz reported, "the whole of artistic and aristocratic Paris."

Eisler, the author of "Byron" and "Georgia O'Keefe and Stieglitz: An American Romance" has written one more biography, tight but rich in detail, giving us a sweeping look at the political and social events of the era as well as intimate details of Chopin's life and an examination of his style and music.

(Knopf, $23.00, 203 pages)