Book Review: 'Chopin's Funeral' march

Benita Eisler begins "Chopin's Funeral," her melodious narrative of the life of Frederic Chopin, with death. On a bright October day in 1849, more than 4,000 mourners crammed into the temple-like Church of the Madeleine in Paris to say farewell to the musical genius. The service could not have been more lavish or costly. How ironic for a man who spent his final years in near-isolation from friends and family, scraping out an existence, desperately ill and terrified of becoming destitute.

Although the arc of Chopin's brief but productive life (he died at 39) is well known, Eisler's ability to penetrate the psyches and inner lives of her cast of characters makes this story seem newly gripping and freshly told.

Everything about Chopin's career appears improbable. A small, sickly but talented son of simple Polish parents, he flees his native country as a young man, driven away by his loyalty to the crumbling monarchy. Exiled to Paris, he becomes the darling of the aristocratic classes, depending on their patronage to make his way. Conservative, elegant, diminutive, he ends up in the arms of the most notorious woman of almost any age, six years his senior.

The story of Chopin cannot be disentangled from the life of George Sand, the pants-wearing, cigar-smoking libertine female who shocked even Paris with her multiple love affairs and independent life. The opposite of Chopin politically, she kept company with "sweaty, loud, ill-mannered journalists, organizers, and worker-poets." He craved the concerts, balls and glittering salons of the city. A stylish dandy, barely five feet tall, he began a fad for lavender gloves, certain scented soaps and shades of wallpaper. Sand presided over her country house, Nohant, managed her large extended family, sat up all night writing novels and journalistic pieces and still possessed energy to put up 40 pounds of plum jam single-handedly.

Any telling of the romance of these two always centers on the famous Majorcan winter, where they escaped for sunshine and a restoration of Chopin's always-fragile health. They found isolation, constant dreary rain and no servants. Sand, ever rising to the occasion, did the cooking, kept her boy-genius dry and even managed to have a full-sized piano delivered over rocks to their remote location -- in tune, yet!

Thus began a period of mutual admiration and care, of ecstatic and tender nurturing of Chopin's art by Sand. "I feel as peaceful as a baby in its cradle," he wrote to a friend.

The problem with any biography of Chopin is the dominance of Sand's character. Yet Eisler admirably manages to keep the focus on Chopin's struggles to teach, compose and perform. He preferred the private concert, subscribed to by friends and devotees. "I am not fit to give concerts," he said. "The crowd intimidates me and I feel suffocated by its eager breath, paralyzed by its inquisitive stare, silenced by its alien faces."

He seldom could bring himself to play in public. How fortunate were the relatively few people who ever heard him perform his music. All accounts by those who were so blessed rave about his delicate touch, intricate fingering and coaxing of beautiful tone from his large pianoforte. He had a unique way of stroking the keys, causing a note to linger and shimmer a little while before fading away. I kept thinking of Olympic diver Greg Louganis, who would lift off the platform and seem to hang there a moment in perfect form before plunging into the water.

Inevitably, the complex personalities of Sand and Chopin clashed. Each was demanding in different ways. She described it in a thinly disguised roman a clef as a "desperate struggle as to which would consume the other." She began to ease her "angel" from her inner circle, banishing him first from Nohant and then breaking finally from their shared quarters in Paris.

The manner in which Sand distanced herself from her formally adored lover can only be described as cruel and insensitive. She showed similar disdain for her daughter, Solange, whose own story, a tragic subplot in this tale, has all the characteristics of Eisler's definition of the "ultimate romantic requirement: beauty touched with strangeness."

The author has a charming way of imagining how music sounds. Writing about the Third Scherzo in C-sharp minor, for instance, she describes the uncertain rhythms and key as though the composer has opened a lion's cage and is facing down the beast. "Violence is courted," she purrs, "only to be elegantly controlled."

Chopin's loneliness and despair after the brutal separation from Sand, along with a dangerous insurrection in Paris, sent him to England and Scotland in his final year, trolling for stipends and pupils to teach, unappreciated and ignored.

An interesting irony is that, 150 years after his death, Chopin's music grows in reputation. He is known and loved and performed and, yes, still mourned. Sand, who outlived him by 26 years, is known mainly for her affair with him. Few of her written works remain in print, and she is largely unread.

I wish so many biographies did not end in sorrow.

Yet I found this an uplifting book. It might be sacrilegious to say this, but a swift portrait of a life, packed with interesting insights and carefully selected details, can be just as satisfying as an all-inclusive tome containing documentation and dating of every grocer's bill, appointment and litany of the subject's antecedents. I mean no disrespect to David McCullough and Robert Caro and other giant Sequoia biographers, but Benita Eisler's more compact style is dazzling. I will eagerly read anything she writes.

("Chopin's Funeral by Benita Eisler, Knopf, 206 pages, $23)