The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz (Everyman's Library (Cloth)) by Hector Berlioz  (6)
$16.50
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Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Studies on the History of Society & Culture) by James H. Johnson  (1)
$25.95
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
This book may be of greater interest to the historian--political, social, and cultural--than to the musician. As its title indicates, it is about France, particularly Paris, more than about Chopin, and presupposes considerable knowledge of French history. Chopin wanders through its pages as a peripatetic presence; there are quotes from his letters commenting on whom he meets, where he plays, what he sees and hears, with references to his friends, pupils, and publishers. The author, a New York dermatologist who has written two previous books about Chopin (including Fryderyk Chopin: Pianist from Warsaw), has prodigiously researched every aspect of French life between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. He quotes copiously from contemporary writers as diverse as Balzac, Heine, Berlioz, Mrs. Trollop, and Thackeray. A meticulously detailed guided tour through Paris is followed by an account of several generations of the royal family describing their politics, personalities, fortunes, and misfortunes, as well as their habits, love affairs, interrelationships, hangers-on, and adversaries, resulting in a bewildering profusion of names.
This book may be of greater interest to the historian--political, social, and cultural--than to the musician. As its title indicates, it is about France, particularly Paris, more than about Chopin, and presupposes considerable knowledge of French history. Chopin wanders through its pages as a peripatetic presence; there are quotes from his letters commenting on whom he meets, where he plays, what he sees and hears, with references to his friends, pupils, and publishers. The author, a New York dermatologist who has written two previous books about Chopin (including Fryderyk Chopin: Pianist from Warsaw), has prodigiously researched every aspect of French life between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. He quotes copiously from contemporary writers as diverse as Balzac, Heine, Berlioz, Mrs. Trollop, and Thackeray. A meticulously detailed guided tour through Paris is followed by an account of several generations of the royal family describing their politics, personalities, fortunes, and misfortunes, as well as their habits, love affairs, interrelationships, hangers-on, and adversaries, resulting in a bewildering profusion of names.
Among the most interesting chapters are those on the Polish refugee community--where Chopin had many friends--and those on the artists, writers, musicians, philosophers, and theologians (including numerous crackpots) who created the city's rich cultural life in its concerts, theaters, operas, journals, and famous private salons. The writing is lively, witty, and informative, marred only by occasional infelicities like "his inseparable sister," and the book abounds with excellent illustrations. Unfortunately, it also abounds with anti-Semitic slurs; Atwood misses no chance to point out, in an insulting manner, the Jewish origin of anyone he does not like, from the Rothschilds to Heine, Meyerbeer, and Offenbach. --Edith Eisler
From Publishers Weekly
Atwood's third book on Chopin (Fryderyk Chopin: Pianist from Warsaw) views the composer's life against the backdrop of Paris, from Chopin's arrival in 1831 until his death in 1849. Atwood captures historical details of the City of Light, nicely describing, for example, the Polish emigre community and the city's leading salon hostesses. Chopin's own insights into these various milieus are revealed in pointed comments drawn from his correspondence ("I am launching myself little by little into society, alas, with nothing more than a ducat in my pocket!"). Beginning with a panoramic tour through the arrondissements of Paris, Atwood notes Chopin's various residences and other landmarks of importance in his life. Several chapters on the intensely active musical life of Paris, from the salons to Chopin's beloved opera, and on the rise of journalistic music criticism, are of central interest. Yet Atwood's thoroughness becomes a problem in chapters that, by his own admission, explore aspects of Parisian life with which Chopin had little to do. For instance, his lover George Sand was a link to literary and radical political circles, but Atwood stresses Chopin's lack of interest in politics only after providing a detailed political history. A chapter on the visual arts includes Sand's observation that "her lover was a musician and only a musician, with little feeling for the other arts." Atwood's urge toward panorama takes the book away from its supposed central figure into the realm of more general cultural history from which Chopin often disappears. But what this study lacks in focus it makes up for in colorful anecdotes and personality sketches that will surely interest aficionados of music in 19th-century Paris. 151 illus.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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