In recent years, intersectional music scholarship has produced books that invite listeners to rethink beloved cornerstones of the repertoire, thereby enlarging and deepening our understanding. Much like tenor Ian Bostridge's masterly "Schubert's Winter Journey," investigating the song cycle "Winterreise" from every conceivable angle, out music scholar Paul Kildea, author of a brilliant biography of Benjamin Britten, has looked deeply into Chopin's Op. 28 Preludes in "Chopin's Piano: A Journey Through Romanticism" (W.W. Norton).
There's no big reveal here that Chopin was gay, because he was not. But Kildea tackles head-on the long shadow of the feminine, meant negatively, that has fallen on the physically frail, "sickly" composer of salon music.
Describing Chopin's playing, a contemporary remarked, "One cannot help but think he is hearing the faint voices of fairies sighing under silver bells, or showers of pearls falling on crystal tables." That's miles from the butched-up Chopin that thunders away on today's recital platforms. Throughout, and particularly in his doting analysis of Sviatoslav Richter's Chopin, Kildea restores some welcome balance (and aims us at the second-generation Chopin pupil Raoul Koczalski, playing Chopin on the composer's own piano, available on YouTube).
Like Bostridge, the author skirts the granular musicological analysis that can make music books accessible only to scholars. He writes compellingly about each of the preludes along the way, but not as a complete opus, in which form Chopin neither conceived nor performed them. "The Preludes transgressed musically farther than any other work," Kildea writes. "Through their individuality and originality, through their extreme distillation of Romantic ideas, the Preludes first defied the artistic aesthetic of the mid-19th century, and then came to define it."
Kildea's book starts as an adventure story about an episode of adventure travel ill-suited for the frail composer, who eventually died of TB. In the company of his paramour George Sand - a woman author and cigar-smoking legend about whom Kildea writes mostly sympathetically, who found the composer disappointing sexually and referred to him in a letter as "Little Chip-Chip" - Chopin sailed to Majorca to escape the harsh Paris winter of 1838-39.
Their rental cells in an abandoned monastery in Valdemossa were little better for Chopin. Yet it is there that Chopin composed, among other pieces, the Preludes, a substantial number of them working at first only with an existing "pianino" made by Juan Bauza, a local carpenter, before his preferred piano-maker Pleyel dispatched the instrument on which Chopin completed them. Restrictive as the Bauza miniature was, the instinctive player in the composer found its way into it.
Kildea distances himself from the common view that if Chopin had had access to the wonders of the modern Steinway, he would composed with its significantly greater range in mind. He concentrates instead on the instruments Chopin did know, and his personal playing style (which a contemporary described as if his fingers had no bones), in its own way as dazzling as his contemporary, Liszt's, minus the thunder.
A born improviser who struggled mightily to refine his scores, Chopin shunned playing in public and only once - his last-ever "recital," then a new word for performing for a large, paying public - in a large concert hall, in London in 1848.
Barely has the composer exhaled his last, agonizing last breaths when, making a sharp turn, Kildea takes us to the composer's compatriot Wanda Landowska, who dominates the second half of the book and the cover of the book's American edition. Landowska is remembered for her tireless work to bring the harpsichord out of onstage obscurity. For her, "the Preludes and this [Bauza] piano were bound together," she made a pilgrimage to Majorca to retrieve it, bringing it back to Berlin, where she was photographed with it, then to France.
Landowska, whose Pleyel harpsichords had the metal-plated soundboards first employed to bear the string tension in grand pianos, warrants the reputational upgrade she gets in this sensitive, involving semi-biography. She began writing "How Chopin Played Chopin" in Berlin in 1913, during her short, unsatisfying heterosexual marriage. Kildea writes, "Here and elsewhere she decried the muscularity of contemporary Chopin performances."
She spent the rest of her long life with Denise Restout, a 17-year-old harpsichord student who partnered her in all of her subsequent musical endeavors. "Unfashionable" as her harpsichord playing has been regarded over the years, her contributions to what is now a vital, historically informed performance-practice tradition are laid out in full here, in language that sometimes verges on the devout.
The book returns to adventure travel as Kildea follows the trail of the Bouza pianino. After the Nazis looted Landowska's French country home, it did time in an actual salt mine near Leipzig where they concealed it. Eventually the path to its whereabouts, if any, today grows cold, in contrast to the mounting heat of Kildea's search.
The book's cumulative feeling is perhaps best expressed by Carla Shapreau, an authority on music restitution, who told the author she feared she had disappointed, "Sometimes not finding what you are looking for is not a bad way to end a story."