Chopin's life and times - Chopin's Funeral - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Feb, 2004 by Susan Reynolds

Chopin's Funeral. Benita Eisler. Little, Brown. [pounds sterling]16.99. 231 pages. ISBN 0-316-86021-2.

When Frederic Chopin's funeral took place on 30 October 1849 at the Madeleine, the music critic of The Times suspected that of the four thousand mourners who packed the church, many of them, far from being summoned by special invitation, were strangers admitted at the last minute. Benita Eisler's description of the obsequies, with their blend of ostentation, hysterical adulation and black humour, opens the account of a life which, in many respects, was a preparation for just such an event. She skilfully deepens the growing shadow of tuberculosis which hung over Chopin's career. This began in his teens, when he watched his younger sister die agonizingly from the same disease, and would later kill several of his friends as well as his promising pupil, Karl Filtsch.

The author is equally astute in mapping the effects of tuberculosis on his personality, with its extreme mood swings, need for reassurance and security, and morbid hypersensitivity side by side with outbursts of rage at time-wasting pupils and those whom he accused of disloyalty. While not gratuitously demolishing the image of Chopin as doomed genius, she spares no details of his prudish outrage at the behaviour of women of whom he disapproved, especially Georges Sand's adopted daughter, Titine, his fretful petulance and his insistence on meticulous detail in the adornment of himself and his surroundings.

Within the familiar narrative of Chopin's progress from Poland to Paris and his notorious relationship with Sand, Miss Eisler embeds details of the composition of his music, fitting them into the context against which they originated. Although there are occasional infelicities and capricious similes (the Polonaise in F sharp minor, Op. 44, is 'a boa constrictor of a work, seeming to have swallowed pieces of waltz and mazurka and getting longer in the process'), she succeeds admirably in evoking a climate in which the piano was undergoing rapid technical development. This made it an object of desire in the homes of the fast-growing bourgeoisie, creating a market greedy for the sheet music of Chopin's compositions that poured into the shops.

Benita Eisler adroitly balances the political and the personal in her documentation of the revolutions of the 1830s and 1840s in Poland and France against which Chopin's life unfolded and their consequences at an individual and international level. Moreover, she presents a portrait of Georges Sand which shows her not merely as a sexually voracious virago but as a shrewd and canny woman strongly rooted in French rural life with an understanding of its practicalities, a generous and hospitable nature, and a healthy appetite for hard work. (Her letters to her son, Maurice, half-heartedly apprenticed to Delacroix, will strike a chord in exasperated mothers of indolent adolescents.) The capacity for maternal tenderness which she lavished on Chopin throws into painful relief her insensitive handling of her daughter, Solange, the one member of the family present at his death-bed. Miss Eisner's book, while not replacing Zamoyski's biography, does not seek to do so, and provides a lively and readable supplement.