A sad story superbly chronicled.
Poor Frédéric Chopin: so much talent, so much sorrow.
Eisler, a gifted biographer of artists and writers (Byron, 1999, etc.), strikes exactly the right elegiac tone on the first page of this slender volume, which opens with the Polish composer’s funeral in Paris in 1849. Eighteen years earlier, Chopin had arrived in the city an unknown, 21-year-old exile from Poland and immediately thrilled the elite of Orleanist France with two incandescent performances. The elite were just the ones he was after: though his music, like Beethoven’s, has long been considered progressive and even revolutionary, Chopin, writes Eisler, “had a horror of ‘the People’ as a force of upheaval or even change” and was “repelled by marginality: by poor Poles, by Jews, by the ill-dressed and ill-mannered, by coarseness or slovenliness, in art or life.” He was particularly offended by any suggestion that art should serve the cause of social justice or reform, a position championed by one of the most visible and popular artists of the time, novelist George Sand, “the daughter of a bird seller turned camp follower,” with whom the snobbish provincial immediately struck up a torrid affair without having read a word of her writing. Sand was a bit frightening, Eisler tells us, a cigar-smoking terror who all but devoured men; yet she made a perfect balance to the timid Chopin, who was rapidly becoming a superstar—and not just among the elite, but among young amateur pianists who rushed to buy his sheet music, so that the “tender, swaying rhythms of the mazurka became, along with all things Polish, the rage in Paris.” For many reasons, though, and none of them pleasant, Chopin’s and Sand’s love soon soured; each contributed to its collapse, which unfolds in these pages, like so much in Chopin’s life, as an inevitable tragedy.
A sad story superbly chronicled.Pub Date: March 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40945-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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