Chopin

This is a new edition of Adam Zamoyski's definitive biography of Chopin, first published in 1979 and unavailable in English for many years. Few composers evoke such strong emotions as Chopin; few have been more revered and cherished. Yet, few have also been subjected to so much sentimental nonsense.

Published to coincide with the bicentenary of Chopin's birth, Adam Zamoyski's compelling new biography cuts through the mass of anecdote and myth that has accumulated around the composer's life and the ebullient and striking personalities of Romantic Paris among whom he lived, including Liszt, Berlioz, Victor Hugo, and George Sand, all in search of the real Chopin. Zamoyski brings to the subject an unrivalled knowledge of the historical, social, and cultural background of the composer's native Poland, as well as the France in which he spent most of his creative life. He has meticulously scoured the archives of Warsaw, Krakow, Paris, and London in his quest for the truth, basing his account exclusively on primary sources and contemporary accounts.

The result is a biography of authority, perception, and wit. Chopin emerges from the sugary romantic mist in which he has been shrouded as a real, palpable personality: a man of intelligence and humour; in music, an innovator of genius; in business, a feckless spendthrift; in love, hesitant and tender; in friendship, passionately loyal but often intolerably exacting. Through a close reading of his letters and the use of everyday detail, Zamoyski draws the reader into the private world of this most complicated and reticent of men – "a man made for intimacy," as the poet Heinrich Heine called him – revealing the real passions, suffering, and ultimate tragedy of his life.