It is an exceptionally fine book: erudite, digressive, urbane and deeply moving. A conductor and the author of a biography of Benjamin Britten, Mr. Kildea is a talented writer whose spark flares brightest at the level of the sentence and the phrase ... Mr. Kildea gracefully traverses the decades, his pages rich with period detail leading up to Paris’s belle epoque ... No one knows exactly what happened to it upon Landowska’s death 13 years later, and today it remains at large. With luck this outstanding book will prompt its rediscovery, and Mr. Kildea can update readers in a new afterword. This story is well worth reading again just to see how it ends.
The piano that Paul Kildea takes to be the focal point of this excellent book is what Hitchcock called a McGuffin: a striking device to get the story started. The author doesn’t know what became of the keyboard after the war, and nor does anybody else. It could be a much-loved feature of a civilised home, or it could have been cut up long ago for firewood ... This is a wonderful book about music, musicians, cultural similarities and differences, the blood and gore of revolutionary times and the compensations of high art. Kildea writes with elegance and wit, and displays the kind of scholarship that does not come simply from mugging up on a few books.
In 24 chapters (his homage to the Preludes), Kildea, a composer, pianist, and author of a biography of composer Benjamin Britten, tells a sweeping story, which only partly considers the 'search' for the instrument upon which Chopin labored in Majorca. In graceful prose, Kildea explores developments in the history of piano-making, changes in the way pianists have approached their craft, and, most luminously, the music of Chopin. Along the way, Kildea considers the idea of Romanticism, touches on European history, and offers a stimulating discussion on the evolution of nineteenth-century Paris. The reader also encounters Tolstoy, Rodin, and numerous celebrated musicians from Chopin’s time down to our own. Nor can one forget Wanda Landowska, the central figure in the second half of the book ... Upon completing this fine volume, one is tempted to shed a tear because the whereabouts of Chopin’s piano remain a mystery. Far better, though, to take comfort from the fact that his music survives. That seems a reasonable tradeoff, though it would be wonderful to find his piano.
While it is assumed that most readers are aware that the Nazis looted art, what isn’t as well known is the theft of other cultural symbols such as musical instruments. Kildea does an excellent job of tracing and attempting to solve the mysteries of what happened to one of these iconic symbols. The author’s enthusiasm for the subject is very apparent and he expertly and effortlessly illustrates how Landowska’s trials and tribulations relates to Chopin’s, a saga which redefined portions of the cultural and political history of mid-20th century. Captivating and intriguing, Chopin’s Piano will most certainly entertain both novice and hardcore music historians.
In 1838, the French writer George Sand took her lover Frédéric Chopin to Mallorca. Escaping the Paris winter, they would both work in peace ... Along with this more popular fare, Kildea—a musician and conductor himself—writes fluently about Chopin’s work, illustrating it nicely without sounding too technical ... it [the piano] doesn’t much matter to the story. It is a blow that, having survived such a serendipitous yet tragic history, it should be lost after its rescue. But it is enough that the instrument has prompted this rich, winding double portrait of two musical heroes [Chopin and Wanda Landowska]. Chopin may indeed have intended his Preludes to be miniature: 'tiny-great monuments of Western art music,' Kildea calls them. But this book shows us that the story of their legacy, along with their composer’s, is unequivocally rangy and huge.
...Kildea’s account of her [Wanda Landowska's] championship of historically accurate instruments and performance alongside late-romantic melodramatics anchors his insightful exploration of shifting styles of piano-playing and interpretations of Chopin. Kildea’s loose-limbed narrative includes wonderful evocations of the music ('Prelude 18' 'is like someone arguing with himself—interrupting, stuttering, slowly gaining in confidence and fluency, prone to wild coloratura declamations') and luxuriant digressions on everything from piano-tuning tastes to the 19th-century rebuilding of Paris. This is a wonderful, melodic take on Chopin’s genius.
Kildea offers a close technical and formal analysis of the pieces [Preludes], concluding that 'Chopin really did invent a new genre' ... As the author chronicles many pianists’ interpretations of Chopin, Wanda Landowska emerges as an important champion. Besides performing and writing about Chopin’s works, she acquired the Bauza piano, whose later provenance Kildea carefully traces. A deeply researched, gracefully told music history.
