For a biographer, there’s a lot to untangle [with Chopin]. Alan Walker does so brilliantly in Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times, a magisterial portrait of a composer who fascinated and puzzled contemporaries and whose music came to define the Romantic piano ... Drawing on a wealth of letters and fresh scholarship, Walker creates a polyphonic work that elegantly interweaves multiple strands. He sketches key events in the history of Poland and portrays the burgeoning society of Polish exiles in Paris in a way that lends depth to Chopin’s oft-cited patriotism ... Walker offers insightful comments on some of his most important compositions with their pianistic innovations and expressive elegance.
[A] literary feast ... Walker’s MRI-thorough biography leaves no letter unopened, no salacious love story un-debunked, no scathing musical criticism untranslated ... Walker’s narrative style reflects the very music of his subject: He has a light, delicate touch when making apt inferences, and a soft and rather ornate style when providing descriptions of the artist ... already qualifies as one of the best biographies of the year.
An ideal composer biography should combine several qualities: a deep knowledge of the artist’s life and milieu, fortified by a reexamination of all available sources; an intimate understanding of the composer’s personality (and, when possible, some affection for it, too); and an ability to speak of the creative work in a manner that will edify both scholars and the general public, and take us all back to the music. Alan Walker’s Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times manages this hat trick very well indeed ... This is now the best biography of Chopin—meticulous, scholarly and well-told. Whatever the composer’s shortcomings as a person, his music grows only more moving.
The most comprehensive biography and musical analysis to date [on Chopin] ... This highly readable and engaging biography by an authority on 19th century Romantic music is suitable for professional musicians as well as music lovers and piano aficionados. It brings to life one of the 19th century's and Poland's most beloved, legendary, and celebrated artists. It deserves a place of merit at every university, music, and school library.
Walker’s is not the first biography to hack through this jungle of misinformation [regarding Chopin], but it is by far the most thorough and authoritative (in English, at any rate), and, for all its length, by no means the least readable ... More importantly, the book gives significantly more weight than its anglophone rivals to Chopin’s first 21 years in Poland (after all, more than half of his 39 year total). It’s so easy, when writing about an eastern European artist whose productive life was spent almost entirely in the west, to skate over the formative years, especially when they require knowledge of a Slavic language. Walker, however, paints a vivid and detailed picture of the composer’s early family life and schooling, in what he makes clear was a culturally rich period in the Polish capital ... Above all, Walker is brilliant on piano technique and its musical consequences. These passages are like talk of pigment and brushstrokes in a book about painting: technical in a sense yet free of jargon, easily understood, even perhaps by someone who has never laid hand on a piano keyboard.
Is sure to become the definitive biography on the great composer ... General readers should find this accessible as well as engrossing, despite the abundant scholarly apparatus—annotated contents, list of works, illustrations, musical notations, and genealogical charts. Heartily recommended to everyone with an interest in the subject.
Walker's writing is as limpid and engaging as his subject’s music ... this is much less an analysis and appreciation than a 'life and times' ... Informed by the latest discoveries about the composer, Walker’s biography is a towering and beautiful achievement.
Chopin sometimes seems like a cold fish, but Walker manages to unearth a warm, intelligent soul that matches the sublime music he wrote. The study is packed with information and insightful analyses of Chopin’s major works that will interest professional musicians, and even nonspecialists will be entranced by Walker’s piquant storytelling and graceful prose.
