The great difficulty for any biographer of Fryderyk Chopin is conveying his mercurial personality. An idea of its elusiveness can perhaps be glimpsed from one pupil’s struggle to understand how Chopin wanted a piece played:
[H]e rose from the couch to play the piece and . . . finished the lesson . . . . I did not want to forget this experience to which I had so religiously listened.
At the following lesson, almost satisfied with the imitative fashion in which I had worked on the piece, I played it again. Unfortunately . . . Chopin once again . . . rose and with a brusque reprimand, seated himself at the piano saying, “Listen, this is how it should go,” and proceeded to play it again in an entirely different way.
Chopin’s evanescence was not restricted to performance questions—it informed virtually every aspect of his character. His first biographer, the composer-pianist and a longtime acquaintance Franz Liszt, ruefully acknowledged this difficulty when he said that Chopin was “prepared to give anything, but never himself.” The problem is compounded by the loss or dispersal of a large amount of Chopin’s personal papers and correspondence. For this reason, Chopin studies have been afflicted by an unusually high level of biographical whimsy. “Scholarship abhors a vacuum,” writes Alan Walker in Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times, his new study of the composer, which examines the “speculation, hypothesis, and sheer fantasy” that have affected previous studies.
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