Nineteenth-century Polish pianist and composer Fryderyk (more often seen as Frédéric) Chopin emerges much as we’ve known him to be—a quiet, shy, introverted young man who created some of the most fervent piano music of all time—in this lengthy and detailed biography. Musicologist Alan Walker paints Chopin in the familiar hues of a physically frail, consumptive, fussy and somewhat aloof man with a genuine aversion to personal drama. Though certainly proud of his native soil, Chopin spent most of his short life in France. The tome’s most dramatic and engrossing parts deal with his strange relationship with the cigar-chomping, crossdressing, scandal-courting novelist George Sand, whom Chopin at first considered to be “an antipathetic woman,” but who at first seduced, and then became caregiver to, the sickly composer-pianist.
