The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries (review)

The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries, edited by Halina Goldberg, includes essays originally presented at a symposium bearing a similar title held at Indiana University, Bloomington in 1999 to commemorate the sesquicentennial of Frédéric Chopin's death. The publication is not a conference proceedings—that is, it does not represent the sum of papers delivered at the symposium. Nor is it a volume of "selected essays" that might most strongly articulate the underlying premise of the original event. Rather, it is, as Goldberg defines in the preface, a "collection" and, as such, it approximates the symposium's design: it is headed by an introduction and divided into four parts ("Memories, Images, and Dreams," "Analytical Perspectives," "Gender, Genre and Genius," and "Chopin Appropriated"), three of which borrow their headings from session titles. In all, the volume includes a brief introduction and thirteen essays; the majority of these contributions appear in print for the first time.

In the introduction, "Chopin Then and Now: A Fantasy," historian Daniel Stone gets things off to a troubling start by imagining a Chopin born in 1950. Why? Stone suggests that "[t]he degree to which [Chopin's] experience reflected his times is highlighted by the hypothetical construction of a modern Chopin, born in Stalinist Poland in 1950 and perhaps emigrating to New York in 1970" (p. 10). But a fantasy of a modern-day Chopin, "one who might have been an atonalist or a jazz pianist" (p. 10), cannot "highlight" real, lived history, in this case, Chopin's. It can merely contemporize the socio-political contours of a Poland under Russian control. Problems of logic aside, Stone's point (if you will) is condescending. It presumes that the reader lacks the imagination (training?) to envision a Poland more distant than its Communist past. And Stone says as much: "By readjusting the dates in this manner I hope to make Chopin's experience more immediate and accessible" (p. 1).

Bożena Shallcross's essay that follows does not necessarily improve matters. In "Chopin at Home," Shallcross, a scholar of Polish literature, proposes "to show that Romanticism, as a philosophy of individualism—powerfully represented in literature, music, and the visual arts—opens for artists the concept of the home as a new mode of self-expression and a sphere particularly conducive for experimentation" (p. 13). In other words, Shallcross wishes to demonstrate that, through such things as acquired objects, decor, and aura of place, Chopin strongly identified with his domestic environment and, in turn, his contemporaries also defined the composer by his surroundings. The idea is interesting, not least because it allows Shallcross to engage in a discussion of the Romantic "language of fragments" (p. 16) discernable in a selection of Chopin's letters, and in Franz Liszt's vivid description of Chopin performing in his apartment on chaussée d'Antin in Paris. Unfortunately, hard-going (at times, imprecise) language and hasty scholarship too often obscure Shallcross's keen literary observations of a Romantic taste for blurring the boundaries between the real and the imagined. One wishes the author had taken a bit of time to clean up and flesh out the arguments in this short piece.

Unfortunately, the uneven effort that characterizes Shallcross's piece is representative of the volume as a whole. Of the thirteen essays included in this collection, eight appear more or less as they originally were presented while five have been significantly expanded. Among the eight shorter essays, four can be singled out for their coherent arguments and clear presentation, even if they remain modest in scope. Art historian John B. Nici makes a plausible case for interpreting Eugène Delacroix's famous portrait of Chopin (a fragment, in fact, of a much larger canvas) as a manifestation of the Romantic aesthetics of transference, a surrogate self-portrait of the painter himself. In "Idiosyncrasies of Phrase Rhythm in Chopin's Mazurkas," Carl Schachter focuses on two features of...