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Music in Chopin's Warsaw.

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Music in Chopin's Warsaw. By Halina Goldberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. [viii, 330 p. ISBN: 9780195130737. $45.00.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Despite the polonaises and mazurkas, the Krakowiak, and numerous solo songs set in the vernacular, most listeners of Frederic Chopin's music would not likely recognize his style as being particularly Polish. His compositions--almost all of them for solo piano--have long been recognized as cornerstones of a Romantic stylistic orientation whose chief practitioners spent most of their time in the artistic metropolises of Leipzig, Vienna, and especially Paris. Indeed, while Chopin was actively involved in Warsaw's cultural life for more than a decade--composing for the aristocracy, attending university, even working as Sunday organist at a nearby church--most accounts of his artistic formation begin in earnest with his departure for Vienna in 1829 and especially his move to Paris in 1831. For instance, Tad Szulc's Chopin in Paris: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer (New York: Scribner, 1998) glosses over the Warsaw period, and William G. Atwood's more academic The Parisian Worlds of Frederic Chopin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) avoids it completely. To be sure, most of the compositions for which Chopin is known today were written in Paris, but the popular and scholarly involvement with Chopin's career after leaving Warsaw only reinforces our lack of familiarity with the content and context of his early period. Even the ostensibly innocent substitution of "Frederic" for "Fryderyk" on recordings and concert programs unintentionally...

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