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His father was a Frenchman who had transplanted himself to Poland, and Chopin had made the return journey to France. But the truth was that all thoughts of revolution – indeed, any kind of political instability – horrified him, and the reason for this lay in his own ambiguous status. Yet Chopin's heart had bled for Poland – and for his family trapped in Warsaw – and his political convictions were nationalist. In other words, a great composer, but a rotten human being. "A very strange person, very hard to like," Schiff concluded with haughty distaste. While neither image fits the facts, a newer one – first proposed by the pianist Andras Schiff – is currently being tried for size: it has superficial plausibility, but on closer scrutiny proves as blinkered and childish as the others.Īfter researching Chopin in depth for a biographical film, Schiff – who plays his music with rare sensitivity – condemned him as an anti-Semite, a self-invented aristocrat, a social snob, a dandy who hated contact with the rest of the human race, and a man totally without loyalty to his fellow Polish exiles. Time was when he was written off as effeminate – "one naturally thinks of him with a skirt on" was the American composer Charles Ives' idiotically macho jibe – and he's now customarily depicted either as a heroic Polish patriot or hypersensitive hothouse plant.
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His character, meanwhile, has been travestied in a thousand ways.
#CHOPIN MUSIC CAUSES SERIAL#
His commodification by advertisers and the serial murder of a few unfortunate pieces by "smooth classics" programmers means his real oeuvre is now almost terra incognita. Everyone has their own idea of Chopin, and it's often wide of the mark.