Chopin in Paris

More Chopin  

I turn to a few more general remarks about the Gavoty Chopin biography. While I can’t make any comparative judgments, I think of his Chopin as a most respectable biographical effort. This author was trained as a musician and has a respectable record as an organist, a series of recordings included. While his Chopin book has some quirks that you don’t find in a more academically grounded biography, it casts a wide net of contemporary letters and newspaper articles which very much seem to do justice to the subject of his book.

   What hints that the author is not just a worker in the book-writing vintage, are the comments, small and not intrusive—indeed, mostly confined to footnotes—scattered throughout the volume. They show Gavoty to be knowledgeable and alert. As I said earlier, I’m not a Chopin buff, but I found this account of his life most interesting. It was a good time for Chopin to be in Paris and to get a sense of that was like in a period when apparently everyone lived there.