Biography: Everyone knows the first few bars of the third movement of Chopin's Sonata in B-flat Minor, op. 35. That most memorable funeral march is often quoted sardonically in conversation to signify gloom and doom. Benita Eisler's succinct biography of the great 19th- century Romantic, whom she perversely calls "the least romantic of artists", emphasises his frailty and unhappiness, although the originality and poetic purity of his compositions for the piano continue to bring joy to untold millions, writes Patrick Skene Catling.
The title, Delacroix's sombre portrait as frontispiece and the funereal first chapter, headed "Lacrimosa dies illa: What weeping on that day", give fair warning. The subject is absorbing and the writing is systematically skilful, but this is a depressing little book. However, cheer up if you are not a genius.
"If death is a mirror of life," Eisler writes, "Chopin's funeral reflected all the disjunctions of his brief existence".
The reclusive musician was awarded a grand send-off, "worthy of a head of state". Between 3,000 and 4,000 invitations had been issued to attend the service in the Church of the Madeleine on October 30th, 1849. According to Berlioz, "the whole of artistic and aristocratic Paris was there". Chopin had achieved public adulation at only 39 years of age. But in private, near the end of his life, in his most intimate, long-lasting relationship, he was bitterly reviled.
Eisler summarises what she calls the "myths" which, "before he was buried . . . had already embalmed him: a short and tragic life; an heroic role as Polish patriot and exile; doomed lover of the century's most notorious woman; and finally, his death from consumption, that killer of youth, beauty, genius . . . "
Frédéric Chopin was born near Warsaw in 1810. His French father and Polish mother were quick to recognise the child as a musical prodigy. At the age of 19, he left Poland and never went back. Soon after he entered voluntary exile, he heard in Vienna that the Russians had occupied Warsaw. He remorsefully experienced zal, Eisler relates, "that rich, untranslatable Polish word freighted with every shade of sorrow, from regret to mourning - and guilt. His discovery that he had contracted a venereal infection, proof of the shame attached to sexual encounters, confirmed his unworthiness". His love life was off to an unpromising start.
In Paris, his virtuosity as composer and performer was immediately recognised. Liszt, already an established virtuoso, warmly admired Chopin's music. He introduced him to another admirer, George Sand, the prolific novelist, of legendary promiscuity, who played the harpsichord and guitar with sufficient talent to understand Chopin's musical superiority.
Sand and Chopin could hardly have been more disastrously incompatible. He was just over five feet tall, weighed less than 100lbs and suffered from chronic tuberculosis and sexual timidity. She was physically and libidinously overwhelming. They were also utterly unalike ideologically. Though virtually apolitical, he was conservative in almost every other way, influenced musically by Haydn, Mozart and Bach, and a dandy with a fondness for the company of people of high social rank, while Sand was an active supporter of the proletariat. They both apparently exhibited androgynous tendencies. Sand, who was born Aurore Dupin and became, for a while, Mme Dudevant, had adopted her name, Eisler explains, because, at that time, "literary success required a masculine nom de plume". She adopted masculine disguise, Eisler says, because women were not allowed to sit alone in cheap balcony seats in theatre and concert hall. Perhaps there was more than that to her cross-dressing. During her nine years with Chopin, she wore the pants, literally and figuratively, and he favoured pale lavender gloves.
In the early years of their association, Sand revered Chopin's work and devotedly looked after him, in Paris and in her country house at Nothant. Eisler describes Sand as his "lover, muse, mother, nurse, friend and manager". But as his Oedipal gratitude weakened, he suspected her of infidelity. On the other hand, she resented unwanted celibacy. In 1847, after they separated, Sand wrote to a friend, Emmanuel Arago (not quoted by Eisler): "What a chain finally cast off! I've had to resist his narrow, despotic spirit constantly; for nine years, bursting with life, I've been bound to a corpse, chained by pity and fear of causing his death from a broken heart."
In due course, Chopin's heart was returned in honour to Warsaw.
Eisler generously analyses the aesthetic power and charm of Chopin's music in technical terms that musicologists and other readers with good reference books will appreciate.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic.
Chopin's Funeral. By Benita Eisler, Little, Brown, 230pp, £16.99