Chopin best biography of james
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Chopin : picture Man talented His Meeting by Criminal Huneker
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Chopin: The Man And His Music
About Author
James HunekerJames Gibbons Huneker was an American art, literary, music, and theatrical reviewer. A colorful individual and an ambitious writer, he was "an American with a great mission," in the words of his friend, the critic Benjamin De Casseres, and that mission was to educate Americans about the best cultural achievements, native and European, of his day. From 1892 to 1899, he was the husband of sculptor Clio Hinton. Huneker was born in Philadelphia. His parents forced him to study law, but he realized that a legal career was not for him; he was enthusiastic about music and writing, and hoped to one day be a concert pianist and novelist. Huneker and his wife and child returned to Philadelphia the next year, but he was never content in his hometown and longed for the larger stage of New York, where he wanted to try his luck as a journalist while continuing his musical studies. He relocated to New York City in 1886, abandoning his wife and child. He scraped by providing piano lessons and lived a downtown bohemian lifestyle while studying with Franz Liszt's student Rafael Joseffy, who became a friend and mentor. (Huneker's musical gods were Liszt, Chopin, and Brahms. In 1900, he released a biography of Chopin and wrote a commentary
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A great composer deserves a great biography. Of great biographies, we can easily think of Henry-Louis de la Grange lifelong devotion to Gustav Mahler and his music, resulting in a magisterial four-volume biography (the first volume has yet to be republished by Oxford University Press, as promised). Of course we also have Ernest Newman’s reams of writing on Wagner and his music. With composers like Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart, we have, and continue to have, countless outstanding biographies.
In spite of his enormous popularity, Fryderyk Chopin has not been as well served by music historian, at least not in English. We have of course many “music appreciation” type books on the composer, but nothing really that can be counted as a scholarly study on the composer’s life and work. James Huneker’s 1900 book, Chopin, the man and his music, is a highly personal account of the composer’s life and work. Among recent attempts, Adam Zamoyski’s Chopin, Prince of the Romantics, has much to be recommended.
Alan Walker’s Fryderyk Chopin – A Life and Times(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2018) is one of the best musical biographies I have read in a long time. Certainly this is the best book I have rea