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Chopin's Piano - A Journey through Romanticism (Paperback)
Loot Price: R281
Discovery Miles 2 810
You Save: R64
(19%)
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Chopin's Piano - A Journey through Romanticism (Paperback)
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List price R345
Loot Price R281
Discovery Miles 2 810
You Save R64 (19%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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'Beguiling ... Limpidly written, effortlessly learned' William
Boyd, TLS, Books of the Year In November 1838 Frederic Chopin,
George Sand and her two children sailed to Majorca to escape the
Parisian winter. They settled in an abandoned monastery at
Valldemossa in the mountains above Palma, where Chopin finished
what would eventually be recognised as one of the great and
revolutionary works of musical Romanticism - his 24 Preludes. There
was scarcely a decent piano on the island (these were still early
days in the evolution of the modern instrument), so Chopin worked
on a small pianino made by a local craftsman, which remained in
their monastic cell for seventy years after he and Sand had left.
This brilliant and unclassifiable book traces the history of
Chopin's 24 Preludes through the instruments on which they were
played, the pianists who interpreted them and the traditions they
came to represent. Yet it begins and ends with the Majorcan
pianino, which during the Second World War assumed an astonishing
cultural potency as it became, for the Nazis, a symbol of the man
and music they were determined to appropriate as their own. The
unexpected hero of the second part of the book is the great
keyboard player and musical thinker Wanda Landowska, who rescued
the pianino from Valldemossa in 1913, and who would later become
one of the most influential musical figures of the twentieth
century. Kildea shows how her story - a compelling account based
for the first time on her private papers - resonates with Chopin's,
while simultaneously distilling part of the cultural and political
history of Europe and the United States in the central decades of
the century. Kildea's beautifully interwoven narratives, part
cultural history and part detective story, take us on an unexpected
journey through musical Romanticism and allow us to reflect freshly
on the changing meaning of music over time.
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