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Searching for Chopin, Finding Poland's Past

"It’s nearly impossible not to run into some ghosts of the past in Warsaw, even if you’re just a cultural tourist. The other day I went looking for what still exists of Chopin’s trail."

There's a slide show, too.

Steven

It's even worse than I feared. Something about the idea of post war Warsaw makes my blood run cold anyway.

The warfare-state is the enemy of humanities (let alone, of humanity). To the jack-booted thug, art is just so much touchy-feely nonsense suitable only for women, children and girly-men. The military-industrial complex is much, much older than the phrase.

Clayton -

Unless you happen to be Wagner.

The destruction of Chopin's Warsaw began very personally in 1863 when the apartment building where he'd lived with his family as a teenager was looted in reprisal after a shot had been fired at the Russian govenor-general from the building. Chopin's family's apartment, where his mother and his sister Isabella and her husband still lived, was marked for particular attention. Isabella managed to smuggle out some of her brother's letters (which, due to her understandable caution in revealing them were not to be seen again for many years) but much memorabilia including unpublished manuscripts, portraits, notebooks and personal effects were thrown from the windows and burned in the street. An observer noted that the Chopins' piano, an Erard, landed almost intact with only its legs snapping when it hit the pavement while other pianos similarly treated were reduced to matchwood by the fall.

What an odd article. It's worth mentioning that the canceled anti-missle stuff talked about in the first two paragraphs is the stuff that Krystian Zimmerman had a melt-down about in LA, which caused a bit of a stir. I hope he feels better now. But the article, strangely, only mentions Poles that were in favor of it. Hmmm....