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Can anyone recommend any books on Chopin? Alan Walkers bio. show up when I do a search, but a little worried it is too researched with too many polish names.... Chopin as teacher seems interesting. Advice welcome.

Yes, I own exactly those two. The biography is a bit mundane IMO. However I've found fantastic information in the "Chopin pianist and teacher" although it's an absolute mess made of random quotes from letters, etc. and there's no particular order or systematization. But it's nevertheless extremely helpful for a performer. I guess it would be invaluable for top classical pianists who focus on Chopin. I'm just a hobbyist but then I'm also a geek and found it equally as great for me

Not impressed by Walker. Maybe Zamoyski? I especially like Goldberg's Chopin's Warsaw but that's probably a specialist's thing.

There are several books and articles by Jim Samson, who is probably the preeminent authority on Chopin in our time. All of them are excellent, IMO. (I contributed a chapter on the etudes to one of them, The Cambridge Companion to Music, which Jim edited for CUP.). Also, if you're really interested in Chopin and want to get down to the nitty gritty, Jeffrey Kallberg's seminal article "Chopin's Last Style", Journal of the American Musicological Society (1985) 38 (2): pp. 264–315, is required reading. I think you can download it free at https://online.ucpress.edu/jams/article/38/2/264/50394/Chopin-s-Last-Style

Good luck with your research. For what it's worth, I was HUGELY disappointed by Walker's biography, especially after wading through his humungous biography of Liszt, which in my opinion is much, much better.

Jeff Kallberg is a member here. You can always PM him - he's very helpful!

I have the Walker book but have not read it yet. I hope it's not as tedious as his three volumes on Liszt. I read the book about Chopin's teaching a long time ago. It's a completely different kind of book.

I would second the recommendation for Jim Samson's biography in the "Master Musicians" series. Another, shorter book that I like is Benita Eisler's Chopin's Funeral (which, despite the title, does cover his whole life).

But I can't help you avoid Polish names - they just come with this territory!

Jeff Kallberg

Hey, thanks for the replies. What I meant was just that Im more interested in juicy gossip and apocrypha (wish there was a book about Chopin as vampire) than scholarship. Or a balance at least. Cheers!

Funny you should ask this. I'm right in the middle of reading Alfred Cortot's "In Search of Chopin" which I only found on my shelf because I was cleaning out all the mouse po... but that's another story.

I thought it might be all dreamy and romantic writing in the style of his notes about Chopin's music in his editions he published but it is anything but. It's his attempt to find the real person behind the music. My guess is that there are opinions out there as to how well a job he did, but he's very thorough in how he approaches the subject and comes at it from all different angles: Chopin as a teacher, as a pianist, as a concertizer, etc.

It's very enjoyable and full of lots of factoids based on original accounts from his letters and his contemporaries.

Then you want to read Lucrezia Floriani Sand based the main character on him.

It's more tedious, if you can believe it. Actually I thought his Liszt biography was pretty good, as I mentioned earlier. The Chopin book is obviously the result of painstaking scholarly research, but the musical observations are insipid in a way that I really wouldn't have expected from Walker, having read some of his other stuff.

THE Jeff Kallberg???????

Arthur Hedley, short and to the point, a classic.

I really liked Walker's Chopin bio...I found it a very enjoyable, quick read. It seemed less concerned about being scholarly than his Liszt books. Of his Liszt bio, it was mainly the first volume that disappointed me -- in its overly-scholarly approach, and his curious, inexplicable avoidance of the more sensational side of Liszt's performing career. But by the time he got to the third volume, he seemed to have relaxed and made it more readable.

One of them. But not the one who's a real-estate agent in Florida or the one who's a massage therapist in Minnesota.

Jeff Kallberg

There is nice book "Фридерик Шопен" in Russian written by Golubev in 2014.
Also, book in Polish:Chopin, by M. Tomaszewski (2005) - it was translated to Russian in 2011, not sure about English translation.

And there is Life of Chopin, by Liszt

Oh, that's disappointing because I was hoping you'd be able to help me get a good deal on a nice condo in Palm Beach . . .

So you've been lurking here since 2009. I'm glad I didn't say anything awful about you! I assume you're still in touch with Jim? I really enjoyed his recent book on Liszt, Virtuosity and the Musical Work.

This is a very disappointing book IMO. The style and construction of the language makes it almost unreadable for a modern reader.

"Devil's Trill" Prelude (No. 27)
A further prelude exists in E♭ minor and has been subtitled "Devil's Trill" by Jeffrey Kallberg, a professor of music history at the University of Pennsylvania. Kallberg gave it this nickname for its similarities to Giuseppe Tartini's violin sonata known as The Devil's Trill, Tartini being a likely influence on Chopin. The original signature was hastily scrawled (more so than usual of Chopin's original manuscripts).

Chopin left this piece uncompleted and seems to have discarded it; while he worked on it during his stay on Majorca, the E♭ minor prelude that ultimately formed part of the Op. 28 set is a completely unrelated piece. Kallberg's realisation of the prelude from Chopin's almost illegible sketches goes no further than where Chopin left off. The piece had its first public performance in July 2002 at the Newport Music Festival in Newport, Rhode Island, with the pianist Alain Jacquon.[21][22]

(I was listening to this )

Lurking under my own name - hard to do! But I am still very much in touch with Jim [Samson, for the rest of you], who seems in fine fettle, all things considered these days.

Jeff Kallberg