The New York Times
Chopin's Funeral lays considerable blame at Sand's doorstep. Chopin died at 39, in poverty, just two years after the breakup with Sand. Many of their friends thought she killed him. But, after all, it was she who had made it possible for him to outlive his fate for so long. The attraction that held them together may be explained by the voracious appetite for work they shared. Chopin never wrote so well as when he lived with Sand at Nohant, he worrying the piano all day while she scribbled all night. And in the end, we have the extraordinary body of music, and the novels that tell us what it was like to be a woman in Sand's time. So who's to say it was all a terrible mistake? — Angeline Goreau
The Los Angeles Times
In its sensitive re-creation of the time and place in which Chopin lived, and its painstaking and detailed observation of events — as though Eisler were writing about things she had seen — this elegantly slim volume takes its place at the head of, yet apart from, a long list of biographical tributes to the Romantic era's most elusive and hermetic composer. What's more, even though the art is subordinate to the artist here, Eisler, without losing the thread of her narrative, lends a perceptive ear to Chopin's music, which gives her book, if not completeness, at least a satisfying kind of integrity. — Ted Libbey
Publishers Weekly
Biographer Eisler, whose last book was on Byron, has moved to much more heavily trodden ground with this one, and it is to her credit that she manages to make the brief arc of the exiled Polish composer's life so affecting. She begins with a journalistic close-up of Chopin's funeral, which ironically was a lavish affair, though in his last months of sickness he was neglected by most of his society friends. Eisler then proceeds to the familiar story of his triumphant arrival on the Paris scene and the swift liaison with the notorious George Sand. Wisely skipping over the couple's disastrous and endlessly dramatized winter together on Majorca, Eisler focuses her well-researched attention on the closing years of the composer's life. She has an excellent chapter on Chopin's unhappy time in England and Scotland; and she writes with real vigor and sympathy of the byzantine family politics that embroiled the Sand household, both at the country retreat Nohant and in Paris, where the novelist turned away from her daughter Solange and rested her hopes on her far less worthy son, Maurice. In the end it was Solange who comforted the dying composer after Sand had ruthlessly thrust him from her life. Chopin's failings-his rigid conservatism and snobbishness, his political timidity and frequent financial selfishness-are made clear; but Eisler, deeply sympathetic to the quality of the music, also shows that he never ceased to struggle, despite perpetual illness, to expand his extraordinary gift into areas where no musician had previously ventured. The book adds little to the sum of Chopin scholarship, but is a skillfully written and mercifully brief overview that hits the right notes. (Mar. 9) Forecast: A striking cover and a handy size are good selling points for those in search of an accessible account. Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Eisler, a New York-based biographer (Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame), uses Chopin's funeral, a grand "invitation only" event attended by thousands of Parisians, as a metaphor for the composer's life, which, to the author, represents a tragic fall from grace. A theme that runs continually throughout the narrative is Chopin as a man curiously at odds with his time and locale; socially and politically conservative at a time of great revolutionary upheaval; a dandy in an age of the rising middle class; and an artist in exile. Beginning with the funeral, then proceeding in a more traditional chronological manner, Eisler weaves a fascinating account of Chopin's life, with great attention paid to his complex relationship with Europe's best-known woman novelist, George Sand. The music itself is touched upon lightly-there are no notated examples or passages of theoretical analytic-but the author does draw upon current musicological research when describing Chopin's works. Eisler is a compelling storyteller, sweeping the reader into the exhilarating milieu of Paris in the 1820s and 1830s. Highly recommended for all general collections.-Larry Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Poor Frédéric Chopin: so much talent, so much sorrow. Eisler, a gifted biographer of artists and writers (Byron, 1999, etc.), strikes exactly the right elegiac tone on the first page of this slender volume, which opens with the Polish composer’s funeral in Paris in 1849. Eighteen years earlier, Chopin had arrived in the city an unknown, 21-year-old exile from Poland and immediately thrilled the elite of Orleanist France with two incandescent performances. The elite were just the ones he was after: though his music, like Beethoven’s, has long been considered progressive and even revolutionary, Chopin, writes Eisler, "had a horror of ‘the People’ as a force of upheaval or even change" and was "repelled by marginality: by poor Poles, by Jews, by the ill-dressed and ill-mannered, by coarseness or slovenliness, in art or life." He was particularly offended by any suggestion that art should serve the cause of social justice or reform, a position championed by one of the most visible and popular artists of the time, novelist George Sand, "the daughter of a bird seller turned camp follower," with whom the snobbish provincial immediately struck up a torrid affair without having read a word of her writing. Sand was a bit frightening, Eisler tells us, a cigar-smoking terror who all but devoured men; yet she made a perfect balance to the timid Chopin, who was rapidly becoming a superstar--and not just among the elite, but among young amateur pianists who rushed to buy his sheet music, so that the "tender, swaying rhythms of the mazurka became, along with all things Polish, the rage in Paris." For many reasons, though, and none of them pleasant, Chopin’s and Sand’s love soon soured; eachcontributed to its collapse, which unfolds in these pages, like so much in Chopin’s life, as an inevitable tragedy. A sad story superbly chronicled. Agent: Gloria Loomis/Watkins Loomis Agency
