- Paperback: 340 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Reprint edition (December 1, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0199357242
- ISBN-13: 978-0199357246
Music in Chopin's Warsaw examines the rich musical environment
of Fryderyk Chopin's youth--largely unknown to the English-speaking
world--and places Chopin's early works in this context. Halina Goldberg
provides a historiographic perspective that allows a new and better
understanding of Poland's cultural and musical circumstances. Chopin's
Warsaw emerges as a vibrant European city that was home to an opera
house, various smaller theaters, one of the earliest modern
conservatories in Europe, several societies which organized concerts,
musically active churches, spirited salon life, music publishers and
bookstores, instrument builders, and (for a short time) a weekly paper
devoted to music.
Warsaw was aware of and in tune with the most recent European styles and fashions in music, but it was also the cradle of a vernacular musical language that was initiated by the generation of Polish composers before Chopin and which found its full realization in his work. Significantly, this period of cultural revival in the Polish capital coincided with the duration of Chopin's stay there--from his infancy in 1810 to his final departure from his homeland in 1830. An uncanny convergence of political, economic, social, and cultural circumstances generated the dynamic musical, artistic, and intellectual environment that nurtured the developing genius. Had Chopin been born a decade earlier or a decade later, Goldberg argues, the capital--devastated by warfare and stripped of all cultural institutions--could not have provided support for his talent. The young composer would have been compelled to seek musical education abroad and thus would have been deprived of the specifically Polish experience so central to his musical style.
A rigorously-researched and fascinating look at the Warsaw in which Chopin grew up, this book will appeal to students and scholars of nineteenth-century music, as well as music lovers and performers.
Warsaw was aware of and in tune with the most recent European styles and fashions in music, but it was also the cradle of a vernacular musical language that was initiated by the generation of Polish composers before Chopin and which found its full realization in his work. Significantly, this period of cultural revival in the Polish capital coincided with the duration of Chopin's stay there--from his infancy in 1810 to his final departure from his homeland in 1830. An uncanny convergence of political, economic, social, and cultural circumstances generated the dynamic musical, artistic, and intellectual environment that nurtured the developing genius. Had Chopin been born a decade earlier or a decade later, Goldberg argues, the capital--devastated by warfare and stripped of all cultural institutions--could not have provided support for his talent. The young composer would have been compelled to seek musical education abroad and thus would have been deprived of the specifically Polish experience so central to his musical style.
A rigorously-researched and fascinating look at the Warsaw in which Chopin grew up, this book will appeal to students and scholars of nineteenth-century music, as well as music lovers and performers.
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