One of the enduring obstacles to Chopin scholarship outside Poland is the linguistic-cultural divide separating readers of major European academic languages (English, French and German) from a formidable body of primary and secondary source material in the Polish language. Despite notable efforts by Polish scholars in the last decade or so to provide easier access to such sources (the work of The Fryderyk Chopin Institute, comes to mind), Chopin's Polish letters and a vibrant historical record of early nineteenth-century Polish music criticism remain today only partially translated, and essential aspects of the composer's life and work little understood.

Indeed, it is hard to imagine another nineteenth-century composer with as wide a reach and lasting influence as that of Chopin, whose formative artistic and intellectual experiences are as neglected, or as obscured by misunderstandings. Yet this oversight persists, partly because the compositions of Chopin that most intrigue and captivate are products of the Paris years, partly because this early period demands engagement with a Polish history habitually consigned to the periphery of the great European musical tradition.

Then, too, the Cold War years contributed a layer of ideological confusion and rhetoric to Polish narratives of Chopin's youth that poses its own set of problems, even for those for whom a language barrier does not exist. Halina Goldberg's Music in Chopin's Warsaw, then, is a welcome study, one that redresses some of these scholarly lacunae, and provides Anglophone readers with a detailed portrait of the Polish culture and musical milieu that nourished Chopin's talents before he set off for his second Viennese tour in November of 1830.

Goldberg's book is organized into eight chapters, preceded by a thin introduction. In discussions ranging from instrument production, music publishing and musical education in early nineteenth-century Warsaw, to salon, theatre and concert life during the same period, the author identifies, summarizes, translates and effectively brings to life through those efforts several exemplary studies produced in the last half-century by some of Poland's finest music historians. Goldberg reflects only mildly on this research, contributing little in the way of new scholarly insights (her original scholarship, which weaves it way throughout the study, previously has appeared elsewhere), though this does not necessarily diminish the book's value.Footnote 1 On the contrary, such a consolidation of Poland's most notable Soviet-era musicological efforts legitimizes a truly significant body of research that is all too easily dismissed as perpetuating myths of ‘the communist political agenda’, a summary judgment Goldberg herself curiously does not avoid making in her introduction (p. 5).

To be sure, Goldberg makes slightly more clear (on pp. 5–6) that it is not Communist-period scholarship, per se, that is objectionable but rather Polish nationalist narratives that overstate Chopin's relationship to the folk while overlooking the very real influence of Warsaw's urban musical offerings on the course of the composer's stylistic development. But an endlessly repeated boastful storyline about Chopin's Polishness doesn't really seem to be the issue either; indeed, this is the hidden heart of Goldberg's own project, albeit now with an emphasis on Chopin the Polish Romantic ‘prophet-poet’ (p. 176). Instead, it is both a negatively inflected and a narrowly conceived notion of Chopin's Poland that Goldberg finds problematic, one that fails ‘to recognize that Chopin's formative years took place in the enlightened environment of a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic and multi-religious European capital’ (p. 6).

To overcome such misconception, Goldberg must wage battle on two fronts: the first, against a condescending, tenacious stereotype of Polish culture on the margins of western civilization sketched by Voltaire and his fellow philosophes as early as the second half of the eighteenth century. The second, against a Polish nativist exceptionalism, argued and defended tribally from within. Goldberg's project, then, is ultimately a war on outsiderly and insiderly claims alike.

Score a victory, then, for Goldberg, in the first confrontation wherein she details a rich Warsaw musical environment and flourishing Polish intellectual culture, revealing that the distance Chopin travelled between Warsaw and Paris was not far indeed. Chapters 5 and 6, on Warsaw's salon culture, and particularly the section concerning Princess Izabela Czartoryska's ‘Proto-Romanticism’, persuasively demonstrate just how naturally Romanticism took root in Poland, as it had in other congenial locales. Visiting and local virtuosi such as Angelica Catalani, Joseph Christoph Kessler and Francziszek Lessel frequented Warsaw's array of refined salons, performing a repertoire of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Clementi, Weber and Hummel that could only be called ‘European’. If one includes the discussions on Warsaw's musical theatre and concert life, in Chapters 7 and 8 respectively, readers of Goldberg's book cannot help but be left with the impression that Warsaw in the first three decades of the nineteenth century could be an abundantly stimulating and sophisticated place, featuring cultural offerings from abroad as readily as it served up locally-inspired varieties of music.

In her second campaign, however, Goldberg is markedly less successful, at times let down by her own rhetoric. She exaggerates the importance of Polish musical antecedents on Chopin's style, as when making the case for Kessler and Szymanowska's etudes and preludes being ‘an important ancestry of Chopin's etudes and preludes’ (p. 193). While it is certainly true that Kessler and Szymanowska's preludes have received only passing attention in most accounts concerning the stylistic precursors to Chopin's op. 28, closer scrutiny of Kessler's op. 31 Préludes as models for Chopin's work in the same genre yield no greater revelations than do the preludes of Cramer, Moscheles, Hummel or Kalkbrenner. That is because all of these preludes, including Kessler's and Szymanowska's, generically belong more to an earlier prelude tradition, one that Chopin draws from but ultimately transforms into something else entirely. (The two side-by-side examples Goldberg provides of Kessler and Chopin's preludes on pp. 197 and 199, taken without clear attribution from Ferdynand Gajewski's preface to his edition of Kessler's Préludes, exhaust the most fruitful comparisons possible.)Footnote 2

Reading Goldberg's book, one is struck by the astonishing number of names associated with Warsaw's early-nineteenth-century musical life that divulge non-Polish origins: Soliva, Gresser, Elsner, Würfel, Lessel, Kessler, Weinert, Troschel, Buchholtz and so on. Dare we add to this list Chopin? But one is equally struck by the fact that the author fundamentally fails to answer one of the most obvious questions lurking behind nearly every one of them: what were all these ethnic Germans and Czechs and Italians and French doing in Warsaw? In Goldberg's telling, they are simply there, or just arriving, or returning. If ever there was an argument to do away with an image of Warsaw as culturally inhospitable, it is one that makes clear Europeans themselves did not maintain the prejudices of the philosophes and the condescension of Herder, energetically pursuing economic opportunity (and an escape from the Napoleonic wars) wherever it could be found. Perhaps primed by the overwhelmingly negative attitude towards foreign occupiers found in her Polish source material, Goldberg can't quite bring herself to say (other than faintly, on pp. 17–18) that an undeniable consequence of the partitions was the modernization of the Polish lands, which, to be sure, delivered one of the hardest psychic blows in Polish history, but which also brought the ‘benefits’ of empire: educational and social reform, new industries and markets, and tax incentives that attracted the settlers so abundantly represented in Goldberg's study.

Here, ultimately, is one of the great ironies of Polish history leading up to the November Uprising of 1830, by which time Chopin was no longer in Warsaw and when everything radically changed for the worse: precisely because of Poland's great political calamity, Warsaw's music culture steadily gained momentum. Moreover, it did so not because its members engaged in unusually and exclusively nationalist pursuits but rather because national and patriotic considerations came up against unmistakably cosmopolitan, external cultural contributions. Artists, intellectuals, and professionals from abroad, and not only in the realm of music, brought with them new ideas and aesthetic models (mostly German, but also French, English and Italian) that inspired decidedly indigenous iterations. It was such a marvellously diverse, vibrant dynamic of insider and outsider activity, in other words, that nurtured Chopin's intellect and curiosity. Unfortunately, Goldberg does little to assimilate this point thoughtfully into her narrative.

Finally, for a book so dense with information, it is perhaps understandable that there should be some infelicitous prose and facile swooning over Chopin's genius: ‘Fryderyk did not think it beneath him to partake in bourgeois entertainment…’ (p. 191). And Goldberg leaves herself open to charges of linguistic and cultural tone deafness when, without so much as a wink or a nudge, she cites Vogel's opinion that Chopin's attic piano ‘was most likely a French or an English giraffe’ (p. 49). Be that as it may, until such time as the scholarly world embraces a Polish language prerequisite, Goldberg's book, which well lays the groundwork for understanding Chopin's Polish musical environment, at least promises to be of help to students of Chopin, and inspire future academic inquiry.