The opening of Jeffrey Kallberg’s contribution to this volume notes that

Kallberg’s comments would form an apt introduction to the whole volume, which provides an array of approaches to this enigmatic repertoire, and in the process demonstrates some of the ways in which Chopin scholarship has developed over recent decades. The chapter authors, mostly from the USA but also from Europe, include many of the most influential Chopin scholars of recent times. They provide a blend of scholarship rooted in interdisciplinary, analytical and performance studies.

Part 1 of the collection focuses on ‘contemporary cultural contexts’. The ideas presented here are certainly stimulating, if at times one wonders precisely how relevant they are to Chopin. Some authors admit the speculative nature of their arguments, while others are more inclined to leave the readers to draw their own conclusions. No matter; this is interesting and engaging material, and much of it will no doubt stimulate further investigation.

Halina Goldberg’s ‘Chopin’s Oneiric Soundscapes and the Role of Dreams in Romantic Culture’ makes an excellent and highly persuasive opening chapter. She explores contemporary comments on, and visual depictions of, the dreamlike qualities of Chopin’s music, not just in the nocturnes, but in other works as well. In the process she provides an account of dreams in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, philosophy, science and opera. One of the most fascinating elements of this discussion is the exploration of the work of Franz Anton Mesmer who laid foundations for the doctrine of animal magnetism, the study of hypnotism and somnambulism, among other things. But what does all of this have to do with Chopin himself? Goldberg is careful to show that dreams were a regular feature of his experience and consciousness: ‘the accounts of his intimates and his own correspondence preserve ample record of such experiences and traces of the composer’s thoughts about them’ (p. 36). And what of the music? There is little room in such a well-argued and expansive chapter for detailed analysis, but Goldberg gives us a tantalizing glimpse of future studies into ‘the sense of haziness; the feeling of disjointed flow of time; the impression of shifting between conscious and unconscious states of mind’ (p. 39). There is certainly scope here to take the ideas forward.

Anatole Leikin’s chapter ‘Chopin and the Gothic’ is more speculative, not in so far as there was an undoubted literary movement in the early nineteenth century, but in the way in which Gothic themes actually impacted on Chopin himself. Gothic themes are well laid-out in the brief survey of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, and Leikin spends some time examining Chopin’s experience of one Gothic theme in particular – ghosts, nightmares and hallucinations – especially during his time in Valldemossa with George Sand and her daughter. But the impact of Gothic themes on Chopin’s music is largely left to others to explain. So, it was ‘Franz Liszt and an anonymous critic’ who ‘both mentioned that Chopin’s “poetic preludes” [Op. 28] were “similar to those of a contemporary post Alphonse de Lamartine”, evidently alluding to Lamartine’s poem “Les Préludes”’ (p. 89). Later, it is Lennox Berkeley and Herbert Weinstock who are cited as pointing to unusual elements in the Nocturne Op. 32, No. 1 (p. 94). There is certainly food for thought here, and Leikin writes persuasively, but it may be speculative to assert that Gothic themes ‘influenced’ the composer, a point acknowledged in the final paragraph where other works are discussed: ‘Chopin’s other compositions that exhibit generic Gothic influences lack documented links with specific works of Gothic literature. Can such links be ultimately established? Perhaps, although it is doubtful’ (p. 100).

I have laboured a point in discussing Goldberg’s and Leikin’s chapters, but it seems to me an important one in contextual studies of music: great care needs to be taken in ascribing influence or meaning to a relationship between cultural phenomena and music. A model of a cautious approach is found in Jeffrey Kallberg’s excellent chapter on ‘Chopin and Jews’. Kallberg very carefully examines Chopin’s comments on Jews, fully acknowledging the delicacy of his subject matter. He gives examples of the composer’s factual references to individuals’ Jewishness and his friendships with Jewish musicians. But he also examines Chopin’s less flattering association of Jewishness with financial matters and with noise. How the latter might be reflected in his music is discussed in some detail in connection with the A minor Prelude, Op. 28, No. 2, but throughout Kallberg acknowledges the potentially tenuous nature of his case, admitting on one occasion ‘the argument in this essay grows ever more speculative’ (p. 139). This is a carefully crafted and fascinating piece which provides ample food for thought, not only for Chopin’s music, but also for works by other composers.

The other major essay in Part 1 of the book (apart from a translation of a nineteenth-century source to which I will refer below) is a highly thought-provoking chapter by David Kasunic on the relationship between Chopin’s tuberculosis and music. The foundation of the argument is the scientific discoveries of the French diagnostic pathologist René Laënnec, who studied live and deceased subjects who had contracted the disease: of particular relevance are Laënnec’s observations of the sounds – musical and otherwise – detected in their bodies. Kasunic examines the impact of tuberculosis on Chopin’s creativity and develops the theme in relation to other music of the period.

Part 1 of this book thus creatively opens up many themes worthy of further interdisciplinary study, not just of Chopin’s music, but of a wider repertoire. It makes fascinating and rewarding reading. In Part 2, ‘Musical and Pianistic Contexts’ we are on the safer ground of historical and analytical music studies. While there are no fundamentally new approaches here, the chapters broaden our understanding of stylistic and performance issues.

In Jonathan Bellman’s ‘Middlebrow Becomes Transcendent: The Popular Roots of Chopin’s Musical Language’ we are led through the characteristics of three categories of popular music with which Chopin grew up in Warsaw: dance, song and story. The first two of these are probably the most familiar territory for Chopin scholars, but the third, ‘story’, has been much less fully explored. Here, Bellman examines the music of the narrative works that were so popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the most-often cited of which is Kotzwara’s Battle of Prague. In these works, Bellman identifies a number of mimetic musical gestures and topics which he also finds in Chopin’s music. No direct link between Chopin’s early experience of these pieces and his later compositions is demonstrated, but it is nevertheless salutary to consider this less weighty repertoire, with which Chopin must have been familiar, rather than the more obvious compositional models by canonic composers.

Eric McKee’s ‘Dance and the Music of Chopin’ relies both on previous substantial studies of the origins of the dance as well as his own stylistic analysis of a large corpus of late eighteenth-century polonaises. He identifies a number of polonaise types, Polish and foreign, and focuses particularly on ‘the Russian heroic polonaises of Jósef Kozłowski (1757–1831) and the Polish melancholy polonaises of Prince Michał Kleofas Ogiński (1765–1833)’, using those models as the basis for an analysis of Chopin’s Polonaises Op. 40.

James Parakilas relatively briefly uses topic theory to identify barcarolle elements in works with different titles by Chopin before introducing a stimulating study of the barcarolle topic in Chopin’s only work with the title, the Barcarolle Op. 60. In his detailed account of the work he shows how Chopin plays with features of the topic, exploring the familiar, but also defying norms, and asking the question ‘what kind of work is the Barcarolle [Op. 60]?’ (p. 246). He concludes that ‘it is more of a fantasy on the barcarolle topic, the way Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantasie is a fantasy on the polonaise topic, the F-minor Fantaisie a fantasy on the march topic, certain of the mazurkas fantasies on the mazurka topic’.

Chopin scholars will be familiar with the composer’s well-known approach to his habit of ‘re-composing’ his own music when he performed it – the kind of re-composition seen in the variants written into his pupils’ copies. Scholars of piano performance will also be familiar with the growing number of recent studies of nineteenth-century improvisation practices. In a sense, then, John Rink’s chapter on ‘Chopin and Improvisation’ covers familiar ground. However, Rink takes a more systematic approach to studying Chopin’s improvisation practices than is usually found in the literature, dividing the pianist/composer’s practice into distinct categories. By doing so, he systematically examines the characteristics of Chopin’s extempore performances of whole ‘works’, identifying their characteristic elements and distinguishing between Chopin’s public and private improvisations. He also discusses Chopin’s practice of varying the printed texts of his music, and the effects of improvisation on his compositional processes. The final section is in effect a plea for pianists to take improvisation and embellishment seriously. Rink gives examples of his own practice and also his own experience of encountering so few deviations from the printed text as a judge of the Chopin Competition.

Sandra Rosenblum covers much familiar ground in her chapter ‘Chopin Among the Pianists of Paris’. She appeals to familiar evidence from well-known piano tutors published in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as descriptions of some of the chief pianistic protagonists who lived there. Less well-known are her descriptions of the pianists Chopin encountered as a younger man in Warsaw and elsewhere.

Also connected with studies of performance is Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger’s chapter ‘The Hand of Chopin: Documents and Commentary’, the last in Part 2 of the collection. The basis of the chapter is four drawings, purportedly of Chopin’s left hand, attributed to Maurice Sand-Dudevant, George Sand’s son. Eigeldinger compares the drawings with portraits of the composer and with the famous plaster cast of his left hand made shortly after his death, noting the similarities. How much new information about Chopin is actually provided by this new evidence is a moot point, but the drawings certainly corroborate what we know about his hands – if, indeed, the drawings are of Chopin. What we know of his hands physically aligns with his observations about piano technique, which are briefly summarised.

In addition to the chapters already discussed, this volume also contains some nineteenth-century material in translation – very welcome for those whose knowledge of the Polish language is limited or non-existent. The first is part of the collection’s Introduction, which otherwise briefly summarises the historical and cultural background to Chopin’s Warsaw. It is Jankiel’s ‘Concert of Concerts’, drawn from the twelfth and final book of Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, a nostalgic view of life in Poland around 1811/12 written during the author’s exile in Paris in 1830. The extract comes from the description of the celebrations that accompanied Jankiel’s engagement.

The second nineteenth-century text is different altogether – Jósef Sikorski’s ‘Recollection of Chopin’, written in the weeks following the composer’s death. Halina Goldberg’s introduction makes high claims for it: ‘Sikorski’s essay is really the only critical discussion of Chopin and his music with deep roots in his own lifetime, his own country, his own musical circles, and in contemporary aesthetic contexts’ (p. 48). Inevitably, some of the text is given over to pure eulogy, but otherwise it is a well-researched piece that claims to contain evidence from the Chopin family and from current literature. In addition, it contains personal recollection of its author, including an account of Chopin’s singing in a church choir and playing the organ.

The third nineteenth-century text comprises two articles by the Polish opera composer Karol Kurpiński written in 1820 and 1821. The first of the two essays concerns the historical songs of the Polish people and contains a compendium of patriotic songs ‘listed chronologically to mirror the sequence of historical events that took place in Poland between 1791 and 1814’ (p. 172). The second, brief, text discusses matters relevant to Chopin’s music, including topics and familiar melodies that ‘trigger certain recollections’ and that are useful in constructing musical narratives.

The volume closes with a piece by Leon Botstein which focuses on Chopin as an exile. Comparing Chopin with other exiles of the period Botstein teases out the nature of Chopin’s experience as a Pole in France and the narrative that flowed from their experiences. He proposes a distinction between what he describes as Chopin’s somewhat ambivalent relationship with his native country and the uses others made of his origins. Schumann and Liszt, for example, used Chopin’s Polishness ‘to demarcate and contain Chopin’s astonishing originality and alluring distinctiveness in relation to themselves as composers. The Polish explanation – the appeal to exoticism – fit’ (p. 319). Further, Liszt’s characterization of Chopin used his art as politics, ‘particularly the politics of resistance’ (p. 320).

Overall, this is a very welcome addition to the growing literature on Chopin. Especially in Part 1, ideas are introduced that will most likely be pursued by others, or that will spawn additional interdisciplinary studies of the composer’s music. If there is any disappointment, it is in Part 2, which lacks the freshness of approach of the first part. While there is new research and some consolidation of existing work, some the themes are beginning to sound a little tired, in so far as much of the evidence has already been considered in some depth in similar, or in other contexts. Nevertheless, as a whole this collection contains a breadth and depth of current Chopin scholarship written by many of the leading figures in the field.