Chopin's Funeral » (Reprint)

Benita Eisler is the author of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance and Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame. She lives in New York City.

Frédéric Chopin’s reputation as one of the Great Romantics endures, but as Benita Eisler reveals in her elegant and elegiac biography, the man was more complicated than his iconic image.

A classicist, conservative, and dandy who relished his conquest of Parisian society, the Polish émigré was for a while blessed with genius, acclaim, and the love of Europe’s most infamous woman writer, George Sand. But by the age of 39, the man whose brilliant compositions had thrilled audiences in the most fashionable salons lay dying of consumption, penniless and abandoned by his lover. In the fall of 1849, his lavish funeral was attended by thousands—but not by George Sand.

In this intimate portrait of an embattled man, Eisler tells the story of a turbulent love affair, of pain and loss redeemed by art, and of worlds—both private and public—convulsed by momentous change.

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