Chasing Chopin
I am a Chopin fan. I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out in Paris in the 1830s. I even wrote about the heroine of the Polish Revolution of 1830 in Women Warriors.* Those subjects (and so many more) come together in one delightful package in Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries, and a Half-Dozen Revolutions by Annik LaFarge
Chasing Chopin opens in a jazz club in Chicago where LaFarge heard a quartet riffing on the funeral march from Chopin’s Opus 35 Sonata.** She had a decades-long relationship with the sonata and was fascinated by its transformation into a jazz vernacular. A quick Google search revealed not only that musicians have been appropriating the funeral march for more than a hundred years, but that Chopin is the subject of video games, a popular manga series, and a Netflix animated series based on the same.*** Intrigued, LaFarge set out to understand the work, the world from which it came, and the power it continues to have.
The result is a charming and deeply personal account of both her subject and her search. LaFarge literally follows Chopin’s footsteps for the three years in which Chopin wrote his sonata, between 1837 and 1840, visiting the sites in Majorca and Paris where he lived and worked. In the process, she looks at the larger world in which he functioned, including a close look at his relationship with the gender-bending author George Sand. She places him firmly in the context of literal revolutions in Poland and France and the artistic revolution of European Romanticism. She explores the difference between the modern piano and the pianos of Chopin’s time. She looks at Chopin’s role as a revered Polish hero and as a broader cultural icon.
Chasing Chopin is part biography, part memoir, part musical appreciation, and one hundred percent fascinating.
So fascinating that it inspired me to pull out all my Chopin recordings looking for the Opus 35 Sonata, which I apparently don’t own. So I listened to all the others instead. For the record, Chopin is good music to write to.
*Emilia Plater. Just in case you’re curious.
**Whether you realize it or not, you know the opening phrase of Chopin’s funeral march. Its dum dum da dum is the sound of something bad about to happen on screen, whether in a Loony Tunes episode or a movie thriller.
***Forest of Piano. Just in case you’re curious. I found it delightful.
The guts of this review first appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
The Invention of News
These days I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the news: how it is shaped, who controls the story, how we receive it.* These questions are not only an important part of the political dialogue today, but an important part of the book I’m working on. In search of a dimly remembered idea, I recently pulled a book off my shelf that is at least in part about the growth of newspapers. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I was sucked into a fascinating account of how the news as we know it came to be.
At a time when digital media is transforming the way news is delivered–and by whom– Andrew Pettegree offers a reminder that newspapers too were once a revolutionary form of delivering information. In The Invention of News: How The World Came To Know About Itself, Pettegree looks at the changing definition, use, control, and distribution of the news from the medieval world to the age of revolution.
Building on his previous work in the ground-breaking The Book in the Renaissance,** Pettegree demonstrates how access to news became increasingly widespread, moving from private information networks run by medieval elites, through sixteenth century news pamphlets and news singers, to the newspapers of the eighteenth century. He looks at the development of postal systems, private couriers and the printing press. He considers the importance of the introduction of paper, the rise of coffee shops and the growth of a literate middle class. He discusses the roles played by news pamphlets in the Reformation and by newspapers in the American and French Revolutions.
Some of the most interesting sections of The Invention of News deal not with the development of new media, but the creation of new audiences. Technology often outpaced demand. Early printers, finding the traditional market for large books would not keep them solvent, created new markets for more ephemeral products. The leap from broadsheets to newspapers presented a similar challenge: the first newspapers were bewildering to audiences accustomed to news pamphlets that told a single story from beginning to end. Perhaps, at some level, the medium is the message.
*I must admit that I am more plugged in than I was in the past thanks to Twitter. Embarrassing, but true.
**Also well worth reading. Printing and the Protestant Reformation are more closely linked than you might think.
A version of this review appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers a million years ago.
In Which a Reader Asks a Question, and I Go Searching for the Answer
One of the delights of writing this blog is correspondence with like-minded people who have questions or thoughts about my posts. It is always a treat.
In response to my last post, a reader with whom I often correspond asked a question I had never even considered: If Jewish American or Jewish British or Jewish French soldiers were captured by the Germans, were they sent to a concentration camp for extermination or to a regular POW camp? *
I did a quick check through my usual sources. Nothing. I asked My Own True Love if he had knew.** He didn’t—though he agreed that it was a great question. Finally, I turned to a source that hasn’t failed me yet: the reference librarians at the Pritzker Military Library.*** They had an answer for me in an hour and a half.
Sadly, the answer is that the Nazis did single out Jewish soldiers. The United States Army made it easy to identify Jewish soldiers by marking a solder’s religious preference on his dog tag: C for Catholic, H for Hebrew,**** P for Protestant. According to an oral history in the Pritzker collection, the Nazis didn’t bother checking dog tags. They simply asked Jewish soldiers to identify themselves.
Soldiers identified as Jewish, or even potentially Jewish, were separated from other America prisoners and sent to the slave labor camp at Berga, which had the highest death rate of any of the POW camps, or to the extermination camps.
More information is available in a book titled Forgotten Victims: The Abandonment of Americans in Hitler’s Camps. I haven’t read it, but it has good reviews.
Thanks to Dr. Gene for a great question. And to Pritzker librarian Leah Cohen for the sobering answer.
*You people are smart!
**He knows a lot more about World War II than I do. Or at least different things.
***If you are interested in military history, you should be aware of the Pritzker. They have interesting exhibits (the current exhibits are on women’s service organizations in WWII and WWI posters-both subjects dear to my heart), a solid research collection, an enormous collection of war posters, and kick-ass reference librarians. They collect veteran’s stories in an oral history program, Stories of Service. They also host excellent speakers. Even before the current troubles, they streamed many of their programs live. I have spent many a happy evening in front of my computer with my knitting and a notebook, listening to experts talk about their passions.
****Obviously problematic