Alan Walker’s “Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times” manages this hat trick very well indeed. Walker, a professor emeritus at McMaster University in Canada, is best known for his triumphant multi-volume biography of Franz Liszt, on which he worked for a quarter-century. Even for those of us who don’t particularly like most of Liszt’s music, Walker proved such a compelling storyteller and advocate that we would brighten when a new installation was set to arrive. And now he has moved on to Chopin (Walker uses the Polish first name — Fryderyk — throughout the book).

After a brisk preamble concerning the composer’s undimmed and near-universal popularity, Walker turns to a purported statement by Hector Berlioz: “Chopin was dying all his life.” This sets the tone for much of the nearly 700 pages that follow, and it is a grimly appropriate perspective, for Chopin was tubercular by his mid-teens. “We know that there were times when it was a simple inconvenience and he could go about his daily business with energy to spare,” Walker explains. “But there were others when his activities came to a virtual standstill, because the leaden weight of his symptoms — chronic tiredness, incessant coughing, inflammation of the larynx, breathlessness and neuralgia — proved to be such a heavy burden that he could hardly function.” He died at the early age of 39, after what must have seemed an eternity of close calls.

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One may wonder whether Chopin’s physical frailty limited his creative choices, inspiring him to concentrate his forces only on what he did best. On a superficial level, there is a certain sameness here: Most of his works are over in less than 10 minutes, and virtually all of them were written for the piano alone. (Indeed, he never learned to orchestrate with any panache.) Moreover, while there are flashes of wit throughout, especially in the waltzes and mazurkas, the abiding mood is one of an elegant and poetic contemplation.

And yet, within these limits and despite his ailments, Chopin wrote some perfect music. Has any other composer ever understood melancholy so completely? If he mostly stayed with the piano, he attained such command as to forever change our understanding of its capacities. Unlike other great composers such as J.S. Bach, whose music will usually be effective on whatever it is played, there are few successful orchestral arrangements of Chopin’s work: It seems to belong exclusively to the instrument for which it was made.

In addition to his fame as a virtuoso, Chopin may have been the most adventurous harmonist of his time, and Walker’s tour of the music makes us remember once again how radical he really was. Every beginning pianist learns to play through some of the “Preludes,” Opus 28, but nobody really outgrows them. Within the bounds of these 24 extraordinary little works (which range from about 30 seconds to five minutes), one finds music of astonishing richness and variety compressed into the most economical of forms.

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Chopin is one of those masters whom one wouldn’t necessarily have enjoyed as company. He was removed and dismissive of most of his composer friends (including those who were vital supporters), and he harbored a deep strain of anti-Semitism, even more than was common in his time and place. His genius was mostly relegated to his work.

Chopin’s long affair with the author and feminist George Sand has become legendary. Of this unusual pairing, Walker writes: “He was reserved, aloof, somewhat effeminate in his bearing, always immaculate in his attire, and looked the perfect dandy. She was brash, flamboyant, outspoken in the dissemination of her radical political ideas and decidedly masculine in appearance, donning men’s clothing as an outward symbol of equality with the opposite sex.” The breakup, painstakingly traced by Walker, did credit to neither party. Sand went so far as to write a mean novel based on her sickly lover, but it should be remembered that she also took fierce care of Chopin during some of his most dreadful days.

This is now the best biography of Chopin — meticulous, scholarly and well-told. Whatever the composer’s shortcomings as a person, his music grows only more moving. As the poet Heinrich Heine, who was born a dozen years before Chopin and survived him by the better part of a decade, once put it: “When he plays, I forget all other masters of the instrument, or mere skill, and sink into the sweet abyss of his music, into the melancholy rapture of his exquisite and profound creations. Chopin is the great and genial poet of sweet sound, who should only be named with Mozart, or Beethoven, or Rossini.”

Fryderyk Chopin

A Life and Times

By Alan Walker