Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries, and a Half-Dozen Revolutions opens in a jazz club in Chicago where Annik LaFarge (On the High Line) heard a quartet riffing on the funeral march from Chopin's Opus 35 Sonata. LaFarge had a decades-long connection with the sonata and was fascinated by its transformation into a jazz vernacular. Her quick Google search revealed not only that musicians have been using the funeral march for more than 100 years, but that Chopin is the subject of video games, a popular manga series and a Netflix cartoon based on the same. Intrigued, LaFarge set out to understand the work, the world from which it came, and Chopin's continued power over the imagination. The result is a charming and deeply personal account of both her subject and her search.
LaFarge 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. 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 modern Polish hero and as a broader cultural icon.
Chasing Chopin is part biography, part memoir, part musical appreciation and 100% delightful. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins