Author(s): Benita Eisler

Biographies & Memoirs

At twenty-one, Frederic Chopin fled Russian-occupied Poland for exile in France. He would never see his native country again. With only two public concerts in as many years, he became a star of Parisian society, revered by his great contemporaries Schumann, Liszt, and the painter Eugene Delacroix. Blessed with genius, success, and the love of Europe's most famous - and infamous - woman novelist, George Sand, Chopin's years of triumph ended with his expulsion from paradise: less than two decades after his conquest of Paris, the composer lay destitute and dying in the arms of Sand's estranged daughter, Solange. Chopin's Funeral is the story of this fatal fall from grace, of an Oedipal tragedy unfolding, and of illness and loss redeemed by the radical breakthrough of the composer's last style.