Musical biography often seems a step or two behind literary biography, largely beholden as it is to the positivist approach to music and history that the Germans invented in the nineteenth century, which not even New Musicology in the late twentieth managed to dent. Alan Walker’s three-volume biography (1983–96) of Liszt is a case in point. Even more years in the making than Ellmann’s Wilde, Walker’s biography is recognised as the definitive study of Liszt and his music, though one very much shaped by the polite conventions of Old Musicological enquiry.

In Fryderyk Chopin, Walker tackles an altogether more complex subject. Chopin is psychologically and musically far more elusive than Liszt, who dominated the Romantic landscape as no other. Chopin was the far greater revolutionary figure, yet he commanded no army, no disciples, and was largely uninterested in the huge cultural shifts happening around him. He was a mutineer, something close to Julian Barnes’s description of Chopin’s friend Delacroix: a ‘great fiery explosion happening at the same time as Romanticism’. What a potentially brilliant portal into the development of the Romantic imagination!

Chopin at 25, by his fiancee Maria Wodzinska, 1835 (Wikimedia Commons)

Yet there remains something determinedly old fashioned about Walker’s biography. Even the contents pages read like epigraphs in a Dickens novel: ‘Chopin travels to the village of Szafarnia for a summer holiday, to the home of his friend “Domus” Dziewanowski.’ Or: ‘Chopin becomes infatuated with the singer Konstancja Gładkowska but does not declare his feelings.’ This is Walker’s deliberate choice, an early signal that modern biographical trends will not shape the ensuing narrative.

This old-fashioned quality also governs Walker’s prose. He is forever explaining what he’s doing, resorting to first-person plural to this end: ‘Nicolas adopted the Polish form of his name, Mikołaj, which he never abandoned, and which we therefore propose to use throughout our narrative.’ How irritating you find this technique depends to some extent on how good you find the associated musical insights. And in these Walker excels. Writing about the A-flat Mazurka, he singles out an eight-bar passage that offers ‘a glimpse into the future of harmony’, before illustrating the slippery chromaticism in question – real tectonic shifts in the harmonic terrain – and telling us how these bars stumped both Mendelssohn and Liszt, so out of place did they seem next to what came before and what soon followed. On the whole, I prefer deft analyses like these to the historical critics and biographers Walker quotes a little too frequently, framed as they are in the sort of flowery visual imagery and analogy that Chopin particularly disliked. Walker clearly does not need such props, and the frequency with which they turn up in a book whose purpose is to replace this type of existing scholarship is disconcerting.

Sometimes, as he imposes motive on events, Walker’s ear sounds a little tinny. It is simply not feasible that Chopin’s prevarication when asked to perform his ‘Là ci darem’ Variations in Vienna in 1829 was because he hadn’t touched a piano in weeks; this was the same young man who had been playing in the finest Warsaw salons since boyhood, his wondrous technique and memory widely admired. Nor to be believed is the story about Chopin calming unruly fellow students by improvising a melodrama about easily frightened robbers, the students falling off to sleep in the middle of the lively musical narrative. Given that in his spirited prologue Walker sets up his stall – writing clinically about the source material that other biographers have missed or inexpertly handled – such episodes ever so slightly undermine our confidence in his judgement.

Anyone writing about Chopin today has to decide pretty smartly what to do with George Sand, the wonderful and ferocious free spirit with whom Chopin spent a quarter of his life. Walker points out that musicians have not always been kind to Sand (‘It may be useful to pause at this point in order to consider the complex personality of the woman with whom Chopin was to spend nine years of his life’), yet does not avoid such traps himself. He acknowledges that it was during this relationship that Chopin wrote some of his greatest music, yet there remains something grudging about Walker’s admiration for the woman who made such creativity possible. This is never more evident than in the vexed issue of their sexual relations. To Walker, ‘Sand had imposed conditions of celibacy on Chopin after the pair had returned from Majorca’, conditions Chopin apparently found extremely difficult to understand or abide by. Yet the far more likely explanation is that the sexually inexperienced musician found either Sand or sex intimidating and gratefully took on instead the mantle of brilliant child instead of passionate lover. Sand’s sad, furious letter to Chopin’s friend Grzymała upon their breakup in 1847 – in which she despairs at having lived the previous years in Chopin’s company as though a virgin – is hardly the reflection of someone who had implemented such rules and roles.

There are carefully chosen and illustrative musical examples, which Walker speaks to with his customary skill, but these are at the expense of the many iconic images that capture the nineteenth century and Chopin’s place in it. I missed them – as I did the sort of physical and psychological layering Ellmann is so adept at. Paradoxically (or explicably) for such a meaty volume, it is a relatively quick read. And this is Walker’s achievement. He has set out to write a cradle-to-grave narrative of arguably the most original musician of the nineteenth century, distilling in unadorned prose every detail he has discovered in archives throughout Europe. If the resulting book is more Life than Times – an outcome of Walker’s musicological training – this does not necessarily take away from his achievement.