Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
Simply Chopin - cover

Simply Chopin

William Smialek

Publisher: Simply Charly

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

Born in a small town near Warsaw, Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) was a musical prodigy who began giving public concerts and composed his first piano pieces at the age of seven. Following studies at the Warsaw Conservatory, he left his native Poland in 1830, eventually settling in Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. There he cultivated friendships with prominent musicians and intellectuals of the period and quickly achieved renown as a virtuoso performer and pioneering composer. However, by 1842, his lifelong health issues had become increasingly serious, and his brilliant career went into a precipitous decline, concluding with his untimely death at the age of thirty-nine. 
 
In Simply Chopin, Dr. William Smialek presents an accessible and revealing portrait of a musical genius, including his artistic development, his tempestuous love life, and his towering artistic achievements. Relating Chopin’s life story to his historical place and time, Dr. Smialek intimately chronicles his influences and significant relationships, in particular, his long love affair with the writer George Sand. The book also draws on recent research to explore the compositional technique displayed in Chopin’s piano compositions, with commentary on his most important works. 
 
Intended for a general readership, Simply Chopin is both a lucid introduction to a giant of classical music and an insightful look at a key moment in musical history, as nineteenth-century Europe turned toward Romanticism and the powerful idea of nationalism.
Available since: 09/21/2018.

Other books that might interest you

  • Sons of Baseball - Growing Up with a Major League Dad - cover

    Sons of Baseball - Growing Up...

    Mark Braff

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    A rare glimpse of professional ballplayers, not as pitchers, hitters, managers, and coaches, but as dads and grandads.  
     
    Sons of major league baseball players grow up in a unique environment, not only because they are raised in part by professional athletes, but also because they are raised by the game itself. They come of age immersed in the distinct sounds and aromas of baseball. The locker rooms, the cinderblock-lined corridors beneath the stands, the dugouts, and the fields are the playgrounds of their youth.  
     
    In Sons of Baseball, Mark Braff interviews 18 men who share their exclusive stories, ballpark memories, and the challenges and rewards of having fathers whose talents enabled them to reach the pinnacle of their profession. Each chapter is devoted to one son talking about his experiences, from the poignancy of one son’s disclosure that his dad has not been able to acknowledge his son’s sexuality as a gay man, to the humor of another son absconding with the groundskeepers’ cart in Cleveland.  
     
    With a foreword by Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. and interviews with the sons of beloved players such as Yogi Berra, Mariano Rivera, Roger Maris, Gil Hodges, and Larry Doby, Sons of Baseball provides a unique, well-rounded perspective on the lives of professional ballplayers and their families.
    Show book
  • Ten Years Hard Labour - cover

    Ten Years Hard Labour

    Chris Williamson

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    For 42 years, Chris Williamson was a Labour Party member. In 2010, he was elected to Parliament to represent his home town. However, in 2019, he was unceremoniously suspended from the party after being subjected to a smear campaign, and he later resigned in protest at the betrayal.
    In this forensic memoir – free of his Labourist clutches – Williamson provides a unique ringside view. As well as lifting the lid on the amateurish politics-by-focus-groups under Ed Miliband, Williamson exposes some of the major events that created and deepened Labour's 'antisemitism crisis' under Jeremy Corbyn.
    In his mission to set the record straight on numerous misreported events, Williamson names and shames the individuals – on the left and the right – whom he holds responsible for delivering his former party back into the hands of New Labourism under Sir Keir Starmer. To understand the existential crisis facing socialists in Britain today, Williamson's account of recent Labour history is indispensable.
    Show book
  • Coming Up Trumps: A Memoir - cover

    Coming Up Trumps: A Memoir

    Jean Trumpington

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    In this witty, candid and utterly fascinating memoir, Baroness Trumpington looks back on her long and remarkable life. The daughter of an officer in the Bengal Lancers and an American heiress, she was born in 1922 into a world of privilege and luxury. But her mother lost most of her inheritance in the Wall Street Crash and the family retrenched from Mayfair to Sandwich, in Kent, where her mother became a succesful society interior decorator. 
     Leaving school at fifteen, without ever taking an exam, the young Jean Campbell-Harris was sent to Paris to study art and both French and German, but two years later, with the outbreak of the Second World War, she became a land girl - on a farm owned by Lloyd George, a family friend. She loathed the outdoor life and soon changed direction, putting her German to good use by joining naval intelligence at Bletchley Park, where she stayed for the rest of the war. After the war was over, she went to New York and worked on Madison Avenue as an advertising copywriter. It was in New York that she met her husband, William Barker, a history teacher. They returned to England and married in 1954, where Barker became first a master and then headmaster at the Leys School in Cambridge. In this witty and winning memoir, Jean Trumpington recalls her early life, growing up in London and Kent in the 1920s and 30s, her wartime experiences, her life in the world of Madison Avenue's 'mad men' and - perhaps the happiest period of her life - her years as a headmaster's wife. The book ends with her embarking on what was to become a distinguished political career. It is vivid, forthright and funny, and will appeal to readers who enjoyed the Duchess of Devonshire's Wait for Me as well as to the many people who warmed to Lady Trumpington after her triumphant appearance on Have I Got News for You.
    Show book
  • Admiral Albert Hastings Markham - A Victorian Tale of Triumph Tragedy & Exploration - cover

    Admiral Albert Hastings Markham...

    Frank Jastrzembski

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    The story of a 19th-century adventurer who battled pirates, hunted buffalo, sailed the Arctic, and was “one of the most arresting figures of his time” (The Globe). 
     
    Few men have lived such an extraordinary life as Admiral Albert Hastings Markham. Besides dedicating five decades of his career to Britain’s Royal Navy, Markham was a voracious reader, prolific writer, keen naturalist, and daring explorer. He battled Chinese pirates during the Second Opium War and Taiping Rebellion; chased down Australian blackbirding ships in the South Pacific; trekked to within 400 miles of the North Pole; hunted buffalo and visited Indian reservations in the United States; observed a bloody war in South America; canoed Canada’s remote Hayes River; and explored the icy waters of Baffin Bay and the Arctic Ocean archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. At the time of his death in 1918, The Globe declared that Markham had been “one of the most arresting figures of his time.” 
     
    While Markham’s life was filled with adventure, it was also marred by tragedy. Regrettably, Markham is best remembered for his role in the sinking of HMS Victoria in 1893. This one incident has tarnished his legacy until now. This book follows Markham through his adventures and misfortunes—and reassesses the life of this forgotten yet fascinating admiral.
    Show book
  • Founding Fathers The: Biographies of George Washington Alexander Hamilton Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin - cover

    Founding Fathers The:...

    Shane Costello

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    This audiobook includes biographies on the following men: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. 
    The Founding Fathers of the United States led the American Revolution against the Kingdom of Great Britain. Most were descendants of colonists settled in the Thirteen Colonies in North America. 
    Historian Richard B. Morris in 1973 identified the following seven figures as the key Founding Fathers: John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin were members of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were authors of The Federalist Papers, advocating ratification of the Constitution. The constitutions drafted by Jay and Adams for their respective states of New York (1777) and Massachusetts (1780) were heavily relied upon when creating language for the US Constitution. Jay, Adams and Franklin negotiated the Treaty of Paris (1783) that would end the American Revolutionary War. Washington was Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army and was President of the Constitutional Convention. All held additional important roles in the early government of the United States, with Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison serving as President. Jay was the nation's first Chief Justice, Hamilton was the first Secretary of the Treasury, and Franklin was America's most senior diplomat, and later the governmental leader of Pennsylvania. 
    The term Founding Fathers is sometimes used to refer to the Signers of the embossed version of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Signers should not be confused with the term Framers; the Framers are defined by the National Archives as those 55 individuals who were appointed to be delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and took part in drafting the proposed Constitution of the United States.
    Show book
  • The Cracker Queen - cover

    The Cracker Queen

    Lauretta Hannon

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Award-winning author and humorist Lauretta Hannon is also a popular contributor to Georgia Public Radio. A collection of hilarious and poignant true Southern stories, The Cracker Queen dispels the popular image of the Southern belle with spirited portraits of strong, authentic Southern women.
    Show book