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Showing posts from March 22, 2020

Chopin and his 'espaces imaginaires' - The Fortress of Venus - An escapist thought in these disordered times

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The Fortress of   Venus Michael Moran In the summer of 1844 Chopin was at Nohant with George Sand, her children, his sister  Ludwika JÄ™drzejewicz and his sister's husband Kalasanty.  After they left to return to Warsaw he wrote a letter to her expressing his sense of loss at her departure: 'I feel strange this year [...] but I am not at all here at this moment, only as usual in some strange space. This must be  espaces imaginaires,  but I am not embarrassed by it.'   It is now exactly 50 years since I left civilization  as a young man  and went to live on a South Pacific Island. I took with me my  C. Bechstein  upright grand piano and a great deal of the music of Fryderyk Chopin. I intended, among other escapist tendencies, to practice and realize the utterly false hope of turning myself into a concert pianist.  As much of the world is now living in strange and unaccustomed isolation during one ...