CHOPIN RECONSIDERED
CHOPIN: THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC. By Herbert Weinstock. Alfred
A. Knopf. $5.00.
Mr. Weinstock has resolved the familiar dichotomy of Life
and Works in a conventional way, by dividing his book into two equal
halves. The Life, we are informed on the dust-jacket, is "colorful"; the
study of the music, "distinguished and detailed." An examination of
the contents does not completely substantiate these conclusions.
In biographical matters, the author seems on firm ground. His
conscientious desire to counteract the great mass of romantic bosh that
has been written about Chopin has led him to state the facts as he
sees them in a bald, rather pedestrian style. Under the circumstances,
this may be considered a good fault. For the most part, the tendency
to novelize biography by putting imaginary speeches into the mouths
of the helpless characters has been resisted.
But it is in the section of musical analysis that difficulties multiply.
Mr. Weinstock makes evaluation of his approach easy by frankly ad–
mitting his borrowing of the principles of literary analysis established in
the
Lexicon Rhetoricae
of Kenneth Burke's
Counter-Statement-princi–
pIes which he has taken over for his own use by merely substituting
musical terms for literary ones. He justifies this by pointing out that
Burke himself makes "numerous references to music." But that is not
enough to justify the direct transfer of his methods of literary analysis
to music. Burke uses musical references merely as analogies. Mr. Wein–
stock conceives his musical analyses within a literary framework-and
thereby dooms himself to failure. While he evidently considers his
Burkean approach a novelty, it is merely the latest in a long series of
more or less ill-starred attempts to describe music in terms of almost
every other art. The great need for a methodology and terminology
truly adequate to music has been overlooked or misinterpreted by Mr.
Weinstock. This would be true even if Burke's methodology were beyond
reproach in itself-which it is not. The statement that form is an
"arousing and fulfillment of desires" may express one legitimate emo–
tional reaction to form, but can hardly constitute a definition of it. And
"syllogistic progression," while an appropriate term when we are dealing
with words, in which the "rightness" of the conclusion can be demon–
strated in terms of factual subject matter, cannot simply be applied to
music (an art without subject matter) without further formalities. We
urgently need to know what harmonic and motivic procedures assure
unity without monotony, variety without disparity. It is not enough to
