It’s time to leave Chopin in peace

There’s a scene early on in A Song to Remember — Charles Vidor’s clunky Technicolor film of 1945 — in which the young Frédéric Chopin (Cornel Wilde) provides background music for a banquet hosted by Count Wyszynska in his Warsaw palace, plates of rubbery pig and candy-coloured vegetables in heady supply. Chopin plays his own Fantaisie-Impromptu, five years or so before composing it, and then, having insulted the Russian governor of Poland (‘I do not play for tsarist butchers!’), he avoids arrest by hastily rowing to Paris, so it seems, dressed like a military cadet.

Our real-life hero has borne an awful lot since his premature death in 1849, though this particular film — with its mushy soundtrack, red-cheeked wholesomeness and hateful portrayal of the brilliant George Sand — is a definite nadir. A Song to Remember was not even the only picture on this very subject in these decades: the same troop of characters gurns its way through Henry Roussel’s silent film La valse de l’adieu (1928), released nine years after the Germans had first raised their flag with Nocturno der Liebe.

It seems at the very least ironic that a figure as blurry as Chopin during his lifetime should be brought into keen focus following his death. Probably it’s this very blurriness that encourages such ventures: documentation can be imagination’s most unforgiving suitor, after all. So people continue to foist on Chopin their own fantasies and desires, some more lurid than others. And in the same way that the meaning of Chopin and his music has shifted in the 170 years since his death, so too have depictions of him in popular culture mutated.

Nor is it simply in popular culture.