Frederic Chopin: A Guide to Research.(Review)

Frederic Chopin: A Guide to Research. By William Smialek. (Composer Resource Manuals, 50). New York: Garland Publishing, 2000. [xiii, 191 p. ISBN 0-8153-2180-5. $65.]

William Smialek's research guide to Chopin scholarship comes on the heels of the assorted festivals, symposia, and congresses organized in 1999 to honor the sesquicentennial of the composer's death. While the volume covers scholarly works through 1997 only, it offers another opportunity to take stock of the state of Chopin studies at the close of the twentieth century. In his introduction, Smialek states that the purpose of Frederic Chopin: A Guide to Research is to identify "key directions in Chopin scholarship for scholars and other musicians new to Chopin studies" (p. xi), rather than to serve as an exhaustive review of the musicological literature on the composer and his music. The guide accomplishes this for the most part, but the lapses in academic rigor evident throughout are a disheartening reminder that there is much room for improvement where matters of Chopin research are concerned.

The book is divided into seven chapters, four of which are subdivided into topical categories. Yet despite this apparently straightforward design, the organization is often confusing. It is not clear, for example, why several sources that concern Chopin's relationships with nineteenth-century Polish writers should be cited in the section entitled "The Composer in Other Arts" rather than listed with similar studies in the section "Contemporaries." Nor is it obvious why studies that deal with Chopin's musical genres are divided between the overlapping sections "Analytical Writing" and "Style Studies." Another problem is that of omission; for example, there is no section devoted to the theme of Chopin and nationalism--a serious lacuna, given the author's aim to identify important trends in Chopin scholarship. Useful author, work, and subject indexes, however, make it easy to locate related items scattered among categories.

Although Smialek offers fairly thorough source listings for a number of sections--"Bibliographies," "Catalogs," "Life of the Composer," "Correspondence," "Contemporary Documents," and "Editions" are exemplary--many could have benefited from additional entries. Among the underdeveloped categories are "Related Cultural History," "Societies, ...