‘I Think I Would Take Chopin to a Vegetarian Restaurant’: An Interview with Alan Walker

alan_walker_3.jpg, default, Alan Walker, photo: Press materials of Znak Publishing House

Alan Walker, the esteemed biographer of Liszt and Chopin, explains his singular approach to history. He reveals why he remains an ‘analogue person‘ in a digital world, and argues that the best path to a life story is to ‘walk among the tombstones.‘

Upon entering Professor Alan Walker’s hotel room, I notice a stack of freshly printed books on the table: the first volume of the Polish translation of Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times, originally published in 2018 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc. ‘They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover’, he smiles, ‘but I’m very pleased with what I see’. The author of the most authoritative biography of Franz Liszt – a work that took him 25 years to complete – asks if we might take a picture together. His visit to Poland, marking the release of the Chopin biography’s translation, will be captured in a documentary about his life, titled It Takes a Life. He is 95 years old, and most of those years have been devoted to studying the lives of great composers.

Filip Lech: What is your relationship with the composers whose lives you describe?

Alan Walker: It’s impossible to write a biography about a subject you don’t love. There has to be a love affair between the biographer and his subject. Biographies can be written out of a sense of hatred, out of a sense of indifference; these biographies do exist, but usually they’re bad. The reason they’re bad is that love opens doors, while hatred shuts them. If you feel hatred towards the subject you’re writing about, you’ll never actually get to the truth of the matter. The moment you fall in love with a subject, it’s a miracle, really. Doors start to open, one subject leads to another and suddenly you’re at a place where perhaps you’ve never been before in studying the life of this person. You come across facts and information which are new, and you’re able to report them for the first time.

Now, there is a danger. I have been accused of falling in love with my subject and closing my eyes to their faults. For example, the leading music critic of The New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg, accused me of having shown bias towards Franz Liszt. My reply is simple: It is not the function of a biographer to achieve balance by finding one bad thing to balance against a good thing.

FL: How is that balance achieved?

AW: If you’re writing about the life of one of the saints, for example, the point of balance will be towards the ethical upper end of the spectrum. Conversely, if you’re writing a biography of Adolf Hitler, the point of balance is right at the evil end of the spectrum. That is the correct balance. When people say a biography lacks balance, I say that’s the wrong phrase: it is the point of balance that matters.

FL: Which biographies, perhaps outside the musical realm, do you consider models for your own work?

AW: The great model for all biographers is The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell. More recently, one of my heroes is Ernest Newman and his four-volume Life of Richard Wagner. Also, there is Jacques Barzun’s single-volume biography of Berlioz, Berlioz and the Romantic Century. These biographies are models for me. As a biographer, which is a very lonely profession, it’s always a good idea to have a model out there, a standard that you can try to strive to achieve.

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Alan Walker, photo: Press materials of Znak Publishing House

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FL: What exactly do you mean by that?

AW: I spend six or seven hours each day in my library. I have a house in Canada with a very large basement, and I’ve transformed it into a library containing about 5,000 books, which is where I have my mental life and get my inspiration. Since there’s no sunlight, I occasionally go upstairs to look out the window to make sure it’s still daylight or to have another cup of coffee, and then I go back to my desk.

I do all my writing by hand. I’m old-fashioned enough to know that unless your prose flows down your right arm, it doesn’t belong to you. Modern researchers often say, ‘Oh, I’ve got it – it’s in my computer’. Well, it’s in their computer, not in them. Writing is a physical process. I write using a Staedtler pen on children’s multi-coloured writing pads. Once I have a draft I can live with, I then put it into the computer. My personal archive at McMaster University, which is around 48 boxes, contains the complete handwritten draft of the Chopin biography.

FL: Given your emphasis on physical documents, what role do digital resources play in your current research?

AW: They don’t. I’m not a digital person; I’m an analogue person. Analogue sound, for example, is far superior to digital sound. My own archive, which consists of many letters – thousands of letters to and from musicians and people I met while at the BBC – is very precious to me. Perhaps one day it will be digitized. However, the archive at McMaster University is open access, and the catalogue is online. If you look up, say, my correspondence with Arthur Rubinstein, they will send you a copy.

FL: Where would you go if you found yourself in 19th-century Warsaw?

AW: Where would I go? I think Holy Cross Church, the Visitationist Church, the Carmelite Church. And of course Żelazowa Wola, also the Hunting Palace of the Radziwiłł princes in Antonin, but that’s two or three hundred kilometres outside Warsaw. In fact, I’d go to all the places that a Chopin biographer should visit. I have a phrase that I use in this connection, and it’s ‘the geography of biography’. It’s important to go to the places you’re writing about. I’ve said many times that you can stay at home and write a biography, read old books, join them together, and say, here’s a new version of the story.

But that’s not the way to write biographies, and it’s not the way to write a biography of Chopin. You have to go and consult documents. You have to see the buildings. You have to enter into the spirit of the person that you’re writing about.

Graveyards are one of the best places to go for a biographer. You have to know where the bodies are buried. The tombstones, they don’t lie. They give the name, the dates, family members – it’s all there. Graveyards are the best source for biographies. If I were to give advice to my fellow biographers, it would be to walk among the tombstones.

FL: What questions are biographers expected to cover, and which ones should they avoid?

AW: I don’t think you should avoid any questions when it comes to biography, unless of course you’re dealing with a living person. There you have to be careful. But where the subject is long dead, I think everything is open. Sometimes the questions and the answers are not very pleasant.

In the case of Chopin, let us say, one controversial aspect of his personality is his latent homosexuality. I don’t think it existed. I’ve looked into this very carefully. Like many other biographers, I’ve examined the very few documents, the letters and the various friendships he had. And I’m convinced that the language he used was simply that of youthful exuberance. And it had nothing to do with love of the same sex. However, there are Chopin scholars who disagree with me.

FL: What key pieces of information or hidden details are you still hungry to find regarding Chopin’s biography?

AW: I would like to know the truth behind the rupture, the break in the friendship–love affair with Georges Sand. We think we know what happened, but there’s obviously much more to it than that. They met in 1838. They became lovers quite quickly. Georges Sand took the initiative, and Chopin was a little bit slow to respond. But according to Georges Sand, they were lovers in every sense of the word. Within a few weeks of their meeting, they of course went to Mallorca, basically not to escape the scandal, which is the popular idea, but because her son, Maurice, was not very well. And they thought that the warmth of the Spanish island, Mallorca, would help to improve his health. But we know that Chopin fell ill there. Within a very short time – my guess is three or four weeks – Georges Sand became a caregiver and not a lover. And for the next eight years, Chopin was a kind of invalid, let us say, always in need of some care and protection, which Georges Sand was able to provide. But then there was a quarrel, which involved Solange, the daughter. Georges Sand and her daughter, Solange, were always arguing. There was always trouble. And Chopin always took Solange’s side. He loved this girl as if she were his daughter. And that was part of the problem. There was a very ugly scene towards the end, and Georges Sand could never forgive Chopin for taking Solange’s side in this big argument. Solange left Nohant, the country home where Georges Sand lived with her children, and went back to Paris. Solange was reunited with Chopin and told her side of the story, and Georges Sand was humiliated and angry. We would like to know more about that because there are two sides. We know what Chopin wrote and felt, and we know what Georges Sand wrote and felt, but there’s more to it than that. There has to be more.

This is one example, but as a biographer, we are hungry for more and more information. From the very beginning, articles about Chopin were filled with dreams, fantasies and lies. The printed word is permanent, and once it’s out there, you can never get rid of it. So all we can do is improve on the facts left to us by previous generations. As I say, Chopin’s life is in a constant state of disrepair. It always needs mending and improving.

FL: Liszt was the first composer to write a biography of a fellow composer – Chopin – a fact you know intimately after dedicating 25 years to Liszt’s life. What is your perspective on that unique position in history?

AW: Yes. Liszt wrote a biography of Chopin, making him the very first composer in musical history to write a biography of another composer. This indicates the admiration Liszt had for Chopin, although the admiration was not reciprocated. Having said that, the book is not very good, and some of it was not written by Liszt but by Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, Liszt’s Polish companion, who had a special interest in Chopin. Liszt initiated the project by sending a questionnaire to Ludwika, Chopin’s sister, just after Chopin died. However, the questionnaire so offended Ludwika that she passed it on to Jane Stirling, who provided the answers used to start the book. Liszt later handed the Polish aspect of the work to Princess Carolyne, who wrote in a style of free association, resulting in a linguistically difficult book to read.

FL: From a biographer’s perspective, what do you feel is the cultural impact and artistic integrity of films about composers? For instance, what is your view of the controversial ‘Lisztomania’ directed by Ken Russell?

AW: Yes. Classical composers, and especially Chopin and Liszt, have not been well served by film directors. Frankly, and I have no hesitation in saying this, I think Ken Russell’s Lisztomania is a disgrace. It tells us much more about Russell than it tells us about Liszt. It’s based on fantasy and exaggeration, and its chief purpose is sensation.

Hollywood has a long history of making movies about Chopin and Liszt. Now, here we enter a somewhat different world, other than art house or experimental cinema. It’s still a world in which the film director is in charge of everything, and he can indulge in fantasy and dreams and in making things up. But the one advantage of those Hollywood movies… I’m thinking, for example, of Song to Remember, the Chopin movie directed by Charles Vidor with Cornel Wilde playing the part of Chopin and Merle Oberon playing the part of George Sand (they even have Wojciech Żywny, Chopin’s teacher, in Paris with him; Żywny never left Warsaw, of course; that’s just a minor blip on the silver screen), and Song Without End, which was a movie about Liszt. But the great advantage of those movies, as I started to say, was the soundtrack, music performed by Ervin Nyiregyházi.

The general public, without iPhones or television and often without adequate access to libraries, still had access to the cinema. Especially in England, in my generation, in a small town with five movie theatres, we would all go on Friday night to watch the silver screen. There, we heard Chopin playing the piano on the soundtrack. This is where we learned to love the music of Chopin. Millions of people in my generation grew up with our first impression of Chopin being through the cinema. We went away with the dreams and the fantasies that the film director had given to us, thinking that this was the truth. It was only later on that we realised this was not the way that Chopin had lived. But the music remained.

FL: A new Chopin movie has recently premiered in Poland.

AW: I have not seen the movie, but I have seen the trailer and some comments. I think it lacks the quality soundtrack that even the bad Hollywood movies had. It’s got a kind of jazzy soundtrack to appeal to the young. I don’t think Chopin would have recognised himself. He would have wondered, ‘What on earth am I doing up there on the silver screen? That is not me at all’. Now, when my comments appear in print, I will probably be chased out of the country, because I know that this movie took a very great deal of money to make.

Based on my limited knowledge, I think it falls into the Ken Russell category. But the job of a biographer is to tell the truth, to get rid of fantasy and to provide facts. Film directors always get a pass; they can say, ‘it was poetic licence’, but as a biographer, you have to state the facts as they were.

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Eryk Kulm Jr. in the film Chopin, Chopin!, directed by Michał Kwieciński, 2025, photo by Jarosław Sosiński/Akson StudioTVP

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FL: On a related note, the Polish film ‘The Blue Note’ by Andrzej Żuławski – which centres on Chopin’s relationship with Sand and Solange and features Janusz Olejniczak performing on a period instrument – raises the question: What is your opinion of Chopin being played on historical instruments?

AW: I don’t know this film, so I have no comment on that. But as for playing Chopin on period pianos, I have to be a traitor to my class and say that I much prefer Chopin on modern instruments. Although Chopin only heard instruments such as the 1848 Pleyel, they lack the strength, the colour and the pure volume of sound of a modern Steinway or Bösendorfer. Chopin’s favourite instrument was not the piano but the human voice. If that is the criterion, the Steinway grand is superior to the period Pleyel because the Steinway grand can sing and send its song to the back of a 2,000-seat auditorium, which the period Pleyel cannot do. It’s a great pity Chopin didn’t live to around 1855 or 1856, as I think he would have loved the new nine-foot grands, realizing his repertoire was just waiting for a better instrument.

Also, there is an issue with the early music movement: if you play Chopin on period instruments, you must go all the way. Pitch was one tone lower in Chopin’s time than it is now. So, to maintain historical accuracy, you would have to play the music at the lower pitch, which many musicians resist. You can’t pick and choose.

FL: Turning to performance, which recordings or interpretations of Chopin’s music do you personally appreciate the most?

AW: I think, without question, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Arthur Rubinstein and Dinu Lipatti. They are all very different pianists, but they all share one thing: a respect for the score, while at the same time leaving themselves just enough space to be Rubinstein or Lipatti. I think it can be objectively demonstrated that these three had what it takes to show Chopin at his very best.

Chopin scholarship is now focused on getting the Urtext right, and the task of scholars is to tell the performers, ‘This is the correct text’. My response is that if you simply reproduce the Urtext, all you’ve done is reproduce a document. What we want is to know what you think of that document as a pianist – to put a part of yourself into it. The criterion is driving the performance down the middle, so you are true to the Urtext and true to yourself.

I would suggest that all the great performers leave possibly 5% of the work’s reproduction to themselves. The moment you give the interpreter 15%, you’re going to lose the piece, and it becomes about you, not about Chopin. My advice to young pianists is to learn how much of yourself to put into the performance without sacrificing the nature of the music, because at the end of the day, you are the servant of the piece.

FL: Given that you’re in Warsaw during the event, do you have any specific memories or reflections connected to the Chopin Competition?

AW: I haven’t followed the earlier competitions in detail, but I’m aware the standard this year is incredibly high. I’ve served on many juries in the past, including three times on the International Liszt Jury in Budapest, but never on the Chopin Jury. I feel really sorry for the jury here, in Warsaw, because the repertoire is not mixed; it’s entirely Chopin. I cannot imagine what it’s like to hear Étude Op. 25, No 11, ‘Winter Wind’, 40 times in a few days.

I tend to side with Chopin: I don’t think he would approve of a competition in his name. We know from his correspondence that he hated spectacle in music. Spectacle abounds in competitions, and for that reason, Chopin would not have approved. He was not interested in competitions at all, even failing to turn up to the Hexaméron competition. I have to question the value of these competitions. Chopin doesn’t need a competition to make his name famous. The sun never sets on Chopin’s music; wherever you are on this planet, his music is like an acoustical halo around the globe. If Chopin is universally loved and recognized, what is the purpose of a competition?

Competition creates losers. To lose can sometimes do irreparable psychological harm to a gifted young pianist who might otherwise develop into a great artistic personality. I know I’m being a ‘traitor to my class’ by saying these things, but it’s important to introduce a little bit of sanity and distance to this wave of Chopin euphoria.

Now I suppose I should pack my bags and head for the airport.

19th Chopin Competition – Stage I [Image Gallery]

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FL: I think there are many people in Poland who agree with you. Even among those who follow the Chopin Competition with excitement.

Regarding the presence of Chopin’s music worldwide, it is worth mentioning Jan Brokken’s book ‘The Music of the Netherlands Antilles: Why Eleven Antilleans Knelt before Chopin’s Heart’.

AW: This actually adds to the universality of Chopin’s music. What makes this so interesting is that 90%, maybe 95% of everything that Chopin ever wrote is alive and well in the concert hall. You can’t say that about any other composer; their liveliness is based on a smaller number of pieces, and many pieces are not in the standard repertoire. But everything that Chopin wrote is in the standard repertoire – every simple prelude, every mazurka. Also, whenever you hear Chopin, he has unmistakable fingerprints. You cannot mistake his music for that of any other composer, whereas I sometimes get mixed up between Mozart and Haydn because the language is so close.

FL: If you had the chance to spend an afternoon with Fryderyk Chopin, how would you choose to spend that time?

AW: I think I would take him to a vegetarian restaurant because he didn’t like alcohol and was very careful what he ate. Then I would start a conversation with him – in my imagination, it would be in Polish. I would ask him about his childhood: Was he really born on 1 March 1810? How is it that he wrote this date later, but the church registry lists 26 February, possibly 1809? I would also ask him about his lessons with Wojciech Żywny – whether Żywny simply left him to his own devices or gave him technical advice. We know their relationship was a ‘love affair’ in the purest sense, because you can’t learn anything from a teacher you don’t love.

Above all, I would question him about his creative process: Is it true that he could not compose if he did not have a keyboard in the room? These are esoteric questions, but they would improve my work as a biographer. However, in one sense, I’m glad I will never meet Chopin. I think I would like him so much that I would be unable to apply the necessary detachment to the story.

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