19 November, 6.30 pm

Moritz Weber’s feature for Swiss public radio on the love letters of the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin to men attracted considerable attention. Now he follows it up with a voluminous study. Chopin supposedly loved men? Until now, the piano virtuoso and composer was regarded as a darling of women. Didn’t he have an affair with George Sand? And now Chopin is suddenly supposed to be gay?

Moritz Weber pursues these questions with meticulous research and philological rigor. In doing so, he reveals that Chopin addressed a great number of love letters exclusively to men. Not only to his childhood friend and life companion Tytus Sylwester Woyciechowski, but also to a number of other men, Chopin directs ardent declarations of love.

Merely romantic exuberance? Not at all. Weber places these personal testimonies in relation to a detailed reconstruction of homosexual life in the first half of the 19th century, lays bare the networks of relationships in and around Chopin, and uncovers the efforts at concealment made by an entire cohort of Chopin biographers. In some cases, editions of the letters were sanitized, or in translations of the letters, originally male pronouns suddenly became female ones, in order to disguise the true addressees of Chopin’s declarations of love.

Moritz Weber’s biography, at over 500 pages, carries considerable explosive force and is sure to cause quite a stir in the conservative music world.

We are pleased to present this sensational work at Qwien.