Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The big sleep


The good news: A new photo of Frederic Chopin has been discovered.

The bad news is that it is of when he was dead.

That is the photo up above. Supposedly Chopin is lying in his coffin in the Madeleine Church in Paris. I do not think I ever knew the church Chopin was buried out of. Subsequently I did not go to it when I was in Paris. I would imagine the church was named for St. Mary Magdalene.

I did not expect the Madeleine Church to look like this. But it does!


Here is the interior where Chopin was lying when he was photographed. It looks kind of like my old church, St. Gerard's, which is now being shipped to Georgia.


Here is Gerard's, for comparison's sake.


I always thought it was kind of ghoulish that Chopin's heart was separated from his corpse at one point and brought to Warsaw. But it was, and there it still is, in Warsaw's beautiful Holy Cross Church.  


I do not get the idea that Chopin was much of a churchgoer during his life. After his death, though, he seems to have made up for lost time.

Here is a brain teaser for today, something you can think about as you go about your Tuesday.

Were you to choose an elegy for Chopin what would you choose?

Imagine you are making a movie about Chopin and you need something to play as the closing credits roll. What would it be?


That beautiful E major Etude?

So many choices.

So little time.

1 comment:

  1. Liszt's "Funerailles"?...thought by some to be a memorial to Chopin.

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