Yet even that destiny is now unclear, and Kildea weaves together its many possible strands – documented and speculative – with cross-cutting virtuosity. The result is an invigorating read, brilliant for the ease with which Kildea switches between subjects, places, and even eras; for the purposes of a concise review, though, it might be clearer to consider them separately.

First, the book is in part a biography of Chopin in the last eleven years of his life, beginning from the arrival in Mallorca with his partner George Sand and her children. Poor conditions and the composer’s fragile health made for a fraught sojourn there, but, despite everything, it was a remarkably prolific time. The Bauza piano was putto good use, and sidelined only when a more superior Pleyel et Cie instrument was eventually delivered. This is one of the most vivid biographical accounts I have read of Chopin’s later life, and Kildea is especially strong on the background and scene-setting in Paris, making good use of rich material. Chopin’s Parisian life was framed neatly by two seismic political events, the July Revolution of 1830 and the Second Republic of 1848. Kildea’s eye for descriptive detail brings pre-Haussmann Paris to life, and we also follow the ailing composer on his final tour, to London (‘the abyss’, Chopin called it) and Edinburgh (not much better).

Then there are the Preludes themselves, completed during the Mallorca stay, though some had been composed earlier. Taken together, they comprise the nineteenth century’s greatest collection of piano miniatures, standing in delicate opposition to the monstrosities of Romanticism. Or do they really constitute one quite big work? (In Conversations with Arrau [1982], the great Chilean pianist tells Joseph Horowitz, ‘I never think of them as single pieces. They answer one another. When I finish one of them, I need to play the next. In a way, they are a survey of Photo of Frédéric Chopin, 1849. (credit: Wiki Commons)Chopin’s cosmos. Alternating light and shade.’) Kildea explores notions of the Preludes as a cycle, and also their tonal scheme, which can be traced back not so much to Chopin’s beloved Bach and his 48 Preludes and Fugues as to the 24 (admittedly less inspired) Preludes composed by Johann Nepomuk Hummel in Vienna while Chopin was still a toddler.

One sign of greatness in Chopin’s Preludes – recognised by such composers as Debussy and Szymanowski, who paid homage with theirs – is that the ‘genetic’ make-up of each piece is clear in its opening bars. Kildea documents how they began their independent posthumous life at Chopin’s funeral at the Madeleine in Paris on 30 October 1849, when the organist Louis Lefébure-Wély played two of them (the E minor and B minor) on the organ. He also traces their publication history, and it is Chopin’s dealings with his publishers that sometimes brought out his anti-Semitism. Although Kildea considers the musical characteristics of several of the Preludes, he omits the ‘Żydek’ (‘Little Jew’) nickname once applied to the second, A minor piece, whose strange, unsettling harmonies might today be acknowledged simply as evidence of Chopin’s adventurousness.

Kildea does offer fresh analysis of the D flat major Prelude, whose ‘Raindrop’ nickname can be traced to Sand herself, and of how it might have sounded before the advent of equal temperament – something surely unavailable on the Bauza piano. Indeed, his book distils the essential history of piano design, looking at the rivalry between Pleyel et Cie (whose ‘sonic perfume’ could be said to have influenced Chopin’s style) and such emerging names as Steinway, and of the musicians who played these and other instruments. Anton Rubinstein, Carl Tausig, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Alfred Cortot, and Arthur Rubinstein all make appearances here.

Yet the book is especially valuable for its portraits of two great women. George Sand is given positive credit for her role in Chopin’s life – the pair split in 1847 – and the novelist emerges more fully than the figure often dismissed by Chopin scholars. She lived a life beyond restrictions, a modern figure before her time.

Wanda Landowska with Chopin’s piano, Berlin, 1913. (photograph by Alexander Binder)It was the Polish early-music pioneer Wanda Landowska who, after a pilgrimage to Chopin’s monastery cell at Valldemossa in 1911, set out to acquire the ‘holy relic’ that was the Bauza piano. The story of how she first took it to Berlin and then Paris is interwoven with fascinating biographical snapshots of a musician also seen visiting Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana in Russia, and whose mother translated Mark Twain into Polish. But the harpsichordist who made the first complete recording (in 1933) of Bach’s Goldberg Variations could actually trace her musical lineage to Chopin: her teacher Aleksander Michałowski had been a pupil of Karol Mikuli, himself the most famous pupil of Chopin. (One of Mikuli’s other pupils, Raoul Koczalski, left recordings including the Preludes, that count among the most revelatory treasures of the gramophone.)

Landowska’s pedigree made her a keen promoter of Chopin’s Polishness (his father had been born in Lorraine), and she went to lengths to argue the now discredited theory that his French family had Polish roots and had changed their name from Szop or Szopa. Looking from the angle of her adopted France, Landowska was one of the first to find interesting parallels between Couperin and Chopin. (She played mostly François Couperin, but also music by his uncle Louis Couperin – a distinction lost on the book’s indexer.)

The inventory made by the Nazis when they raided Landowska’s home at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, north of Paris, makes for painful reading, but it allows Kildea to trace the Bauza piano, listed in the fifty-sixth crate. The final major strand of this book examines the spoliation of musical instruments during World War II – a much less familiar subject than the looting of art – and the story of postwar restitution. Though her collection of instruments was seemingly recovered, Landowska did not attempt to ship them to her new home in America, though there have been suggestions that the Bauza ended up there. Kildea follows the scent, especially when he picks up on a convincing yet speculative suggestion that the piano might be in a museum in Coral Gables, near the former Florida home of Landowska’s housekeeper to whom the instrument may (or may not) have been bequeathed. Though Kildea never solves the mystery, his book is nothing less than a musicological thriller.