Global Times - 07.08.2019

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Wednesday August 7, 2019 LIFE


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ach Sunday, passersby
are invited to at-
tend free Chopin
piano concerts in the
Royal Baths Park
in Warsaw, in an
event that has
reached its 60th
season this year.
Young couples
lying down on
the grass, students
reading, tourists tak-
ing photos, pensioners
hiding from the sun under
the tall trees in the Royal Baths
Park in central Warsaw – everyone is
part of the audience of a regular Sun-
day concert of Chopin’s piano music
taking place for years in Warsaw. It
has become a trademark of the city,
for both tourists and locals.
The concerts take place twice a
day, at midday and at 4 pm, and the

pianists interpreting
the pieces at the foot of
the giant statue of
Chopin situated
in the park are
either renowned
Polish artists or
international
guests – this
year, coming
from Bulgaria,
Canada, France,
Hungary, Spain,
Japan, Russia,
Ukraine, the UK,
Italy and the US. This
year’s concert cycle started
on May 19 and will finish on Septem-
ber 29.
The fact that the concerts are free
and held regularly means that some
locals have taken to integrating them
in their weekend routine.
“I come here almost every week-
end, together with my sister, after we

meet at my place and have a
lunch,” 66-year old Beata Wit, a
retired teacher, told the Xinhua News
Agency while preparing to listen to
Polish pianist Marek Drewnowski on
Sunday.
“We’ve been coming for years and
it’s great to see that so many people
are joining every time. We are proud
that the music of Chopin reaches so
many people from all over the world
who visit Warsaw,” Wit said.
“We’ve lived in Warsaw for 10 years
now, and we come time and again
here to listen to classical music, to
the great Chopin, Poland’s pride and
joy,” Madalina Popescu, a Moldovan
woman who lives in Warsaw with her
family, told Xinhua.
“How privileged we are to enjoy
over and over again the creations of
this beautiful mind.”
Organized by the Stoleczna
Estrada cultural institution and the
Fryderyk Chopin Society, the concerts
have been taking place since 1959,
gathering about 80,000 viewers each
season.

Born in 1810, Fryderyk
Chopin was a Polish composer
and virtuoso pianist from the Roman-
tic age, who wrote music primarily
for the piano. His compositions are
well-known across the world.
Visitors to Warsaw run into Cho-
pin’s traces all over the city. A Chopin
museum in the old town, founded
in 1954, was refurbished in 2010
and is now one of the most modern
museums in the country, with col-
lections displayed on five levels and
the exhibition spaces – including
multimedia installations – stretching
over 15 rooms.
Since 2009, people can find 15
Chopin musical benches across
Warsaw, which give the possibility
of listening to Chopin’s music by
pressing on a button, and are located
in places where the composer used to
spend time while in the city.

Xinhua

Fans of French literary giant
Marcel Proust will soon have
the chance to read nine novel-
las from early in his career that
were only unearthed in 2018,
the Fallois publishing house
said Monday.
The nine texts by the author
of Swann’s Way were originally
to be part of his first book, Les
Plaisirs et les Jours (Pleasures
and Days), a collection of
poems and short stories pub-
lished in 1896.
But Proust, who was still


in his 20s, later decided not to
include them.
They were uncovered by the
publishing house’s founder
Bernard de Fallois, a noted
Proust specialist who died in
2018.
It will issue the collection
on October 9 under the title
The Mysterious Correspondent
and Other Unpublished Novellas.
“With this diverse collec-
tion of previously unpublished
novellas and texts, we discover
the sources of Swann’s Way,”

the house said in a statement.
Fallois had previously
discovered a Proust novel
that went unpublished in his
lifetime, Jean Santeuil, as well
as an unfinished text called
Contre Sainte-Beuve. Both were
eventually published in the
1950s.
Proust, who died in 1922 at
the age of 51, has been hugely
influential for subsequent
generations of authors, in par-
ticular for the masterpiece In
Search of Lost Time, also called

Remembrance of Things Past,
the first volume of the Swann
works.
A copy of that book, dedi-
cated by Proust to his lover,
sold at auction in December
2018 for 1.51 million euros
($1.7 million), a record for a
French book.
The newfound texts show a
young writer dabbling in new
narrative techniques while
exploring such risque themes
for the era as physical love and
homosexuality.

“Because of their audac-
ity, he probably thought they
would offend a social milieu
dominated by traditional moral
forces,” the publisher said.
The 180-page collection
will include facsimiles of the
original texts as well as analysis
and critiques.

AFP

Newly discovered Proust novellas to be published in October


Page Editor:
bimengying@
globaltimes.com.cn

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Polish composer and pianist Frederic
Chopin (1810-1849) Photos: IC
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