A wonderful book about music, musicians, cultural similarities and differences, the blood and gore of revolutionary times and the compensations of high art. Kildea writes with elegance and wit, and displays the kind of scholarship that does not come from simply mugging up on a few books. ... A book that will, amongst other things, send the reader back with fresh ears to the delightful, tormented Pole, and hear the music he composed on a borrowed piano in a monastery cell in Mallorca one terrible winter -- Michael Henderson ? The TimesChopin's Piano takes the motif of this piano - "Out of date before it was completed"; its maker Juan Bauza unknown and possibly an amateur - and uses it to tie together various narrative strands in an original, constantly interesting format. As it does it tells the story of Chopin's work, the development of piano making, and how music became inextricably linked to atrocities in the 20th century. -- Jonathan McAloon ? Financial TimesAn episodic, picaresque tale, woven confidently - at times even pacily - by Kildea. He writes knowledgeably and approachably about music and sympathetically about his cast of characters. It is the story of an obsession, but it manages not to feel obsessional. ... I enjoyed it very much. -- Alan Rusbridger ? Spectator Biografía del autor Paul Kildea holds an honours degree in piano performance and a masters degree in musicology from The University of Melbourne - where he is now an Honorary Principal Fellow and where in 2016 he was Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow - and a doctorate from Oxford University. His books include Selling Britten and Britten on Music. In January 2013 Penguin published Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century to enormous critical acclaim; it is now widely recognized as the best book on its subject, the Financial Times calling it 'unquestionably the music book of the year.' In June 2018 Penguin published Chopin's Piano: A Journey Through Romanticism, which is currently being developed as a feature film. In October 2019 he succeeded Carl Vine as Artistic Director of Musica Viva, Australia.