Józef Sikorski’s “Recollection of Chopin”: The Earliest Essay on Chopin and His Music

This chapter focuses on “Recollection of Chopin” by Józef Sikorski, the earliest extended essay on the composer's life and works. The author's emotional language captures the immediacy and poignancy of the response to the news of Chopin's death in the composer's Warsaw circles. A close reading, however, also reveals striking similarities between Sikorski's effusive prose and the overlapping metaphoric vocabularies of German Idealism and Polish political messianism: the figurative language is deployed to locate Chopin and his artistic achievement within these two philosophical frameworks. Moreover, Sikorski was among the first critics to offer perceptive analytical observations on Chopin's compositional strategies and his innovative musical language.