The Scot, known as Chopin’s Widow, who dedicated her life to composer

(Sparsile, £20.99)

Frédéric Chopin’s nine-year affair with author George Sand is the stuff of legend. Less well known is his relationship with Jane Stirling of Perthshire.

Infatuated with her superstar piano teacher, she dedicated the rest of her life to him, shepherding him through a tour of England and Scotland, paying off his debts, bankrolling his magnificent funeral, preparing his scores for publication and setting up a Chopin museum in Calder House outside Livingston. Despite the composer’s complete lack of romantic interest in her, Parisian society dubbed her “Chopin’s Widow”.

Christopher Rush’s exhaustively researched novel is a collection of journal entries, letters and reminiscences supposedly assembled by Miss Stirling for a Chopin biography she died before completing.

My copy doesn’t include notes or bibliography, so I can’t say how much is based directly on the writings of his contemporaries and how much is the product of Rush’s piercingly perceptive imagination. But Nocturne reads like an extraordinarily intimate portrait of a man, told through the recollections of Miss Stirling and many others, including Chopin’s closest friend, the painter Delacroix, piano manufacturer Camille Pleyel, Liszt, Balzac, Solange Clésinger, the closest thing he had to a daughter, and inevitably George Sand, who clearly feels she’s entitled to the last word (she doesn’t get it).

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Chopin’s own voice rings out most resonantly in Abbé Aleksander Jelowski’s account of the composer’s marathon four-day deathbed confession, a spiritual journey through his past in which he is wracked with guilt for his sins.

Rush’s writing is so persuasive, the memories of his subjects so personal, thoughtful and deeply felt, that one frequently feels like an eavesdropper on the gossip of the Paris salons, with all their sniping, jealousy and pettiness.

Chopin was a complex individual, and through the lenses of his various contemporaries, his foibles and contradictions slide into sharp, unsparing focus. He was a man who considered himself a Pole first and foremost, plagued with guilt for abandoning his homeland and cutting off his father, but who couldn’t quit the Parisian society where he earned his living and basked in adoration.

A man who craved company, though it quickly took its toll on him. Welcomed in the salons for his “honesty and freedom from affectation and conceit”, he was also distant and guarded, and a fussy and demanding man with expensive tastes. A man who never married, but put himself through a long, unhealthy relationship with George Sand.

The presence of death in Nocturne is inescapable. Not only because it begins with Chopin’s funeral, but because his sickness and frailty, the ever-present threat of consumption, left neither the composer nor his friends under any illusion that he was destined for a long life. His existence was defined by the proximity of death, his casual acceptance that the end of the road was just over the horizon.

Nocturne, by Christopher Rush (Image: free)

Though they see different sides of Chopin, his friends and acquaintances speak with one voice when it comes to his music, their descriptions of the transcendence invoked by the touch of his fingers on the keys of a piano suggesting they had never heard their own awareness of their mortality so profoundly expressed.

Miss Stirling is typically effusive: “That is how Chopin played, probing the emptiness. With every key he struck, a dear friend flitted away from you and the shadows took him. Or her. Every phrase was a dying fall. Every soul was remembered. He made you scent the sweet corruption of man, on which the angels feed, their lips drunk with the honey of life.”

His friend and rival Liszt says simply, he “spoke to the soul”.