大象传媒

Donald Macleod explores the music and life of Chopin, zooming in on five key places on his lifetime itinerary. Today, we're at Nohant, a bucolic oasis some 150 miles south of Paris, where Chopin's lover - and, increasingly, carer - the novelist George Sand, had - by aristocratic standards - a modest country ch芒teau. Here, over seven long summers, the composer produced much of his finest music.

If no-one's made a soap opera about Sand's household at Nohant, they should do. It would be a kind of French Upstairs, Downstairs, with squabbling servants, family tiffs, romantic intrigue and glamorous guests ... all to the soundtrack of Chopin's extraordinary music, caught in the white heat of creation, which in the words of one of those glamorous guests, the painter Eug猫ne Delacroix, "would waft over us from the windows opening onto the garden, while he worked away; the music mingling with the singing of the nightingales and the scent of the roses". Over the years, the cracks began to appear in Chopin's relationship with Sand, and it eventually crumbled - unlike the house at Nohant, which is now preserved as a national monument.