Chapter One: In a Word, Poland ONE In a Word, Poland "All the contemporary assaults upon society date from the partition of Poland. The partition of Poland is a theorem of which all the present political crimes are corollaries. When you examine the list of modern treasons, that appears first of all." VICTOR HUGO, Les Miserables One morning in 2010, the official "Year of Chopin," a young Polish entrepreneur woke up with an idea that was crazy but wonderful: Frédéric Chopin could return from the grave and save the world from itself. As a creator of video games he had all the tools to make it happen, and that day Zbigniew Debicki, known as Zibi to friends, put his team to work. Artists and animators worked with writers and programmers to develop a storyline and graphic landscape. Musicians selected, then remixed, a dozen compositions--polonaises, nocturnes, mazurkas, waltzes, études, songs--into mashups with contemporary formats: reggae, rap, country, rock, and chiptune, a form of synthesized electronic music. The game opens with an animation in black-and-white as Chopin, dressed in tailcoat and cravat, awakens in his grave at Père Lachaise.

Moments later the graphics turn to color as the confused composer passes through the cemetery gates into noisy, twenty-first-century Paris, where he is greeted by three Muses. They present him with special artifacts, including his own grand piano (now pocket-size) and a magical horse-drawn carriage that will take him home to Poland. This is the game''s ultimate goal, for while Chopin''s body was buried in Paris, his heart was removed after he died in 1849 and smuggled by his sister across a heavily guarded border into Warsaw, where it was eventually interred in the pillar of a Catholic church. The title of Zibi''s game is Frederic: The Resurrection of Music , and its premise is that the world has lost its collective soul, thanks to the greed and creative bankruptcy of modern content creators for whom music is just one bullet point in a marketing strategy designed to craft brand image and sell product. We are all surrounded by this soulless stuff, and only one man can save us. The gamer''s task is to escape the mind-numbing stereotypes of contemporary commercial music; Chopin''s is to finally return to his homeland. Along the way the two of you must engage in a series of musical duels against all manner of opponents, from a Jamaican Rasta man to a New York City gangbanger, until finally you come face-to-face with Mastermind X, the evil worldwide producer who owns every musician and cares only about money and power. The funeral march from Opus 35 appears in a country-western-techno remix when Chopin finds himself in a deserted cowboy town, forced to duel with the local sheriff at high noon.

The game''s interface is a piano keyboard, and during each battle musical notes fly fast and furious toward the gamer, whose job is to hit them with the cursor as they land on the keyboard, thereby gaining points. It''s clear that whoever designed this game was a pianist, because basic keyboard technique--skills I learned once I had mastered scales and arpeggios--serve the player well by netting higher points. The more musical you are, it turns out, the better you will perform against the bad guys. For example: if you hit a flying note in just the right spot on the key, which on a real piano would elicit a highly coveted rich, singing tone, you''ll get a 10 instead of a 7. Artfully sliding your finger from one key to another--a technique scholars cite as one of Chopin''s keyboard innovations--gains even more points. The Help section includes a tip that will resonate with any musician, reminding us that "the key to success is not faith in your eyes but your ears ." If I had a dotted quarter note for every time my teacher told me to make better use of my ears at the keyboard, I could write a symphony. The gamer''s keyboard in Frederic: The Resurrection of Music .

Frederic is one of a handful of Chopin video games available today on multiple platforms, from Nintendo to iPhone, but it''s the only one that puts music at the center of play. And it''s not just about melodies and techniques; it''s also ideas that animate the experience, beginning with Chopin''s painful self-exile from his homeland, a theme that''s introduced in the opening moments back in Père Lachaise. Thinking there were worse (or certainly more predictable) ways of exploring Chopin''s Polish roots, I emailed Zibi to see if he would speak with me. Most of all I wanted to know why, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a young software developer would choose Frédéric Chopin, of all people, as an international superhero. Frederic is hard to master if you''re over fifteen, but it''s strangely addictive, and because I wanted to find out what happens in the end, I was highly motivated to complete all the duels. Chopin does make it home to Poland, but there''s an interesting twist that Zibi explained to me via Skype from his home in Gdansk. "First," he promised, "you will fail against Mastermind X in the final duel. Every player does, it''s built into the game.

" Your loss creates a sense of doom and unhappiness; meanwhile, Mastermind X revels in triumph, brandishing his contracts. But then the Muses return and tell you that this time you must play the music that comes from your own heart. Finally, in one last duel, you and Frederic defeat Mastermind X. He gives back the contracts, frees the musicians, and disappears forever. The art of soulful music has been saved, and Chopin is home at last. These themes of homelessness, yearning, and redemption through music are among the key threads in the story of Chopin, and since his death have formed the basis of his long, enduring cultural legacy. His music and his life, Zibi told me, "tell a very hard story about my country," one that continues to resonate today in powerful ways. What''s unusual about Frederic the video game is the way the designers chose to represent Chopin: not as the weak, sickly, tragic figure that has become a common trope but as a clever superman with nimble strength, artistic independence, and vanquishing power.

"It''s crazy, I know," Zibi kept saying during our conversation, the idea that Chopin is a musical zombie and my iPad a magical piano. But what better way to bust up the musical and cultural stereotypes of our times than by reanimating old forms and creating unexpected surprises? After all, that''s what Chopin himself did. The "very hard story" of Poland is often told through music, a tradition that predates Chopin by many centuries. You can experience it for yourself any day in Kraków''s main market square, where, if you hang around for at least an hour, you''ll hear a trumpet call sounding from the top of the fourteenth-century St. Mary''s Basilica. Actually, you''ll hear it four times: a plaintive melody that ends as abruptly as it begins, mid-note. Look up at the tower and you''ll see the bell of a trumpet emerging, first from a window facing west, toward Wawel Castle in honor of Poland''s kings and heroes, and then three more times as the trumpeter makes his way around the points of the compass. Down below, tourists flock with cell phones and wave to the tower.

Usually the trumpeter--a member of Kraków''s fire brigade in dress uniform--waves back. The call is made every hour on the hour, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The melody the bugler plays is known as the Hejnal Mariacki ; it consists of just thirty-three notes, but it''s never played through to the end; the final cadence is always cut off in a sharp, unmelodious way. The reason for the broken note dates to a legend from the thirteenth century, when the cupola of St. Mary''s was a watchtower manned around the clock by a guardian with a bugle. Every morning he woke the residents of Kraków with his call; throughout the day he alerted them to the opening and closing of the city''s gates, signaling the arrival of an important visitor, and his job was also to warn the community of fire and foreign invasion. In 1241 an army of Mongol warriors known as "the scourge of God" rode from the steppes of Central Asia into modern-day Poland, where they razed village after village, killing all or most of the inhabitants. Before they reached the gates of Kraków, so the legend goes, the bugler atop St.

Mary''s sounded the alert, blowing his horn until an enemy arrow pierced him through the throat and stopped his call mid-note. His warning allowed many of the town burghers to escape without harm, and in tribute to the fallen musician the survivors endowed a city fund to pay a trumpeter full-time. The first mention of an hourly bugle call comes from the mid-fifteenth century, and the playing of the Hejnal with the broken note has endured since sometime in the seventeenth. In 1927 Polish Radio began broadcasting the noon call and claims it to be "the longest running serial broadcast on Earth," one that sounded through the years of Nazi occupation in World War II, the fall of Communism under the Solidarity movement in the 1980s, and the rise of a new right-wing party, Law and Justice, that assumed power in 2015. It is still, as historian Norman Davies observed, a reminder to millions of listeners "both of the ancient pedigree of Polish culture and of Poland''s exposed location. one of the few active mementoes of Genghis Khan, and the irruption of his horsemen into the heart.