I’m listening to Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor (not the familiar Opus 27 No. 1 but the earlier one) on the floor of my living room. I’m listening to it trip and flit, unfold in delicate and urgent jolts between closed windows and drawn blinds that glow with morning sun. There is only one piano — one set of hands working one set of fingers on one set of keys — and yet the room is full, saturated with what the music carries: traces of possibility, roads that lead out my door.

But for all of the piece’s power to transport, I can’t imagine what it sounded like when Wladyslaw Szpilman played it in his Warsaw Ghetto attic before the end of the German Occupation. I can’t imagine what it sounded like on an out-of-tune piano with his frozen, brittle fingers playing it at the command of a German officer. In Szpilman’s memoir The Pianist, which is the basis for Roman Polanski’s new film, the piece is a musical boomerang: it leaves the piano and floats across the street into the ghetto’s ruins, then returns back to Szpilman as something else, something that is not music, not Chopin, but "a muted, melancholy echo." There was silence before he played it, but the silence after was something else, something far more alarming, because this new silence had a price. He was, as he put it, buying his life by playing the piano.

Szpilman’s performance of the Nocturne in C-sharp minor as he recounts it in The Pianist is disruptive because the work’s slow and stirring warmth spills across a place that for more than three terrifying years had been the murderous icy opposite — an expanding graveyard blanketed with bodies, rubble, ashes, and the refuse of lives lost. "The feathers of slashed pillows clogged the gutter," he writes. "Every breath of wind raised great clouds of them, eddying in the air like a thick snowfall in reverse, going from earth to sky."

Szpilman’s rebirthing of Chopin in the tomb of Warsaw echoes decades later in "El pianista del Gueto de Varsovia" ("The Pianist of the Warsaw Ghetto"), a song for Szpilman by the Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler. Drexler is not Polish and not a piano player, but he is a displaced Jew (a Latin American living in Madrid), and his German-Jewish grandfather escaped Hitler’s Berlin when Drexler’s father was four. Drexler’s song, which appears on his most recent album, Sea (Virgin), brings Szpilman back to life. "If you were your nephew," Drexler sings to Szpilman, "and I were your grandfather, perhaps you would tell my story." But instead Drexler tells Szpilman’s story — the story of music refusing death and endowing strength and unimpeachable will. At the end of the song he even fades out his own guitars and sequencers and lets a distant fragment of Chopin play.

Drexler’s Szpilman ode is part of what he’s been doing for six albums now: making music about memory. He gets at memories through motifs and metaphors that he repeats and recycles, whether he is writing about heart or homeland. There is always sand and shooting stars, and there are always roads, which usually lead to the sea and its breezes. On "730 Días," from his 1996 album Vaivén (EMI), Drexler sings of a house that is a sandbox, a testament to a lost friend that is full of grains of memory, each corner of it bringing back his ghost. On Sea’s "Un país con el nombre de un río" ("A Country with the Name of a River"), it is not sand but the sea that takes him back to where he wants to be. "The smell of wet earth, the breeze of the sea" he sings, "carry me to my home."

But for Drexler, it is in music where memory dwells the most. His long-ago winds carry guitars and voices, his ancient rains boleros and waltzes. On 1999’s Frontera (Virgin), he recorded "Memoria de cuero" ("Memory of Leather"), which told the story of his family’s flight from WW2 Germany through the leather of drums in the bowels of cargo ships. The boat that carried his grandfather was tossed from Jamaica to Brazil to Uruguay to Argentina until it was allowed to dock in Bolivia. From the music to the leather to the ship to his grandfather — a chain of memory linked between sea and sky.

Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor leads off the Sony soundtrack to Polanski’s film. The CD includes eight Chopin compositions played by Polish pianist Janusz Olejniczak, and as stirring as his take on the Nocturne is, the album’s most haunting section is its final four minutes — Szpilman’s own performance of the Mazurka in A minor Opus 17 No. 4. This was recorded in 1948 in Warsaw, and Szpilman’s light dancing over the piano’s keys breaks through the spinning disc’s shroud of crackle and hiss. It was only three years earlier that Szpilman was back in his attic bunker, playing Chopin in the shadow of a uniform. The difference those years make is the difference between Szpilman and Drexler, the difference between the music of experience and the music of memory.