Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

According to the local registry of births, marriages, and deaths, Chopin was born on February 22, 1810, in Zelazowa Wola, about 28 miles from Warsaw, Poland. According to Chopin himself, he was born on March 1. The uncertainty remains unresolved, and this minor mystery has contributed to the myths that surround Chopin, the most "romantic" of Romantic composers.

Chopin was the son of a Frenchman, Mikolaj Chopin, and Tekla Justyna Kryzanowska, the companion and housekeeper to Countess Justyna Skarbek. Mikolaj was appointed tutor to the Countess's son in 1802. Tekla had lived with the Skarbeks at their estate at Zelazowa Wola since she was a girl. She was distantly related to the family, and her position in the household was one of privilege rather than service. The pair were married in 1806 and lived on the estate until 1810, when Mikolaj was offered a teaching post at the prestigious Lyceum in Warsaw, located in a great house known as the Saxon Palace. The new post afforded the family good social connections, with the intelligentsia of Warsaw and the wealthy.

As a child, Chopin's formidable talent was apparent. He was a prodigiously gifted pianist, and by the age of seven he was performing regularly both in public and in the houses and salons of aristocratic families around Warsaw. He was also a published composer. His early works, including two polonaises (Polish dances) that he wrote when he was seven, garnered public attention. He received tuition from several eminent teachers, but Chopin was essentially self-taught as a pianist, and his unorthodox and highly personal technique contributed to the way he composed. He was throughout his life a great improviser, and he would transcribe his extempore inventions-often with some difficulty. He entered Warsaw's High School of Music in 1826, and received a rigorous education in composition. When he left in 1829, Jósef Elsner, the school's rector, pronounced him "a musical genius."

At the age of 19, Warsaw seemed to have little to offer Chopin. Compared with other European capitals, Warsaw seemed limited in artistic scope. On his graduation from high school, he traveled to Vienna and gave two public concerts at which he played his own compositions. He was received rapturously, and on his return home he applied to the Education Ministry for funds to continue his studies abroad. When he was turned down, he fell into a state of despair and became reluctant to go on performing in public. This despair was intensified by his infatuation with a young Polish singer, Konstancja Gladkowska, a passion which he felt was hopeless and never made known to her.

In 1830 Chopin returned to Vienna. He intended to make the city his first on a European tour, but a week after his arrival news arrived of the November Uprising. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Warsaw had been declared the center of the Polish Kingdom, a constitutional monarchy under a "personal union" with Imperial Russia. Following repeated violations of the Polish constitution by the Russians, the Poles had become increasingly restless, and an unsuccessful assassination attempt was made on the life of the Russian Grand Duke in November 1830. The Russians responded with brute force, and the November Uprising broke out in protest against the Russian authority.

Once more, Chopin was in despair. He felt unable to return home, and friends convinced him that his contribution to the Polish cause could best be made outside Poland. Chopin was somewhat of a celebrity, and it was felt that he could fight better for Polish interests in the concert halls of Europe than on the streets of Warsaw. He remained in Vienna for eight months. As a Pole, hostilities between Russia and Poland meant that his status in the Habsburg capital was very different from before. He found concert engagements impossible to arrange, and spent most of his time composing. Understandably, his compositions took on a Polish nationalistic coloration. He gave up writing his popular salon-style polonaises, and began to explore the mazurka, a traditional Polish dance in triple time. The mazurka is a proud dance. It is performed with a mixture of noble bearing and abandonment that is felt to be very specifically "Polish," and the nine mazurkas that Chopin wrote during his months in Vienna were perfect vehicles for his passionately nationalistic feelings.

He finally left Vienna in July 1831 and traveled first to Munich, where he stayed a month, and then on to Stuttgart. It was while he was in Stuttgart that Chopin heard of the failure of the uprising. His agony of indecision was over. He could not go home. He now faced the agony of exile.

Chopin arrived in Paris in September 1831. He immediately felt at home. The French were sympathetic to the Polish cause, and Chopin met many fellow Poles in Paris. His first concert, at the Salle Playel in February 1832, drew critical acclaim. Robert Schumann, the great German composer and pianist, declared, "Hats off, gentlemen, a new genius!" For the next two years, Chopin made a very good income both as a performer and as a teacher. Although he gave public concerts, for which he wrote virtuoso pieces and music for piano and orchestra, his music was better suited to the intimacy of the private salons to which he was frequently invited to play. It was here that he perfected his mazurkas, nocturnes, and études. He was an accomplished teacher, and the series of studies, preludes, and impromptus that he produced for his students are models of refinement and control.

Chopin's life during these first few years was as settled as his life could ever be, given his emotionally volatile temperament and his constitutional weakness. He remained homesick, and feared that if he visited Poland, his passport would be confiscated. Despite these fears, he managed to spend the summer of 1835 with his family in Karlsbad. He was briefly engaged to Maria Wodzinski, the 16 year-old daughter of one of his father's former lodgers with whom Chopin had renewed contact in Dresden. It is significant that, even at this time, her mother's main concern about the union was not Maria's youth, but Chopin's health. The first signs had begun to appear of the tuberculosis that was eventually to kill him. It remained undiagnosed for several years while Chopin denied that he was seriously ill. His request for the girl's hand was eventually refused.

In 1837 at a salon in the Paris apartment of Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, Chopin met the woman who was to transform his life. But his first meeting with the aristocratic French writer Georges Sand (her real name was Amandine Lucie Aurore Dupin, Baronne Dudevant) was not promising. Chopin remarked afterwards, "What an unattractive person La Sand is. Is she really a woman?" But when they met again in April 1838, they fell in love quickly and began one of the most celebrated romantic relationships in art-their love has been the source of novels, histories, operas, plays, films, and endless speculation. It is the stuff of myth. Chopin was six years younger than Sand, and Sand remarked later that it was maternal instinct that had originally drawn her to him. They spent the winter of 1838-1839 on Majorca, Chopin writing furiously while his health deteriorated. On medical advice, they left the island in the spring for Nohant, Sand's beautiful manor house in Berry, in central France.

For the next eight years, Chopin's life followed a regular schedule: summers spent writing at Nohant, winters spent teaching and performing in Paris. Chopin and Sand had a passionate, sometimes tempestuous relationship. He was depressed and infuriated by his ill-health and often resented her nursing; she was strong-willed and assertive. Sand was the mother of two grown-up children. Her son disliked Chopin, and her daughter, Solange, adored him. After a family dispute over a broken engagement, Chopin took Solange's side when her mother threw her out of the house. Sand regarded this as a gross disloyalty, and the pair split in 1847. She wrote of it that it was "a strange conclusion to nine years of exclusive friendship." Chopin never recovered from the emotional distress, his health declined, and he died on October 17, 1849.

No great composer has written so exclusively for the piano as Chopin. While most of his work is characterised by strong, sustaining melodies, the power of his invention transformed the simple structures within which he worked-the dances, the études, the nocturnes. It is a mistake always to see the dying man in the music. Even at its most contemplative and sophisticated, Chopin's music has a fierce energy, an urgent, improvised quality that puts it on a level with the greatest piano music of Beethoven and Schumann.