Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric Chopin was a Polish composer and pianist of the early Romantic era who wrote almost entirely for the piano. Raised in Warsaw, he left Poland at 20, shortly before a failed national uprising against Russian rule, and spent the rest of his short life in Paris. His mazurkas, polonaises, nocturnes, études and ballades widened what the piano could do, and his use of Polish dance forms made him a symbol of a nation without a state.

Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin was born at Żelazowa Wola, west of Warsaw, in the Duchy of Warsaw, a Polish state created by Napoleon. The family used 1 March 1810 as his birthday, now generally accepted, although his baptismal record gives 22 February. His father, Nicolas, was a Frenchman from Lorraine who had settled in Poland and insisted that Polish be spoken at home. In October 1810 the family moved to Warsaw, where Nicolas taught French at the Warsaw Lyceum.

Chopin was a child prodigy. He studied piano from 1816 with Wojciech Żywny, gave public concerts by the age of seven and composed two polonaises in 1817. Warsaw was by then under Russian rule, and as a boy he played for its Russian ruler, Grand Duke Konstantin, and in 1825 for Tsar Alexander I, who gave him a diamond ring. From 1826 he studied composition with Józef Elsner at the Warsaw Conservatory.

After a successful debut in Vienna in 1829, on 2 November 1830 he left Warsaw again with plans to continue to Italy. Later that month the November Uprising broke out in Warsaw. In September 1831, travelling west, he learned that it had been crushed. He reached Paris on 5 October 1831 and never returned home, becoming one of the many Polish exiles of the Great Emigration.

Robert Schumann greeted Chopin's early variations in print in December 1831 with the words "Hats off, gentlemen! A genius." Chopin's Paris debut in February 1832 was much admired, and within a year, helped by the patronage of the Rothschild family, he was earning a good income from publishing and from teaching wealthy pupils. He disliked large concerts and gave only about thirty public performances in his lifetime, preferring aristocratic salons and small gatherings at home. His circle included Liszt, Berlioz, the painter Eugène Delacroix and the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. He took French citizenship in 1835 but continued to think of himself as a Pole.

A planned marriage to Maria Wodzińska fell through in 1837, and by 1838 Chopin had begun a relationship with the French novelist George Sand. They spent the winter of 1838–39 on Mallorca, where, despite cold lodgings in a former monastery and worsening illness, he completed his 24 Preludes. For most summers until 1846 they stayed at Sand's country house at Nohant, where he composed many major works. His health declined from 1842, and the relationship ended in 1847 after quarrels involving Sand's children.

As the Revolutions of 1848 shook Paris, Chopin gave his last Paris concert in February and in April left for Britain, on a tour arranged and largely funded by his Scottish pupil Jane Stirling. He played in London, before Queen Victoria among others, and in Scotland. His last public appearance, in London that November, was a benefit for Polish refugees. Gravely ill, he returned to Paris and died there on 17 October 1849, aged 39. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, and his sister carried his heart back to Warsaw.

Schumann famously described Chopin's works as cannon buried in flowers, and later generations in Poland heard his music as a voice of national endurance. Composers from Liszt and Debussy to Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Rachmaninoff learned from his harmony and his use of national idioms. Since 1927 Warsaw has hosted the International Chopin Piano Competition every five years.

Our 1815 map shows the partitioned Polish lands, with Warsaw under the Russian Empire in the year of Napoleon's defeat; no map year falls during Chopin's Paris decades, so the 1815 map also serves for the France he made his home.