1810–1849 · France, Russia · Romantic
Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) was a Polish composer and piano virtuoso of the Romantic era who devoted almost his entire output to that one instrument. He reimagined Polish folk dances — the mazurka and the polonaise — and became the founder of the piano ballade as a genre. His études, nocturnes and waltzes still anchor the repertoire of music-school students today.
The composer's father, Nicolas Chopin, moved from France to Poland in 1787: at first he worked at a tobacco factory, then took up tutoring within a household, and from 1802 he became tutor to the children of Count Skarbek on his estate at Żelazowa Wola. In 1806 he married Justyna Krzyżanowska, a distant relative of the Skarbeks who served as their housekeeper; her family was old but not wealthy. It was on that estate that Frédéric came into the world on 1 March 1810 (some sources give 22 February).
The composer's mother was well educated, spoke fluent French, sang beautifully and played the piano wonderfully — it was from her that Frédéric got his first musical impressions and his love of folk melodies. The family had four children: besides Frédéric, three sisters. The eldest, Ludwika, became his closest friend for life, while Emilia, who died young, showed an exceptional literary gift.
In the autumn of 1810 Nicolas Chopin secured a teaching position at the Warsaw Lyceum, giving lessons in French, and moved the family there; he and his wife also kept a boarding house for the school's pupils. The Chopins lived inside the palace that housed it.
According to family legend, his father once found three-year-old Frédéric at the piano at night: the boy was picking out a dance tune his mother had played for the boarders that day, and explained that he wanted to take her place if she grew tired. His first music teacher was his elder sister Ludwika.
From 1816, Frédéric was taught music by the Czech-born pianist Wojciech Żywny. Żywny considered himself a follower of the Bach tradition and above all introduced his pupil to the works of Bach, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven — a reverence for Bach that Chopin kept for the rest of his life. At the end of February 1818, aged eight, the boy gave his first public performance, playing a concerto by the Viennese composer Gyrowetz, and was thereafter invited to the homes of family friends and to aristocratic salons.
A year later, the Italian singer Angelica Catalani, moved by the boy's playing, gave him an engraved gold watch. And by the age of twelve Żywny declared that he could no longer teach him anything: the young Chopin's skill was already equal to that of Poland's finest pianists.
Chopin's first published composition was a Polonaise in G minor, printed in 1817: Żywny himself probably had to write it down and edit it, since its seven-year-old author did not yet know musical notation.
From 1823 to 1826 Chopin attended the same Warsaw Lyceum where his father taught. The exact sciences held no interest for him, but he took a lively interest in the history of Poland and in literature; in the evenings he liked to "tell" the country's history at the piano.
From the age of twelve, in 1822, Chopin took private lessons in music theory from the composer Józef Elsner, a family friend, and in 1826 moved to Elsner's Higher School of Music. Elsner called his pupil a "musical genius" and did not confine him with strict rules, basing his teaching on the material of Polish folk song.
Among his schoolfriends were future musicians and composers — Tytus Woyciechowski, Julian Fontana and others; in orchestral and choral composition Chopin sometimes fell short of his classmates, but as a pianist he had no equal. Trips to Berlin, Dresden and Prague, where he heard leading musicians and frequented opera houses and picture galleries, broadened his horizons.
During his studies, in 1825, Chopin gave an improvised recital on an unusual instrument, the aeolopantaleon, while Tsar Alexander I was visiting Warsaw; in gratitude, the Tsar gave him a diamond ring.
Chopin's artistic career began in 1829 with a concert tour to Vienna: the press called him a "new star of the north" and a "brilliant meteor on the musical horizon". After a brief return to Warsaw, in November 1830 he left his home city — as it turned out, forever.
Soon after he left, an uprising for independence broke out in Poland. Chopin was ready to return and take part in the struggle, but on the way he learned that the uprising had been crushed and its leader taken prisoner. Travelling through Dresden, Vienna, Munich and Stuttgart, he reached Paris in 1831. He poured out his distress in the diary he kept in Stuttgart, writing, in his belief that his music would help his people, "Poland will be splendid, mighty, independent!" It was in this anxious time that his famous "Revolutionary" Étude was composed.
Chopin gave his first public concert in Paris in February 1832 at the Salle Pleyel, and it was an immediate success. Even so, he performed in public rarely, preferring to play in the salons of the Polish émigré community and the French aristocracy, where his fame grew rapidly. The celebrated Kalkbrenner thought highly of his pianism: he even offered to give Chopin lessons, though these soon stopped, while the friendship between the two musicians continued for many years afterwards.
In Paris, Chopin grew close to musicians of his own circle — the pianist Ferdinand Hiller, the cellist Franchomme, and others — and kept up acquaintance with the era's major composers: Mendelssohn, Bellini, Liszt, Berlioz and Schumann.
In time Chopin himself began to teach piano playing and, unlike many great artists of his era, approached this work with genuine warmth, devoting considerable effort and time to it.
In 1837 Chopin suffered the first symptoms of a lung illness, most likely tuberculosis. Around this time he met the writer George Sand, and a romance began between them: for his sake she broke off all her previous ties. On doctors' advice, the couple spent much time in a warm climate.
But the rainy season on Mallorca, where they had settled in an old monastery, worsened his illness: Chopin was overcome by deep melancholy and auditory hallucinations, while George Sand carefully followed every doctor's instruction in caring for him. It was on Mallorca that, among other works, the 24 Preludes were written. After returning to France, at Sand's estate in Nohant, Chopin's health improved, and there he composed his Sonata in B minor and a number of nocturnes and mazurkas.
In October 1839 Chopin returned to Paris to be closer to Sand, and in the following years wrote his second and third ballades, three polonaises, a scherzo and new nocturnes. Ten years of his relationship with George Sand were not easy for him, and the 1847 breakup, which cost him his refuge at Nohant, was a heavy blow.
Wanting a change of surroundings, in April 1848 Chopin set off for London to give concerts and lessons; the trip turned out to be his last journey, and on 16 November 1848 he gave his final public concert, in London.
At the end of November 1848 he returned to Paris; his health kept deteriorating, and in June 1849 his sister Ludwika arrived with her husband and daughter to be with him. From September he lived at a hotel on Place Vendôme. On the night of 17 October 1849 Chopin died at the age of 39; when a doctor asked whether he was suffering greatly, the composer answered, "No more".
The funeral was delayed by nearly two weeks and took place on 30 October at the Madeleine church in Paris; admission was by ticket only, and more than three thousand people who had come from London, Berlin and Vienna to bid him farewell could not get inside. Mozart's Requiem was performed at the ceremony, and the funeral procession to Père Lachaise cemetery was led by Prince Adam Czartoryski; among the pallbearers were the painter Eugène Delacroix and the cellist Auguste Franchomme.
His tombstone, depicting the muse Euterpe mourning a broken lyre, was created by the sculptor Auguste Clésinger, paid for by Chopin's friend Jane Stirling. At his own request, his sister Ludwika took the composer's heart to Poland, and it is still kept inside a column of the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw. The death certificate listed tuberculosis as the official cause, though researchers have proposed other theories; a 2014 examination of the preserved heart suggested his death may have been caused by a rare case of pericarditis, a complication of chronic tuberculosis.
Chopin devoted almost his entire output to the piano — beyond it, he wrote only two orchestral concertos and a handful of songs. He reimagined genres that already existed: he revived the prelude on a Romantic basis, brought poetry and drama into the mazurka and the waltz, and turned the scherzo from a light piece into an independent concert work. In doing so he enriched piano texture and harmony, combining the rigour of classical form with melodic richness and a lively imagination.
A substantial part of Chopin's output draws on Polish folklore: the mazurka, once a simple folk dance, became a full concert genre under his pen. One scholar of Chopin's music considers his waltzes the most personal, diary-like genre in his output — so closely are they tied to events in his own life.
The site holds nearly the complete set of Chopin's Preludes, Op. 28 — a genre he gave a new, Romantic voice — along with a selection of his études: the A minor and C minor études of Op. 10, the F minor Op. 10 No. 9, the A-flat major Op. 25 No. 1, and the F minor étude from the Trois Nouvelles Études. In his études Chopin, beyond mere technique, opened up a whole poetic world: some breathe youthful freshness, others carry dramatic intensity.
Also on the site are nocturnes, including the E minor Op. 72 No. 1 and the D-flat major Op. 27, the mazurkas Op. 6 No. 1 and Op. 33 No. 1, the B minor Waltz Op. 69 No. 2, and one of Chopin's best-known works, the Fantaisie-Impromptu in C-sharp minor.
A rare item in the catalogue is a pair of songs for voice and piano set to Polish words, Wiosna and Życzenie: Franz Liszt later arranged them for piano together with other Polish songs by Chopin, under the titles Spring and Wish.
Chopin's piano works are technically demanding and call for a well-developed sense of nuance — contemporaries noted the same qualities in his own playing. A beginner might start, for instance, with the Prelude Op. 28 No. 2 or the F minor étude from the Trois Nouvelles Études; a more advanced player with the Prelude Op. 28 No. 1 or the C minor étude Op. 10 No. 12. Chopin's works remain one of the main benchmarks of the piano repertoire today: an international piano competition devoted entirely to his music has been held regularly in Warsaw since 1927.