Frédéric François Chopin, born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, was a Polish-French composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era, who wrote primarily for solo piano.
Background
Frédéric Chopin was born on March 1, 1810, in the small village of Zelazowa Wola, Duchy of Warsaw (now Poland), the second of four children of Nicolas Chopin, a French émigré in Poland, who was employed as a tutor to various aristocratic families, and Justyna Krzyżanowska, a poor relative of the Skarbeks, one of the families for whom Nicolas worked.
Education
Young Chopin had a good education and studied music privately with Joseph Elsner, founder and director of the Warsaw Conservatory. In 1817 Chopin's first composition was performed publicly; a year later he himself performed in public, playing a concerto by Adalbert Gyrowetz.
From September 1823 to 1826, Chopin attended the Warsaw Lyceum, where he received organ lessons from the Czech musician Wilhelm Würfel during his first year.
By 1826, he had composed several piano pieces in different styles, and his parents enrolled him in the Warsaw Conservatory of Music, where he studied for three years under Polish composer Josef Elsner.
Career
Despite the lively musical life of Warsaw, Chopin urgently needed wider musical experience, and so his devoted parents found the money to send him off to Vienna. After a preliminary expedition to Berlin in 1828, Chopin visited Vienna and made his performance debut there in 1829. A second concert confirmed his success, and on his return home he prepared himself for further achievements abroad by writing his Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor (1829) and his Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor (1830), as well as other works for piano and orchestra designed to exploit his brilliantly original piano style. His first études were also written at this time (1829 - 1832) to enable him and others to master the technical difficulties in his new style of piano playing.
In March and October 1830 he presented his new works to the Warsaw public and then left Poland with the intention of visiting Germany and Italy for further study. He had gone no farther than Vienna when news reached him of the Polish revolt against Russian rule; this event, added to the disturbed state of Europe, caused him to remain profitlessly in Vienna until the following July, when he decided to make his way to Paris. Soon after his arrival in what was then the centre of European culture and in the midst of its own late-flowering Romantic movement, Chopin realized that he had found the milieu in which his genius could flourish. He quickly established ties with many Polish émigrés and with a younger generation of composers, including Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz and, briefly, Vincenzo Bellini and Felix Mendelssohn. The circles to which Chopin’s talents and distinction admitted him quickly acknowledged that they had found the artist whom the moment required, and after a brief period of uncertainty Chopin settled down to the main business of his life - teaching and composing. His high income from these sources set him free from the strain of concert giving, to which he had an innate repugnance.
Initially, there were problems, professional and financial. After his Paris concert debut in February 1832, Chopin realized that his extreme delicacy at the keyboard was not to everyone’s taste in larger concert spaces. But an introduction to the wealthy Rothschild banking family later that year suddenly opened up new horizons. With his elegant manners, fastidious dress, and innate sensitivity, Chopin found himself a favourite in the great houses of Paris, both as a recitalist and as a teacher. His new piano works at this time included two startlingly poetic books of études (1829 - 1836), the Ballade in G Minor (1831 - 1835), the Fantaisie-Impromptu (1835), and many smaller pieces, among them mazurkas and polonaises inspired by Chopin’s strong nationalist feeling.
In 1838 he set off to winter on the island of Majorca. He rented a simple villa and was idyllically happy until the sunny weather broke and Chopin became ill. When rumours of tuberculosis reached the villa owner, he was ordered out and could find accommodations only in a monastery in the remote village of Valldemosa.
The cold and damp, malnutrition, peasant suspiciousness of their strange ménage, and the lack of a suitable concert piano hindered Chopin’s artistic production and further weakened his precarious physical health. Indeed, the privations that Chopin endured hastened the slow decline in his health that ended with his death from tuberculosis 10 years later. He realized that only immediate departure would save his life. Chopin arrived at Marseille in early March 1839, and, thanks to a skilled physician, Chopin was sufficiently recovered after just under three months for them to start planning a return to Paris.
The summer of 1839 he spent at Nohant, about 180 miles (290 km) south of Paris. This period following the return from Majorca was to be the happiest and most productive of Chopin’s life, and the long summers spent at Nohant bore fruit in a succession of masterpieces. For a regular source of income, he again turned to private teaching. His method permitted great flexibility of the wrist and arm and daringly unconventional fingering in the interests of greater agility, with the production of beautiful, singing tone a prime requisite at nearly all times. There was also a growing demand for his new works, and, since he had become increasingly shrewd in his dealings with publishers, he could afford to live elegantly.
Health was a recurrent worry, and every summer he went to Nohant for fresh air and relaxation. Close friends, such as Pauline Viardot and the painter Eugène Delacroix, were often invited too. Chopin produced much of his most-searching music at Nohant, not only miniatures but also extended works, such as the Fantaisie in F Minor (composed 1840 - 1841), the Barcarolle (1845 - 1846), the Polonaise-Fantaisie (1845 - 1846), the ballades in A-flat major (1840 - 1841) and F minor (1842), and the Sonata in B Minor (1844). Here, in the country, he found the peace and time to indulge an ingrained quest for perfection. He seemed particularly anxious to develop his ideas into longer and more-complex arguments, and he even sent to Paris for treatises by musicologists to strengthen his counterpoint. His harmonic vocabulary at this period also grew much more daring, though never at the cost of sensuous beauty.
Broken in spirit and depressed by the revolution that had broken out in Paris in February 1848, Chopin accepted an invitation to visit England and Scotland. His reception in London was enthusiastic, and he struggled through an exhausting round of lessons and appearances at fashionable parties. Chopin lacked the strength to sustain this socializing, however, and he was also unable to compose. By now his health was deteriorating rapidly, and he made his last public appearance on a concert platform at the Guildhall in London on November 16, 1848, when, in a final patriotic gesture, he played for the benefit of Polish refugees. He returned to Paris, where he died on October 17, 1849; his body, without the heart, was buried at the cemetery of Père Lachaise (his heart was interred at the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw).
Quotations:
"Simplicity is the highest goal, achievable when you have overcome all difficulties."
"Nothing is more odious than music without hidden meaning."
"Oh, how miserable it is to have no one to share your sorrows and joys, and, when your heart is heavy, to have no soul to whom you can pour out your woes."
"Man is never always happy, and very often only a brief period of happiness is granted him in this world; so why escape from this dream which cannot last long?"
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
According to the personal description data entered in a passport issued to Frédéric Chopin on July 7, 1837, in connection with his visit to London: his eyes were grey-blue, his hair, brows and beard were blond and his complexion - fair, his face was oval, which might have meant "harmoniously rounded". His height was medium; it is not known whether in result of measurement or assessment it was defined at 1 metre 70 centimetres.
Quotes from others about the person
"Chopin wrote many small pieces - mazurkas, waltzes, préludes, nocturnes - many more than Schumann. That covers the needs of millions of amateurs who love music but do not command the instrument well enough and who love Chopin’s music. It enters their hearts." - Elisabeth Leonskaja
"It was Chopin who properly set romantic pianism on its rails and gave it the impetus that shows no signs of deceleration. He did this all by himself, evolving from nowhere the most beautiful and original piano style of the century." - Harold C. Schonberg
"His creation was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without searching for it, without foreseeing it. It came to his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he would hasten to hear it again by, tossing it off on his instrument. But then would begin the most heartbreaking labour I have ever witnessed. It was a series of efforts, indecision, and impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he had heard: what had come to him all of a piece, he now over-analyzed in his desire to write it down, and his regret at not finding it again "neat," as he said, would throw him into a kind of despair. He would shut himself up in his room for days at a time, weeping, pacing, breaking his pens, repeating and changing a single measure a hundred times, writing it and effacing it with equal frequency, and beginning again the next day with meticulous and desperate perseverance. He would spend six weeks on one page, only to end up writing it just as he had traced it in his first outpouring." - George Sand
"After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own." - Oscar Wilde
Connections
Frédéric Chopin was once engaged to Maria Wodzińska though the marriage was ultimately called off.
Later on he had a love affair with the French novelist Amantine Dupin (known by her pen name, George Sand).