Education
Born in Warsaw to a family of Italian origin, Fontana studied law at the University of Warsaw and music under Józef Elsner at the conservatory, where he met Chopin.
Born in Warsaw to a family of Italian origin, Fontana studied law at the University of Warsaw and music under Józef Elsner at the conservatory, where he met Chopin.
Fontana left Warsaw in 1831, after the November Uprising and settled in Hamburg, before becoming a pianist and teacher in Paris in 1832. In 1835 in London he participated in a concert with music played by 6 pianists, the others including Ignaz Moscheles, Johann Baptist Cramer and Charles-Valentin Alkan. In 1840, Chopin dedicated his 2 Polonaises, Operation
40, to Fontana.
These included the "Military Polonaise" in A major. He took up a wandering life that included:
England and France (1833–1837);
Havana, Cuba (1844-1845): On 8 July 1844 he played the music of Chopin for the first time in Cuba. His pupils there included Nicolás Ruiz Espadero.
New York (1845-1851): he gave concerts with Camillo Sivori;
Their son Julian Camillo Adam Fontana was born in Paris on 10 July 1853.
He then returned to New York, where he was naturalised an American citizen on 7 September the same year. Also in 1855 he published a collection of Chopin"s unpublished manuscripts, under the opus numbers 66–73.
He then travelled to Cuba in an unsuccessful bid to recover his late wife"s estate. He spent some years travelling between Havana, New York, Paris and Poland.
In 1859 he published 16 of Chopin"s Polish Songs, as Operation
74 (a later edition increased this to 17 songs). In 1860 Louis Moreau Gottschalk dedicated two compositions to Fontana, Louisiana Gitanella and Illusions perdues. In the 1860s Fontana translated Cervantes" Don Quixote into Polish.
In 1869 he published a book of folk astronomy.
He succumbed to deafness and poverty, and committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide in Paris. He was buried in Montmartre Cemetery.