For most of his life, Chopin was in poor health. He died in Paris in at the age of 39, probably of tuberculosis. All of Chopin's compositions include the piano. Most are for solo piano, though he also wrote two piano concertos , a few chamber pieces , and some 19 songs set to Polish lyrics. His piano writing was technically demanding and expanded the limits of the instrument: Chopin invented the concept of the instrumental ballade.
Among the influences on his style of composition were Polish folk music , the classical tradition of J. Bach , Mozart , and Schubert , and the atmosphere of the Paris salons of which he was a frequent guest. His innovations in style, harmony , and musical form , and his association of music with nationalism , were influential throughout and after the late Romantic period.
Chopin's music, his status as one of music's earliest superstars, his indirect association with political insurrection, his high-profile love-life, and his early death have made him a leading symbol of the Romantic era. His works remain popular, and he has been the subject of numerous films and biographies of varying historical fidelity. The parish baptismal record gives his birthday as 22 February , and cites his given names in the Latin form Fridericus Franciscus [2] in Polish, he was Fryderyk Franciszek. Fryderyk's father, Nicolas Chopin , was a Frenchman from Lorraine who had emigrated to Poland in at the age of sixteen.
In October , six months after Fryderyk's birth, the family moved to Warsaw, where his father acquired a post teaching French at the Warsaw Lyceum , then housed in the Saxon Palace. Fryderyk lived with his family in the Palace grounds. The father played the flute and violin; [10] the mother played the piano and gave lessons to boys in the boarding house that the Chopins kept.
By the age of seven Fryderyk had begun giving public concerts, and in he composed two polonaises , in G minor and B-flat major. In the Saxon Palace was requisitioned by Warsaw's Russian governor for military use, and the Warsaw Lyceum was reestablished in the Kazimierz Palace today the rectorate of Warsaw University. Fryderyk and his family moved to a building, which still survives, adjacent to the Kazimierz Palace. During this period, Fryderyk was sometimes invited to the Belweder Palace as playmate to the son of the ruler of Russian Poland , Grand Duke Constantine ; he played the piano for the Duke and composed a march for him.
Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz , in his dramatic eclogue , " Nasze Przebiegi " "Our Discourses", , attested to "little Chopin's" popularity. He was engaged by the inventors of a mechanical organ, the "eolomelodicon", and on this instrument in May he performed his own improvisation and part of a concerto by Moscheles.
The success of this concert led to an invitation to give a similar recital on the instrument before Tsar Alexander I , who was visiting Warsaw; the Tsar presented him with a diamond ring. At a subsequent eolomelodicon concert on 10 June , Chopin performed his Rondo Op. This was the first of his works to be commercially published and earned him his first mention in the foreign press, when the Leipzig Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung praised his "wealth of musical ideas".
During —28 Chopin spent his vacations away from Warsaw, at a number of locales. Here for the first time he encountered Polish rural folk music. Four boarders at his parents' apartments became Chopin's intimates: In letters to Woyciechowski, he indicated which of his works, and even which of their passages, were influenced by his fascination with her; his letter of 15 May revealed that the slow movement Larghetto of his Piano Concerto No.
In September Chopin, while still a student, visited Berlin with a family friend, zoologist Feliks Jarocki , enjoying operas directed by Gaspare Spontini and attending concerts by Carl Friedrich Zelter , Felix Mendelssohn and other celebrities. For the prince and his pianist daughter Wanda, he composed his Introduction and Polonaise brillante in C major for cello and piano , Op.
He gave two piano concerts and received many favourable reviews—in addition to some commenting in Chopin's own words that he was "too delicate for those accustomed to the piano-bashing of local artists". Later that month, in Warsaw, the November Uprising broke out, and Woyciechowski returned to Poland to enlist. Chopin, now alone in Vienna, was nostalgic for his homeland, and wrote to a friend, "I curse the moment of my departure. You are there, and yet you do not take vengeance! When he left Warsaw in late , Chopin had intended to go to Italy.
However, violent unrest triggered by the Carbonari made that a dangerous destination by the middle of Chopin's next choice was Paris, but the Russian embassy in Vienna refused to authorize his passport for travel to France. Finally, after numerous delays, he received permission to stop in Paris en route to London. Chopin neglected to complete the second leg of this journey, instead settling permanently in Paris. Chopin arrived in Paris in late September ; he would never return to Poland, [34] thus becoming one of many expatriates of the Polish Great Emigration.
In France he used the French versions of his given names, and after receiving French citizenship in , he travelled on a French passport. Chopin's biographer Adam Zamoyski writes that he never considered himself to be French, despite his father's French origins, and always saw himself as a Pole. In Paris, Chopin encountered artists and other distinguished figures, and found many opportunities to exercise his talents and achieve celebrity. Two Polish friends in Paris were also to play important roles in Chopin's life there.
At the end of , Chopin received the first major endorsement from an outstanding contemporary when Robert Schumann , reviewing the Op. Later that year he was introduced to the wealthy Rothschild banking family, whose patronage also opened doors for him to other private salons social gatherings of the aristocracy and artistic and literary elite.
He no longer depended financially upon his father, and in the winter of he began earning a handsome income from publishing his works and teaching piano to affluent students from all over Europe. Chopin seldom performed publicly in Paris. In later years he generally gave a single annual concert at the Salle Pleyel, a venue that seated three hundred. He played more frequently at salons, but preferred playing at his own Paris apartment for small groups of friends.
The musicologist Arthur Hedley has observed that "As a pianist Chopin was unique in acquiring a reputation of the highest order on the basis of a minimum of public appearances—few more than thirty in the course of his lifetime. Examples include a concert on 23 March , in which Chopin, Liszt and Hiller performed on pianos a concerto by J. Bach for three keyboards ; and, on 3 March , a concert in which Chopin, his pupil Adolphe Gutmann , Charles-Valentin Alkan , and Alkan's teacher Joseph Zimmermann performed Alkan's arrangement, for eight hands, of two movements from Beethoven 's 7th symphony.
Chopin's music soon found success with publishers, and in he contracted with Maurice Schlesinger , who arranged for it to be published not only in France but, through his family connections, also in Germany and England. They spent what Mendelssohn described as "a very agreeable day", playing and discussing music at his piano, and met Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow , director of the Academy of Art, and some of his eminent pupils such as Lessing , Bendemann , Hildebrandt and Sohn. He had made the acquaintance of their daughter Maria in Poland five years earlier, when she was eleven.
This meeting prompted him to stay for two weeks in Dresden, when he had previously intended to return to Paris via Leipzig. Paul , and who considered him "a perfect musician".
Frédéric Chopin - Wikipedia
Chopin went on to Leipzig, where he presented Schumann with his G minor Ballade. Although it is not known exactly when Chopin first met Liszt after arriving in Paris, on 12 December he mentioned in a letter to his friend Woyciechowski that "I have met Rossini , Cherubini , Baillot , etc. You would not believe how curious I was about Herz , Liszt, Hiller, etc. The first, on 2 April , was at a benefit concert organized by Hector Berlioz for his bankrupt Shakespearean actress wife Harriet Smithson , during which they played George Onslow 's Sonata in F minor for piano duet. Although the two displayed great respect and admiration for each other, their friendship was uneasy and had some qualities of a love-hate relationship.
Schonberg believes that Chopin displayed a "tinge of jealousy and spite" towards Liszt's virtuosity on the piano, [57] and others have also argued that he had become enchanted with Liszt's theatricality, showmanship and success. Most biographers of Chopin state that after this the two had little to do with each other, although in his letters dated as late as he still referred to him as "my friend Liszt".
Is she really a woman? I have still not recovered from my astonishment, and if I were a proud person I should be feeling humiliated at having been carried away This compelled the group to take lodgings in a former Carthusian monastery in Valldemossa , which gave little shelter from the cold winter weather.
On 3 December, Chopin complained about his bad health and the incompetence of the doctors in Majorca: The first said I was dead; the second said I was dying; and the third said I was about to die. Chopin wrote to Pleyel in January I finished them on your little piano, which arrived in the best possible condition in spite of the sea, the bad weather and the Palma customs.
Although this period had been productive, the bad weather had such a detrimental effect on Chopin's health that Sand determined to leave the island. To avoid further customs duties, Sand sold the piano to a local French couple, the Canuts. In autumn they returned to Paris, where Chopin's apartment at 5 rue Tronchet was close to Sand's rented accommodation at the rue Pigalle.
He frequently visited Sand in the evenings, but both retained some independence. At the funeral of the tenor Adolphe Nourrit in Paris in , Chopin made a rare appearance at the organ, playing a transcription of Franz Schubert 's lied Die Gestirne D. Chopin was reportedly unimpressed with the composition. During the summers at Nohant, particularly in the years —43, Chopin found quiet, productive days during which he composed many works, including his Polonaise in A-flat major , Op. Among the visitors to Nohant were Delacroix and the mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot , whom Chopin had advised on piano technique and composition.
The hosts could not be more pleasant in entertaining me. When we are not all together at dinner, lunch, playing billiards, or walking, each of us stays in his room, reading or lounging around on a couch. Sometimes, through the window which opens on the garden, a gust of music wafts up from Chopin at work.
Frédéric Chopin
All this mingles with the songs of nightingales and the fragrance of roses. From onwards, Chopin showed signs of serious illness. Modern research suggests that apart from any other illnesses, he may also have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy.
In letters to third parties, she vented her impatience, referring to him as a "child," a "little angel", a "sufferer" and a "beloved little corpse. In he did not visit Nohant, and he quietly ended their ten-year relationship following an angry correspondence which, in Sand's words, made "a strange conclusion to nine years of exclusive friendship. Chopin's output as a composer throughout this period declined in quantity year by year.
Whereas in he had written a dozen works, only six were written in and six shorter pieces in In he wrote only the Op. Although these works were more refined than many of his earlier compositions, Zamoyski concludes that "his powers of concentration were failing and his inspiration was beset by anguish, both emotional and intellectual.
Chopin's public popularity as a virtuoso began to wane, as did the number of his pupils, and this, together with the political strife and instability of the time, caused him to struggle financially. In April, during the Revolution of in Paris, he left for London, where he performed at several concerts and at numerous receptions in great houses. Stirling also made all the logistical arrangements and provided much of the necessary funding.
In London Chopin took lodgings at Dover Street , where the firm of Broadwood provided him with a grand piano. The Prince, who was himself a talented musician, moved close to the keyboard to view Chopin's technique. Broadwood also arranged concerts for him; among those attending were Thackeray and the singer Jenny Lind.
Chopin was also sought after for piano lessons, for which he charged the high fee of one guinea per hour, and for private recitals for which the fee was 20 guineas. At a concert on 7 July he shared the platform with Viardot, who sang arrangements of some of his mazurkas to Spanish texts. In late summer he was invited by Jane Stirling to visit Scotland, where he stayed at Calder House near Edinburgh and at Johnstone Castle in Renfrewshire , both owned by members of Stirling's family. Chopin made his last public appearance on a concert platform at London's Guildhall on 16 November , when, in a final patriotic gesture, he played for the benefit of Polish refugees.
By this time he was very seriously ill, weighing under 99 pounds i. At the end of November, Chopin returned to Paris. He passed the winter in unremitting illness, but gave occasional lessons and was visited by friends, including Delacroix and Franchomme. Occasionally he played, or accompanied the singing of Delfina Potocka , for his friends. During the summer of , his friends found him an apartment in Chaillot , out of the centre of the city, for which the rent was secretly subsidised by an admirer, Princess Obreskoff. Here in June he was visited by Jenny Lind.
With his health further deteriorating, Chopin desired to have a family member with him. Some of his friends provided music at his request; among them, Potocka sang and Franchomme played the cello. Chopin requested that his body be opened after death for fear of being buried alive and his heart returned to Warsaw where it rests at the Church of the Holy Cross. He died a few minutes before two o'clock in the morning. Those present at the deathbed appear to have included his sister Ludwika, Princess Marcelina Czartoryska, Sand's daughter Solange, and his close friend Thomas Albrecht.
The funeral, held at the Church of the Madeleine in Paris, was delayed almost two weeks, until 30 October. The pallbearers included Delacroix, Franchomme, and Camille Pleyel. The expenses of the funeral and monument, amounting to 5, francs, were covered by Jane Stirling, who also paid for the return of the composer's sister Ludwika to Warsaw.
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Chopin's disease and the cause of his death have been a matter of discussion. His death certificate gave the cause of death as tuberculosis , and his physician, Jean Cruveilhier , was then the leading French authority on this disease. Over works of Chopin survive; some compositions from early childhood have been lost. All his known works involve the piano, and only a few range beyond solo piano music, as either piano concertos , songs or chamber music.
Chopin was educated in the tradition of Beethoven, Haydn , Mozart and Clementi ; he used Clementi's piano method with his own students. He was also influenced by Hummel 's development of virtuoso, yet Mozartian, piano technique. He cited Bach and Mozart as the two most important composers in shaping his musical outlook. Less direct in the earlier period are the influences of Polish folk music and of Italian opera. Much of what became his typical style of ornamentation for example, his fioriture is taken from singing.
His melodic lines were increasingly reminiscent of the modes and features of the music of his native country, such as drones. Chopin took the new salon genre of the nocturne , invented by the Irish composer John Field , to a deeper level of sophistication. He was the first to write ballades [] and scherzi as individual concert pieces. He essentially established a new genre with his own set of free-standing preludes Op.
Chopin also endowed popular dance forms with a greater range of melody and expression. Chopin's mazurkas , while originating in the traditional Polish dance the mazurek , differed from the traditional variety in that they were written for the concert hall rather than the dance hall; as J. Barrie Jones puts it, "it was Chopin who put the mazurka on the European musical map. However, with the exception of his Funeral March , the composer never named an instrumental work beyond genre and number, leaving all potential extramusical associations to the listener; the names by which many of his pieces are known were invented by others.
The last opus number that Chopin himself used was 65, allocated to the Cello Sonata in G minor. He expressed a deathbed wish that all his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed.
At the request of the composer's mother and sisters, however, his musical executor Julian Fontana selected 23 unpublished piano pieces and grouped them into eight further opus numbers Opp. Works published since have received alternative catalogue designations instead of opus numbers. Chopin's original publishers included Maurice Schlesinger and Camille Pleyel. Chopin published his music in France, England and the German states due to the copyright laws of the time. Each edition is different from the other, as Chopin edited them separately and at times he did some revision to the music while editing it.
Furthermore, Chopin provided his publishers with varying sources, including autographs, annotated proofsheets and scribal copies. Only recently have these differences gained greater recognition. Improvisation stands at the centre of Chopin's creative processes. However, this does not imply impulsive rambling: Nicholas Temperley writes that "improvisation is designed for an audience, and its starting-point is that audience's expectations, which include the current conventions of musical form.
Barrie Jones suggests that "amongst the works that Chopin intended for concert use, the four ballades and four scherzos stand supreme", and adds that "the Barcarolle Op. Chopin's mazurkas and waltzes are all in straightforward ternary or episodic form, sometimes with a coda. However, some also show unusual sophistication, for example Op. As with the traditional polonaise, Chopin's works are in triple time and typically display a martial rhythm in their melodies, accompaniments and cadences.
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