We explain who Chopin was and why he is considered one of the great names of European classical music.
Despite his short life, Chopin was the author of a unique work in the history of music.
Who was Frédéric Chopin?
Frédéric Chopin, known simply as Chopin, was a Polish composer, pianist and music teacher, and one of the most important representatives of musical Romanticism. He was a piano virtuoso and a composer of great imagination and exceptional sense of musical tone.
Chopin He lived only 39 yearsand the last of them suffered from tuberculosis, which ended up causing his death. His private life is known mainly thanks to the extensive correspondence he left behind. His enormous musical genius was recognised by his contemporaries and he was the fashionable musician in most of the salons of Europe.
On the other hand, Chopin It became a cultural and national symbol of Poland, at that time divided and made invisible by the political and military powers of the region. His work continues to be reproduced and praised today, and his life has inspired biographies and historical fiction in both print and film.
Chopin’s birth and childhood
Frederic Francis Chopin Born on March 1, 1810 in the Polish village of Żelazowa Wola, 60 kilometers from Warsaw, which was then part of the Duchy of Warsaw. His parents were Nicholas Chopin, a French professor and emigrant, and Tekla Justyna Chopin, a descendant of the ruined Polish aristocracy. Frédéric was the only boy of the couple’s four children.
Six months after his birth, Chopin’s family moved to Warsaw, where his father had found employment as a French teacher. Music was always present in their home: his father played the flute and his mother the piano, an instrument that Frédéric learned to play under the guidance of one of his older sisters.
The boy’s exceptional playing talent soon became apparent, and he was enrolled in the course of the Czech composer and musician Wojciech Żywny (1756-1842), who was a friend of the family. At just six years old, Chopin could play a melody by ear and create fragments entirely from his inspiration.. And the following year he composed his first work for piano, a Polonaise in G minor.
It soon became evident that Chopin’s talent surpassed his teacher. At the age of eight he had his first public presentation as a concert performer. At eleven he gave a concert to Tsar Alexander I of Russia (1777-1825), during the inauguration of the Warsaw parliament. That same year he composed his Polonaise in A flat major from 1821, which he dedicated to his teacher Żywny; This is the oldest surviving Chopin manuscript.
The fame of the child prodigy of the so-called “little Chopin” opened the doors to the aristocracy and in particular to the Belwedersky Palace, where he became friends with the son of the Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich of Russia (1779-1831). However, at the same time, his health was fragile and he was often under the care of doctors.
Chopin’s formative period
Chopin composed his first work at the age of seven.
In 1822, Chopin He completed his studies with Żywny and began his studies at the Warsaw Higher School of Music., under the guidance of the composer Józef Ksawery Elsner (1769-1854). There he received lessons in music theory and discovered his interest in the popular music of the Polish countryside.
At that time, moreover, Chopin was at the heart of Warsaw’s cultural world. He became friends with many young artists and politicians staying in the student boarding house that his parents ran on Krakowskie Przedmieście Street, such as Tytus Woyciechowski (1808-1879), Jan Nepomucen Białobłocki (c. 1806-1828), Jan Matuszyński (1808-1842 ) and Julian Fontana (1810-1869). With many of them he maintained a long friendship and a fruitful correspondence..
In order for Chopin to get to know other musical environments, his parents decided to send him on a trip to Vienna, one of the great European cultural centers of the time. After a brief stay in Berlin, the young composer arrived in the Austrian capital in 1829. There he gave several concerts and met numerous personalities from the world of art and culture..
Chopin’s artistic style was perceived as something very new in the musical environment of the time.. His execution of his Variations (op. 2) at the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna was received with particular devotion, so much so that in 1830 it became his first score published abroad.
After visiting Prague, Dresden and Breslau, Chopin returned to Warsaw. There he met the young Konstancja Gladkowska (1810-1889), a music student with whom he fell in love and for whom he composed several memorable works, such as the Waltz (Op. 70, n. 3) or the slow part of his Concerto for piano and orchestra in F minor (Op. 21, n. 2), and many of the exercises that later became part of his Studies (Op. 10).
In 1830, while Konstancja was marrying another man, the young composer undertook a second artistic trip to Vienna, where he remained until July of the following year..
However, this second stay was not as happy as the first. In Poland, the Polish uprising against the Russian Empire (known as the “November Uprising”) had taken place and his friend Titus Wojciechowski had to return home, leaving him alone in Austria. Moreover, he was not welcomed as a foreign visitor, but as a competitor in the Viennese cultural environment, so many doors that had previously been open were closed.
In his personal diary, which he had begun in Stuttgart in 1829, Chopin recorded the anguish that the distance from his family caused him, especially in a turbulent socio-political context in his native Poland.and complained about the lack of acceptance by the Viennese public of anything other than “the waltzes of Lanner and Strauss.”
Thus, in July 1831 Chopin decided to leave Vienna and went to Paris, a city considered at that time the cultural capital of Europe.
Chopin’s works, as is often the case with great composers, are organized in academic compendiums using a specific nomenclature, which uses the Latin term opus (“work”) and a certain number. For example, his first three Nocturnal are classified as Opus 9 or, abbreviated, Op. 9. and since these are three pieces, they are distinguished from each other with additional numbers: Op. 9, n. 1; Op. 9, n. 2 and Op. 9, no. 3.
Chopin’s life in France
Chopin arrived in Paris in July 1831 and lived in this city until his death.
In Paris, Chopin found the right environment for his talent to flourish.. Immersed in its own late Romantic movement, the city was already home to numerous young composers, such as Franz Liszt (1811-1886), Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) and Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), whom Chopin soon frequented.
The defeat of the Polish uprising also forced many Polish artists and intellectuals to emigrate, including Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski (1770-1861), the writer and politician Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz (1757-1841) and the Romantic poets Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) and Juliusz Słowacki (1809-1849). Together with these fellow exiles, Chopin became a member and contributor to the Polish Literary Society in 1833.
Chopin debuted in Paris as a concert pianist in February 1832, but soon had to face serious financial difficulties.. Concerts were his main source of income, but he did not fully enjoy them, and the audience did not respond well to his delicate piano performances.
This changed dramatically when, that same year, he met a wealthy banking family, the Rothschilds, for whom he began working as a private teacher and musician. With their financial support, Chopin was able to devote himself freely to composing.
Thus, in 1832 Chopin completed his famous Nocturnal (Op. 9), some of its Rondos for piano (Op. 16), Waltz (Op. 18), and many other works that reflect the Polish nationalist spirit, such as the Andante Spianato and Great Brilliant Polonaise (Op. 22), the Mazurkas (Op. 24) and Polonaises (Op. 26). In 1835 he composed his Ballad No. 1 in A minor (Op. 23) and its Fantasy-Impromptu in C sharp minor (Op. 66).
That same one, moreover, He undertook a brief trip through Germany, where he met Robert Schumann (1810-1856) and where his first symptoms of tuberculosis appeared.. During that winter, in fact, he felt so ill that he wrote a premature will. This did not prevent him from falling in love with Maria Wodzińska, but when they became aware of his illness, the young woman’s family refused the engagement.
Back in Paris, his illness seemed to give him respite and in 1836 Chopin traveled to London, where he worked on his Studies (Op. 25), Mazurkas (Op. 30), Scherzo (Op. 31) and Nocturnes (Op. 32). Upon returning, he met the French novelist Aurore Lucile Dupin de Dudevant (1804-1876), better known as George Sand, with whom he began a long romance in 1838..
Frederic Chopin and George Sand
Chopin and George Sand, portrayed in 1838 by Eugéne Delacroix, a friend of the couple.
Sand and Chopin’s romance lasted eight years, during which the musician helped raise the writer’s children, and she took care of him during times of extreme economic and health fragility. According to Sand’s correspondence, the passion between them was short-lived and soon gave way to a fraternal and compassionate relationship.
During the autumn of 1836, the couple moved to Mallorca and then to the town of Valldemossa, in Catalonia, where the precariousness of their rooms worsened Chopin’s health. Thus, at the beginning of 1839 they returned to France.
The musician’s state of weakness, which had interrupted his artistic production, improved considerably in Marseille and then in the south of Paris, where Sand took him on doctor’s orders. Between Nohant and Paris, Chopin lived his last happy and fruitful times.
His unconventional piano playing techniques allowed him to serve successfully as a teacher, while composing some of his most popular works. Thus, in 1840 he produced his Fantasy for piano (Op. 49), between 1841 and 1842 his Balads n. 3 and n. 4 (Op. 38 and Op. 47 respectively), in 1844 his Piano Sonata No. 3 (Op. 58), in 1845 his Barcarolle in F sharp major (Op. 60) and in 1846 his polonaise-fantasy (Op. 61).
In 1845, Chopin’s health was seriously deteriorating, and the following year he undertook his last journey to Nohant in the company of Sand. The relationship between the artists had begun to deteriorate, particularly after the publication of the novel Lucrezia Floriani (1847) by Sandwhere he represented his relationship with the musician in a rather critical way.
The couple separated in 1848, following disagreements over the marriage of Sand’s daughter. In February of that year, Chopin gave his last Parisian concert, days before the city was shaken by the Revolution of 1848.The musician, ill and depressed, settled in England and Scotland.