Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric Chopin wrote almost exclusively for the piano and did more than anyone to define what the instrument could say. Born near Warsaw in 1810 to a French father and Polish mother, he was a prodigy who published his first work at seven and played for the Russian tsar as a boy. He left Poland in November 1830, weeks before the November Uprising against Russian rule. It was crushed, and he never returned; he is said to have carried a jar of Polish soil, and the Revolutionary Étude is traditionally connected to the fall of Warsaw. He settled in Paris in 1831 and made his living teaching wealthy pupils rather than performing. He gave perhaps thirty public concerts in his life, disliked large halls, and said that the crowd intimidated him and that he was not fit for giving concerts. His forms are almost all small: nocturnes, mazurkas, waltzes, preludes, études, ballades, scherzos and two sonatas. The mazurkas and polonaises use Polish dance rhythms and became a form of national assertion by a stateless composer. The études made technical exercises into music. His rubato — flexible timing over a steady bass — and his use of the sustaining pedal to build harmony from overtones were new. He had a nine-year relationship with the novelist George Sand, including a disastrous winter on Majorca in 1838-39 in a disused monastery, where his tuberculosis worsened and where he wrote the Preludes. The relationship ended in 1847 and his health collapsed. He died in Paris in October 1849 at thirty-nine, and his heart was returned to Warsaw.

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