Frédéric Chopin
Polish Romantic who wrote almost exclusively for solo piano
1810
1849
Polish
Romantic
Nocturnes, Ballades, Études for piano
Early life
Frédéric Chopin was born on 1 March 1810 in Żelazowa Wola, a village west of Warsaw, to a French-born father and a Polish mother. He showed exceptional musical ability from early childhood, publishing his first composition at the age of seven and performing publicly at eight. He studied at the Warsaw Conservatory under Józef Elsner, who recognised his pupil's extraordinary gifts and wisely gave him considerable creative freedom. In November 1830, shortly after graduating, Chopin left Warsaw for Vienna and subsequently Paris, never to return to Poland — the November Uprising and its brutal suppression by Russia made exile permanent.
Career and major works
Chopin settled in Paris in 1831 and quickly established himself as the city's most sought-after piano teacher and one of its most admired performers, though he gave relatively few public concerts, preferring the intimacy of the salon. His output is devoted almost exclusively to the piano: two piano concertos, four ballades, four scherzos, twenty-seven études, twenty-one nocturnes, fifty-eight mazurkas, seventeen polonaises, the Barcarolle, the Berceuse, the Fantasy in F minor, and three piano sonatas — including the Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor with its famous funeral march. His two sets of Études (Opp. 10 and 25) simultaneously revolutionised piano technique and set a new standard for musical content within technical exercises. The Préludes Op. 28 (1839), composed partly on Majorca during a difficult winter with the novelist George Sand, compress an entire world of emotion into twenty-four miniatures.
Musical style and legacy
Chopin's music is characterised by an aristocratic refinement of expression, an extraordinary sensitivity to the singing quality of the piano, and a harmonic language of great originality that influenced Wagner, Debussy, and Scriabin. His use of rubato, his ornamentation drawn from bel canto vocal style, and his exploitation of the sustaining pedal created a pianistic sound world that remains unique. He died in Paris on 17 October 1849, at the age of thirty-nine, of tuberculosis.