CHOPIN, FRÉDÉRIC. - Composer and pianist, b. at Zelazowa-Wola (Warsaw) on 22 Feb. 1810, d. at Paris on 17 Oct. 1849. At Warsaw, having completed his studies (1827), he began his concerts and continued them in the principal European capitals, surrounded by ever-increasing admiration. He was a close friend of Berlioz, Bellini, Balzac, and Fr. Jelowicki, who on his deathbed induced him to make a Christian end.
C. began in a new and wholly personal manner, anticipating, in musical Romanticism, analogous literary phenomena: the dissolution of more rigid constructive and syntactical forms into emotional melodic and harmonic atmospheres, now elegiac and yielding, now impetuous and passionate, all of which envelop a fundamental feeling of strength and anguish. C.’s work finds its perfection in the piano, which here reveals all its expressive possibilities: one may recall the Études, the Preludes, the Ballades, the Mazurkas, the Nocturnes, the Polonaises, the Scherzos, the Waltzes; the news of the fall of Warsaw (1831), which reached him at Stuttgart, inspired the celebrated Étude in C minor (op. 10, no. 12), which has accompanied the Poles in every hour of misfortune and hope.