Chopin, Frédéric

CHOPIN, FRÉDÉRIC. - Composer and pianist, b. at Zelazowa-Wola (Warsaw) on 22 Feb. 1810, d. in Paris on 17 Oct. 1849. In Warsaw, having completed his studies (1827), he began his concerts and continued them in the principal European capitals, surrounded by ever-growing admiration. He was a great friend of Berlioz, Bellini, Balzac and of Fr. Jelowicki, who on his deathbed led him to a Christian end.

C. begins in a new and wholly personal manner, anticipating, within musical Romanticism, analogous literary phenomena: the dissolution of the more rigid constructive and syntactic forms into emotive melodic and harmonic atmospheres, now elegiac and abandoned, now impetuous and passionate, which all envelop a fundamental feeling of strength and torment. C.'s work finds its perfection in the piano, which here reveals every one of its expressive possibilities: one may recall the Studies, 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 in Stuttgart, inspired the celebrated Study in C minor (op. 10, no. 12), which has accompanied the Poles in every hour of misfortune and hope.