CHOPIN, Frédéric. — Composer and pianist, b. at Żelazowa Wola (Warsaw) on 22 Feb. 1810, d. in Paris on 17 Oct. 1849. In Warsaw, after completing his studies (1827), he began his concert career and continued it in the principal European capitals, surrounded by ever-growing admiration. He was a close friend of Berlioz, Bellini, Balzac and Fr. Jelowicki, who on his deathbed induced him to a Christian end.
Chopin inaugurated a new and entirely personal manner, anticipating in musical Romanticism analogous literary phenomena, the dissolution of more rigid structural and syntactic forms into emotional melodic and harmonic atmospheres, now elegiac and abandoned, now impetuous and impassioned, all of which envelop a fundamental sentiment of strength and anguish. Chopin’s work attains its perfection in the piano, which here reveals every expressive possibility: one need only 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), reaching him in Stuttgart, inspired his famous Étude in C minor (op. 10, no. 12), which has accompanied the Poles in every hour of sorrow and hope.