In June 1849 his older sister Ludwika agreed to join him in Paris, where they stayed in a beautiful, sunny apartment that once housed the Russian embassy. In February 1848, Chopin played his last Paris concert, and made his last public appearance on November 16, 1848, playing for the benefit of Polish refugees in a final patriotic gesture. The winter in Majorca is still considered one of the most productive periods in Chopin’s life.

In the winter of 1838, the couple, along with Sand’s two children, traveled to Majorca in the hope of improving Chopin’s deteriorating health. He formed friendships with Berlioz, Liszt, Bellini, Hiller, Mendelssohn, Heine, and Delacroix.& His high income from teaching and composing freed him from the strains of concert-giving, to which he had an innate repugnance.įrom 1837 to 1847 he carried on a relationship with the French woman Amantine Dupin, known best by her writing pseudonym, George Sand. He would later cite Bach and Mozart as the two most important composers in shaping his musical outlook.įollowing the November Uprising’s suppression by the Russian Empire, Chopin remained in France and would never again return to Poland. Though he lived in the 1800’s, he was educated in the tradition of Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Clementi. Thus, comparison of a juvenile Chopin with any earlier composer is difficult because of the originality of works he was producing. By comparison, at the same age, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were all still apprentices. His teaching style was based on his reluctance to “constrain” Chopin with “narrow, academic, outdated” rules, and on his determination to allow the young artist to mature “according to the laws of his own nature”.Īt this point in his compositional career, Chopin was perceived by his peers and audiences to be already a master who was pointing the path to the coming age. In year-end evaluations, Elsner noted Chopin’s “remarkable talent” and “musical genius”. In the fall of 1826, Chopin began a three-year course of studies with the Silesian composer Jozef Elsner. In the 1820’s, when teenage Chopin attended the Warsaw Lyceum and Warsaw Conservatory, he spent every vacation away from Warsaw, traveling and immersing himself into different areas of music.

That same year, Chopin composed his first two polonaises, in g minor and B-flat major. As a seven-year old, he began giving public concerts that prompted comparisons with Mozart and with Beethoven. He received his earliest piano lessons not from his mother, but instead from his older sister Ludwika. By six, he was already trying to reproduce what he heard or make up new melodies. As a child, it has been said that Chopin used to weep with great emotion when his mother played the piano. He invented the musical form known as the instrumental ballade and also made major innovations to the piano sonata, mazurka, waltz, nocturne, polonaise, etude, impromptu and prelude.Ĭhopin’s family was very musically inclined. Compositionally, all of Chopin’s works involve the piano. in his life.) However, his health never held him back from his love of music. (At best, Chopin stood about 5’7 and weighed no more than 100 lbs. For most of his life, he suffered from tremendously poor health and was very frail. Rarely giving public performances, he supported himself as a composer and a piano teacher. After the 1830 uprising where the Russians suppressed the Polish, he settled in Paris as part of the Polish Great Emigration. Renowned as a child prodigy of both piano performance and composition, he grew up in Warsaw and completed his musical education there. Frederic Francois Chopin was a Polish composer considered to be a great master of Romantic music.

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