He asserted his nationalism in his music, too, using Polish folk tunes as themes in many of his works and frequently returning to the country’s dances such as the mazurka and the polonaise. Also, perhaps as a result of hearing a concert by the great violin virtuoso Paganini, he had begun the Op 10 set of Etudes, which were published in Paris in 1833.Ĭhopin never returned to Poland, and became a French citizen in 1835, but he always regarded himself as Polish, and apparently spoke French only reluctantly. These are the first works in which his personal musical voice really begins to show itself, as well as in his first set of mazurkas (Op 6). He had already composed his two piano concertos, which he’d performed in Warsaw in 1830 (the second a few months before the first). In 1830, while en route to Italy, he heard of the Polish uprising against Russian rule.īy the autumn of the following year the uprising had been crushed, but by then Chopin was heading for Paris. Throughout his education he continued to compose and give concerts, and took his first trip abroad, to Berlin, in 1828 he made his debut in Vienna the following year, shortly after graduating from the Warsaw Conservatory. He was always a sickly child (though when and where he contracted the tuberculosis that would be the main cause of his early death remains unclear), but he was soon marked out as a musical prodigy initially taught by his mother, he gave his first concerts at the age of seven in 1817, and wrote his earliest pieces, polonaises that are now lost, the same year.
Ĭhopin grew up in Warsaw his mother was Polish, his father a French émigré who had been a tutor to the children of the Polish nobility and taught at the Warsaw Lyceum, which Frédéric (or Fryderyk as he was then) also attended from 1823. And a fictionalised version of Chopin’s life was depicted in the 1945 feature film A Song to Remember, directed by Charles Vidor with Cornel Wilde as the composer, as well as in the rather less memorable 1991 Impromptu, in which Hugh Grant took the lead.Ī Song to Remember (excerpt) – video His life. While more or less disguised, his works have provided the basis of many popular songs, from the 1917 vaudeville number I’m Always Chasing Rainbows, which uses the theme from the slow central section of Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu Op 66, to Barry Manilow’s Could It Be Magic, taken from the C minor Prelude Op 28 no 20.Ĭhopin’s music has been used for many ballets, most famously in Les Sylphides, which is danced to orchestrations by Glazunov. The slow movement of the B flat minor Piano Sonata has become one of the best known of all funeral marches.
Whether it’s the “ Minute Waltz”, which for decades has introduced the BBC panel show Just a Minute, or the most popular of all the nocturnes, Op 9 no 2 in E flat, used as the evocative soundtrack for so many TV adverts and dramas, Chopin’s music has been regularly raided for other purposes. Chopin has a reputation for being an exquisite miniaturist, but he was much more than that: his approach to playing and composing for the piano and his remarkable imagination for keyboard colour and texture – as well as his often startlingly original treatment of harmony and form – left their imprint on piano music well into the next century. His gifts as a pianist and improviser as much as his music brought him fame during his lifetime, but the beauty of his melodies has maintained his popularity ever since. His life – and death at the age of 39 – is almost the archetypal story of the tragic Romantic artist. T hough he wrote no operas, oratorios or symphonies – nothing, in fact, that did not involve a piano – Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) was one of the supreme composers of the 19th century.