Fryderyk Chopin

For pianists and lovers of piano music, it is impossible to escape an acquaintance with the life and works of Fryderyk Chopin, who was perhaps the greatest composer of piano music during the Romantic era of the Nineteenth Century. In a relatively short lifetime, Chopin composed an amazing quantity of music, and his works are almost exclusively written for piano solo or piano with orchestral accompaniment. Chopin’s life has been the subject of many movies and books, not only because of his masterfully beautiful piano music, but also because of his rather unconventional relationship with the French novelist, Aurore Dudevant, who published her novels using the pseudonym, George Sand. While Chopin’s star is brighter than ever as a composer, the fame of George Sand as a writer has faded to a degree. However, the story of their life together is a truly fascinating tale for adult readers to research. And the several biographies of Chopin discuss their relationship in detail.

Fryderyk Chopin remains one of the most original composers in music history. His style of composition shows little influence from other composers of his time. In fact, much of his music defines new genres and categories all its own. However, it is evident that Chopin’s music owes a considerable debt to the music of the Irish composer, John Field, as a source of inspiration. Also, the Italian opera composer, Vincenzo Bellini, is thought by many to have influenced his melodies, and to varying degrees, some qualities of Bellini’s bel canto style are present in all of Chopin’s lyrical masterpieces. In a phrase, Chopin made the piano “sing” in a way that no composer before him had conceived. Chopin earned the nickname, “Poet of the Piano,” through his genius as a pianist and through the legacy of his highly imaginative, technically demanding compositions.

Fryderyk Chopin was born in Zelazowa Wola, a village six miles from Warsaw, Poland on February 22, 1810 as the son of a French father and a Polish mother. Chopin first studied the piano at the Warsaw Conservatory of Music, and he was quite proficient on that instrument by his early teens. He played his first public concert at age seven, and he was known outside of Poland as a published composer by age fifteen, after several years of study in composition and music theory in Warsaw.

Chopin first achieved fame as a child prodigy in Poland, and a few of his works were published in Warsaw as early as 1817, when he was only eight years old. He continued to compose throughout his student years, but only a handful of these works were printed in Polish editions that were not widely distributed and are now quite rare. When Chopin attained prominence in Paris during the early 1830s, he allowed a few of his early works (the Rondos, Op. 1 and Op. 5) to be reissued by French, German, and English publishers, but he made no further effort to revive the other music he had composed before 1828. These works languished in manuscript until after his death and have been trickling into print from widely scattered sources ever since.

When Chopin graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory in 1829, the most obvious career option before him was that of a touring composer-pianist. With this in mind, he composed a number of virtuoso showpieces for piano and orchestra to display his talents: the Variations on Mozart’s “La ci darem la mano,” Op. 2; the Fantasia on Polish Airs, Op. 13; and the concert rondo on a Polish dance, Krakowiak, Op. 14. In August 1829, he traveled to Vienna in hopes of having some of his music published there. Unexpectedly, he also had the opportunity to give two concerts. His music was well received, and his playing was generally admired, but there were complaints that his tone was not powerful enough to make a sufficiently dramatic effect in large halls.

Chopin returned to Vienna in November 1830 armed with two new piano concertos. He found that only one of the works he had left with publisher Tobias Haslinger a year earlier, the Op. 2 Mozart variations, was close to being published and that the enthusiasm of Viennese audiences for his music had waned. After eight fruitless months, he left for Paris, where it took another seven months to organize a concert. That performance, on February 26, 1832, was poorly attended, but it served to establish Chopin’s reputation among professional musicians as both a pianist and composer. Nonetheless, persistent criticisms of his small piano sonority and his own distaste for traveling made it clear to Chopin that the life of a touring virtuoso was not for him.

Chopin’s love for Paris was so immediate that he promptly decided to make the city his new home. He was never to return to Warsaw. Although an expatriate, he was deeply loyal to his war-torn homeland of Poland. His compositions reflect the rhythms and melodic traits of Polish folk music, and they are imbued with the heroic spirit of a Polish patriot-composer. An infrequent public performer, Chopin was not theatrically overwhelming as a pianist, and other virtuosos have emphasized the heroic side of his music more than he himself could have done or would have wanted to do. His compositions place considerable demands on both the technique and the interpretative abilities of performers willing to undertake them.

In 1841, the editor of La France Musicale wrote, “Chopin is a composer from conviction. He composes for himself, and he plays for himself…Chopin is a pianist apart, who should not be and cannot be compared with anyone.” His playing and his compositions had taken Paris by storm, and he had become the arch-Romantic: an aloof, consumptive genius whose triumphs and failures filled the newspapers daily but who remained distant from his surroundings. In Paris, Chopin was in constant demand as a performer and teacher. He taught piano lessons to the children of the wealthy, and he often played the piano in private homes, preferring this venue to public concerts. He was a favorite at Parisian “salons,” and Chopin was befriended by many artistic luminaries of the time, including Hugo, Balzac, Liszt, Berlioz, Schumann, Dumas, and Delacroix. The lyricism and poetic nature of his music made him a Romantic icon to many of his contemporaries, and he was embraced by the elite of Parisian society.

Chopin was essentially a composer for the piano; the songs and chamber music are peripheral in his oeuvre, though his Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 65 is the most significant duet sonata between those of Beethoven and Brahms. Chopin also was a composer in the smaller forms, for only two piano concertos and three of his four sonatas are viable instrumental cycles, and his longer compositions in the free forms (polonaises, scherzos, ballades, fantasias, etc.) consist of a skillful linking together of ideas proper to the smaller forms. Yet only in the Preludes is he a miniaturist like Schumann, Grieg, or MacDowell.

The composition of the Preludes, Op. 28 came at a time when Chopin was deeply immersed in the music of J.S. Bach. Like the Preludes in The Well-Tempered Clavier, these brief, sharply defined mood pictures utilize all the major and minor keys, though the circle of fifths determined the succession: C Major, A minor, G Major, E minor, and so on. Bach’s works are arranged in rising chromatic steps: C Major, C minor, C-Sharp Major, C-Sharp minor, etc. Chopin’s rich chromatic harmonies and modulations are evident in the Preludes, most notably Prelude in A minor, No. 2, Prelude in E minor, No. 4, Prelude in F-Sharp minor, No. 8, and the middle sections of Prelude in E-Flat minor, No. 14 and Prelude in D minor, No. 24.

Although the influences of Hummel, Field, and Weber are pronounced in the early works, written before his departure from Poland, many of Chopin’s individual stylistic traits are evident in these compositions. The best of them, like the Polonaise for Cello and Piano [large file], the slow movements of the two concertos, several of the Etudes, Op. 10, and the Variations, Op. 2 (which elicited Schumann’s remark, “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!”) could not be mistaken for works by any other composer. Chopin’s Etudes are transcendent studies in technique and intensely concentrated poetic statements. Unlike thousands of contemporaneous piano etudes, those of Chopin successfully combine the practical goal of developing advanced technique with significant artistic content. Both Liszt and Brahms followed Chopin’s lead in this regard.

Most of Chopin’s popular compositions were written between 1831 and 1840, a period of composition which can be demarcated by the Nocturnes, Op. 9, and the B-Flat minor Piano Sonata. Chopin took the name and the general ideas for his Nocturnes from the Irish pianist and composer, John Field (1782-1837). Field’s teacher, Muzio Clementi, took him to St. Petersburg in 1802 and helped him get established there. His Nocturnes, the first of which appeared in 1814, reflect Field’s fluent, pearly performing style and lavish pianistic technique. There are a number of parallels in the compositions of Field and Chopin, particularly the use of rising major sixths in many melodies, the soulful turns employed by both, and the chromatic ornamentation of the melody line against a barcarole accompaniment. Field modeled the melodic ornamentation and cadenzas practiced by opera singers and taken over by pianists in their sets of variations on favorite arias that were widely published at the time. Although John Field anticipated some of Chopin’s mannerisms, he could not match the rich harmonic imagination that so powerfully supports the melodies of Chopin’s lyrical Nocturnes.

Chopin’s last period begins with such major works as the F-Sharp minor Polonaise and the A-Flat Major Ballade and, except for a few mazurkas and waltzes written during his last series of illnesses, concludes with the Cello Sonata, Op. 45 (1846). The best of these late works contain a spaciousness of conception (which was not always successful) and interesting refinements in the smaller works, like the cross-rhythms in the so-called ‘Minute’ Waltz.

Most of Chopin’s smaller compositions are dances and are exemplified by the Polish mazurka and the international waltz. The forms, basically ternary, are sometimes expanded into rondos. Though such dances as the E-Flat (Op. 18) and G-Flat (Op. 70, No. 1) Waltzes and the D Major Mazurka (Op. 33, No. 2) are suitable for dancing, as witness their orchestral transcriptions in the ballet Les Syphides, most of the dances are as highly stylized as the movements of J. S. Bach’s suites; representative specimens are the A minor Waltz (Op. 34, No. 2) or any of the Mazurkas in C-Sharp minor. The mazurkas, spanning Chopin’s entire creative career, show the greatest variety in mood and contain some of the most interesting melodic and harmonic ideas of his compositions.

Chopin’s works of medium length include relatively minor genres like the variations and impromptus as well as such major works as the nocturnes, scherzos, polonaises, and ballades. The Nocturnes, popular because of their relative technical ease, range in expression from salon pieces like the Nocturne in F-Sharp Major, Op. 15, No. 2 to such major works as the C-Sharp minor Nocturne (Op. 27, No. 1) and G Major Nocturne (Op. 37, No. 2). The later nocturnes are less interesting. Among his four Scherzos, the Scherzo in B-Flat minor is most frequently performed; the middle section of the Scherzo in B minor is the Polish Christmas carol “Lulajze Jezuniu.”

Chopin’s six mature Polonaises are considered his most important group of compositions and display a wide variety of mood: delicacy in the Polonaise in C-Sharp minor, funereal lament in the Polonaise in E-Flat minor, a stirring processional quality in the Polonaise in A Major (the so-called “Military” Polonaise), lament in the Polonaise in C minor with its harmonically interesting trio, wild abandon in the Polonaise in F-Sharp minor, and powerful virtuosity in the Polonaise in A-Flat Major.

Of the Fantasias, the relatively early and posthumously published Fantaisie-Impromptu in C-Sharp minor is on a small scale and is one of Chopin’s most popular works. The Polonaise-Fantasia (Op. 61), a late work, contains a magical introduction whose harmonic freedom may possibly have influenced Liszt and Wagner. Yet despite its beautiful sections, it does not give the impression of a genuinely unified work. The Fantaisie in F minor, Op. 49, is one of the composer’s most significant works; apart from the opening march its structure resembles a free sonata form and is a magnificent counterpart to Schumann’s Fantasia, Op. 17. The G minor, A-Flat Major, and F minor Ballades are among Chopin’s most important compositions and excellently illustrate his technique of creating a large work through juxtaposing and effectively repeating short sections which by themselves would have been admirable preludes or nocturnes. Chopin’s few large instrumental cycles have been dismissed by critics from Schumann and Liszt to the present because of their supposed imperfections in form. The two piano concertos, both early works, stem from the tradition of Dussek and Field, and Spohr’s influence is highly evident in the F minor Concerto.

Chopin’s melodies range from figuration and passage work whose main interest is harmonic and pianistic to a languid cantilena with its ornamentation often derived from vocal music, particularly the vocal portamento. Chopin would often exquisitely vary his melody with ornamental figuration, as in the F minor Ballade. Many of Chopin’s singing melodies, whether Major (the Nocturne, Op. 9, No.2 or the middle section of the Fantaisie Impromptu) or even minor (Mazurka, Op. 63, No.3) were carried over into Twentieth Century popular music.

Chopin’s “modal” effects are not derived from deliberate and consistent use of the lowered second and seventh or sharpened fourth degree of the scale but from the ambiguity between the diatonic and altered forms of these scale degrees. The early Polonaises, Op. 71 best show the ambiguous leading tone; whereas the Mazurkas contain the best illustrations of the conflict between the raised and natural fourth scale degrees often found in Slavic folk music. The lowered second scale degree is the reverse of the leading tone’s drive to the tonic, and this gives the melody a despairing character, resulting in the kind of cadence typical of Bartok’s music, where the leading tone and lowered second degree are sounded simultaneously.

Chopin’s rhythm, although dominated by dance forms, is highly flexible. One need only think of the cross-rhythms between 3/4 in one hand and 6/8 in the other in the A-Flat Waltz, Op. 42, and the E Major Scherzo. His works display two kinds of rubato: one kind where, in his words, “the singing hand may deviate…but the accompanying hand must keep time,” often in irregular groupings of notes, characteristic of the Berceuse and Barcarolle; another kind of rubato is an alteration of tempo, either slowing or quickening, necessary for his Nocturnes or stylized dances. Chopin carefully marked the proper preparation of his trills, and the performance of his compound appoggiaturas should be generally on the beat as in the Eighteenth Century style. Since the damper pedals of Chopin’s time gave the piano less sustaining power than those of today’s instruments, the composer’s indications for pedaling should be approached with caution.

Like other young composers, Chopin dedicated his early Parisian publications to well-known composer-pianists or well-to-do patrons of the arts, who were in a position to provide recommendations, commissions, or employment opportunities. More generally, by associating himself with famous musicians and wealthy lovers of music, Chopin enhanced public estimation of his own music. Publishers recognized the value of these associations for their sales and prominently displayed the names of those to whom compositions were dedicated on title pages.

After Chopin became famous, however, most of his dedications were to personal friends. Many of these were still members of high society, since that was the circle in which Chopin moved, but there is little to suggest that he felt the need to court favor. In many cases, he seems to have been very casual about selecting dedicatees, often making up his mind or changing it at the last minute. Chopin dedicated a significant number of works to his students, ranging from aristocratic ladies to professional pianists like Friedericke Müller.

Chopin took his piano teaching very seriously. In the early 1840s, he even sketched the beginnings of a method for playing the instrument, but this project was never completed. Chopin taught music written by a variety of composers, of whom Johann Sebastian Bach was particularly prominent, but his students cherished most the opportunity to study the master’s own works with him. During lessons, he and his students frequently wrote instructions concerning performance in the students’ printed copies of his music. Most of these were fingerings, with occasional details of dynamics, articulation, and phrasing. The markings were primarily didactic and tailored to the needs of individual students. From time to time, however, Chopin also altered pitches, redistributed chords, and even completely rewrote ornamental passage work: changes that are not found in any other early sources. Controversy continues over whether these annotations reflect Chopin’s final revisions of his music or spur-of-the-moment changes that were never intended to have any permanent validity.

The most important of the surviving annotated scores are the ones that belonged to Jane Stirling, a Scottish lady who studied with Chopin between 1843 and 1849 and assembled French editions for nearly all of the composer’s works into seven bound volumes. The fact that Chopin assisted Stirling in compiling a thematic index of her scores has resulted in speculation that he intended this collection to serve as the basis for a revised collected edition of his music. However, the nature of some of his markings belies this possibility. For example, the change in tempo from Allegro to Largo in the Prelude in E-Flat minor, Op. 28, No. 14, probably indicated that Chopin wanted Stirling to practice the work slowly, not that he had changed his mind about the music’s expressive character. Annotated scores may provide us with valuable clues to the way Chopin preferred his music to be played, but their significance relative to other authentic source material is still uncertain.

At the height of his popularity in Paris, Chopin’s music sold so well that publishers were obliged to reprint his works frequently in order to keep up with demand. Most of these reissues used the plates from the first editions; and since printed scores of this period almost never bore publication dates, later printings are often distinguished only by changes on the title pages, such as the price or the publisher’s address. However, there are frequently alterations in the music as well. In Paris editions, some of these variants may be corrections or second thoughts originating with the composer, although it is rarely possible to document his responsibility for them.

The most conspicuous changes are in Breitkopf und Härtel’s reissues, and there is little chance that Chopin had any part in them. Rather, they seem to represent an editor’s attempt to rectify what he considered omissions or flaws in the first editions. Dynamics, pedaling, and phrasing are added, and passages that Chopin provided with different expression marks, harmonizations, or rhythms when they recurred later in the piece are altered so that each appearance of the passage is the same. Imposing such regularization removes a distinctive characteristic of Chopin’s music, so it is particularly important for modern scholars and editors to identify which edition they are using.

It is curious that Chopin did not dedicate published works to either of the two known loves of his life, Maria Wodzinska (1819-1896) and George Sand (1804-1876). Chopin had known the Wodzinski family since childhood and fell in love with Maria in 1835 when she was sixteen. He proposed to Maria, but her family did not approve of their plans to marry, probably because of his chronic ill health. He inscribed a manuscript of the Waltz, Op. 69, No. 1 to Maria during their courtship, but the work was not published during his lifetime. In later years, he did not hesitate to dedicate copies of the same work to other ladies. Chopin lived with novelist George Sand for nine years (1838-1847) and their relationship was common knowledge among members of Parisian society. However, Chopin may have felt that a public dedication to Sand stretched the bounds of propriety.

In 1837, Chopin first met the novelist, Mrs. Aurore Dudevant. The two began a stormy and ultimately tragic relationship that proved to be the most influential and devastating development in Chopin’s life. From this period, Chopin’s Waltz in D-Flat was composed for George Sand’s dog. The couple endured a tempestuous love/hate relationship for almost ten years as Chopin and Sand were intertwined in never-ending emotional squabbles. Born Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, July 1, 1804, George Sand was married at age eighteen to Baron Casimir Dudevant and had two children. Profoundly unhappy in the marriage, she left her husband, established herself in Paris in 1831, and out of financial necessity she began writing. Her first independent novel, Indiana, written in 1832, the story of an unhappy wife who struggles to free herself from the imprisonment of marriage, made her an overnight celebrity.

Subsequent novels such as Valentine and Lelia astounded her readers with their frank exploration of women’s sensuality and their passionate call for women’s freedom to find emotional satisfaction. Sand never advocated “free love” but remained an idealist, exalting the idea of marriage between equals and condemning the social system of male dominance that made such marriages impossible. Legally separated from her husband in 1836, she kept up a furious pace of literary composition throughout her life to support herself and her children. Her reputation for iconoclasm grew not only from the themes of her novels but from exaggerated reports of her unconventional behavior: her occasionally masculine clothing, her habitual smoking, and her love affair with Chopin.

In 1838 Chopin began to suffer from tuberculosis, and George Sand nursed him in Majorca in the Balearic Islands and in France until continued differences between the two resulted in an estrangement. By 1847, their relationship had fallen apart completely. Thereafter, his musical activity was limited to giving several concerts in 1848 in France, Scotland, and England. Chopin was heartbroken over the loss of Sand, and he became increasingly ill. He continued to compose, but Chopin was soon overcome by illness. Eventually, he grew too sick to work, and he died suddenly on October 17, 1849 at the age of thirty-nine. It is tragic that Chopin’s career as a composer was cut short in this way. We shall never know what masterpieces he might have produced as a more mature composer. Many of his supporters in Paris felt this same way at the time of his death.

Undeservedly, George Sand was for a long time the object of scorn among Chopin’s friends for having offered him a “black love” that ultimately killed him. Of course, this is untrue, but the assertions have created a “soap opera” myth concerning their relationship that persists even today. Chopin was the victim of tuberculosis or “consumption” (as it was called in the Nineteenth Century) and not the victim of George Sand. But it is true that she subsequently retired to her country estate following Chopin’s death to continue her literary career.

The elements of his pianistic style make Chopin’s music instantly recognizable. His sense of lyricism and unparalleled melodic genius produced some of the most purely beautiful music ever written. These unique qualities influenced many composers who followed him, notably the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt, the German composer Richard Wagner, and the French composer Claude Debussy. Most of Chopin’s pieces have an introspective nature, and the music suggests the character of improvisation. His works tend to fall into one of three categories: small “technical” pieces (or études) for piano published between 1833 and 1837; larger, more developed works for the piano (nocturnes, preludes, impromptus, mazurkas, polonaises); and the even larger, freely- conceived works (ballades, fantasies, and scherzos). He also wrote several sonatas, piano concertos, and a smattering of music for other instruments and voice.

Chopin published 159 works distributed among sixty-five opus numbers, but he also composed more than seventy other works that he chose not to publish. In some cases, he may have decided that the music was not up to his standards or that it needed further revision. Other works had been presented as personal gifts to close friends, and Chopin may have considered it inappropriate to publish them. On his deathbed, he asked that all his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed, but that wish was not honored, and in 1853 his mother and sisters asked Julian Fontana, Chopin’s friend and amanuensis, to select from among them works that he considered worthy and edit them for publication. He selected twenty-three piano pieces, which he grouped into eight opus numbers (Op. 66-Op. 73).

From the time Fontana’s edition appeared in 1855, musicians suspected that he had added many expression marks and possibly even made changes to the music. Unfortunately, the autograph manuscripts he used were subsequently destroyed, so it is not possible to determine the extent of his editorial intervention. Some of these works survive in other copies that preserve substantially different versions of the music. However, these were all presentation copies that Chopin gave to friends and may lack revisions that Chopin made later to the scores that remained in his possession. Therefore Fontana’s posthumous edition, whatever its shortcomings, remains the most important source for these twenty-three works.

Chopin’s sense of proportion enabled him to recreate Classical forms in the Romantic spirit. His ballades are controlled improvisations; while his études are a collection of poetry. Musical patriotism was never expressed as subtly as in his polonaises and mazurkas. The preludes and scherzos are models of lyricism and sensuality that remain within the bounds of good taste. Moreover, Chopin succeeded in reviving the sonata form, despite the rough treatment it had received at the hands of Beethoven’s successors. He demonstrated that it was still possible to develop the form and imbue it with the spirit of his time. Chopin was an innovator in Romantic music and the ultimate craftsman of lyrical melody and heart-rending harmony. In the structure and form of his compositions, he is quite alone. His sense of form in music was not particularly related to Classical traditions or to the works of his Romantic contemporaries. Instead, his new-styled freer forms seemed to spring from some unknown source within him and to a great degree from Polish dance forms and folk music. His powerful music forms a legacy that has earned him the status as one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era.

At Chopin’s funeral in 1849, Mozart’s Requiem was performed along with Chopin’s own Funeral March, one of the most famous compositions ever written. At the composer’s request, his body was buried in a Paris cemetery, but his heart was removed and carried by his sister to Warsaw where it was interred at the cathedral in the Polish capital. More than one hundred years after his death, Chopin’s grave site in Paris is covered in flowers throughout the year by new generations of admirers. To us, his music remains fresh and untarnished by the hands of time.

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• 3 Sonatas:
  • C Minor, Op. 4 (1828)
  • Bb Minor, Op. 35 (1839)
  • B Minor, Op. 58 (1844)
• 4 Ballades:
  • G Minor, Op. 23 (1835)
  • F Major, Op. 38 (1839)
  • Ab Major, Op. 47 (1841)
  • F Minor, Op. 52 (1842)
• 24 Preludes: Op. 28 (1839)
• 21 Nocturnes
• 15 Polonaises
• 4 Scherzi
• Fantaisie-Impromptu in C# Minor, Op. 66 (1835)
• Barcarolle, F# Major, Op. 60 (1846)
• Fantasy in F Minor
• Numerous Waltzes and Mazurkas
• 27 EtudesOrchestral Music (with solo piano)
• Piano Concertos:
  • No. 1.E Minor (1830)
  • No. 2, F Minor (1830)
  • Variations on Mozart’s La ci Darem (1827)
  • Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise (1831)
  Chamber Music
  • Piano Trio (1829)
  • Cello Sonata (1846)
  • Songs