Frédéric Chopin

„I’m just trying to express the human heart and soul,” wrote the great Polish composer and pianist FREDERIC CHOPIN. For his contemporaries and future generations, he was the „piano poet,” the „symbol of Polish music.” His art captivates with its emotional sophistication and beauty. Frederic Chopin was born near Warsaw. He grew up in an intelligentsia family. Known as a child prodigy, at the age of 7 Chopin wrote his first little „Polonaise in A Minor”. Until the age of 12 he studied under the Czech pianist Wojciech Zywny. During that period, the fame of the young artist grew. Chopin traveled extensively through Europe, attending concerts of famous musicians, which contributed defining his musical style. In 1823, when he was 13 years old, he entered the Warsaw Lyceum, and in 1826 - the Music High School. During a concert tour of Vienna and the cities of Germany, Chopin learned the news of the defeat of the Polish uprising (1830-1831). The tragedy of his homeland and the impossibility to return to it, as he has friends, participants in the liberation movement, gave rise to deep dramatic feelings that ingeniously penetrated his music - „ballade in D minor”, „Scherzo Op.20 No 1 in b minor”, „Etude in C minor, often called „Revolutionary”. Robert Schumann wrote that „Chopin introduces the spirit of Beethoven into the concert hall.” His further life as a composer was linked to Paris, where he went to in 1831. There he met artists from different European countries: composers Hector Berlioz, Ferenc Liszt, Niccolo Paganini, Vincenzo Bellini, Giacomo Meyerbeer, with writers Heinrich Heine, Adam Mickiewicz, George Sand, the artist Eugene Delacroix, who painted the portrait of Chopin. Paris of the 1830s was one of the centers of the new romantic art. In the works created during his yin the early years of Parisian life, the composer displayed his understanding of virtuosity - not an end in itself, but as an artistic tool that expresses the content of the works. He himself did not actively performed on concerts, he prefered the chamber atmosphere of the secular hall to the big hall. Income from concerts and music was scarce and Chopin was forced to give piano lessons. In the late 1830s, when he strengthened his fragile health on the island of Mallorca, he completed the cycle of preludes, defined as a kind of „Encyclopedia of Romanticism.” He was accompanied by his girlfriend George Sand, whom they have a complex emotional relationship with. After that he traveled to Germany (1834 - 1836), where he met Mendelssohn and Schumann, and visited England (1837). In 1840, Chopin wrote his Piano Sonata No 2 in b flat minor - one of his most tragic works, the third part of which is the famous „Funeral March”. His other major works include his Ballads (4), Scherzo (4), Fantasia in F minor, Barcarolle, Sonata for Cello and Piano, as well as romantic miniatures: Nocturnes (about 20), Polonaises (16), Waltzes (17), Impromptu (4). The composer was especially fond of mazurkas. He created 52 plays, artistically poetizing various Polish dances. It is no coincidence that his last work was the sad Mazurka in F minor, Op. 68, No 4 - this is the image of the distant unreachable homeland. Incurably ill with tuberculosis, in the last years of his life Chopin made a major tour around England and Scotland (1848), which finally undermined his health. He died very young, at the age of 39, in Paris, where he was buried. His music strongly influenced the next generations of composers from Ferenc Liszt to Claude Debussy and Karol Szymanowski, Sergei Rachmaninoff and many others.