I.

Introduction

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), Polish composer and pianist of the romantic school, widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of piano music. Chopin is among the few composers to have written almost exclusively for the solo piano. He never wrote a symphony, an opera, or a choral piece; he did not produce a single string quartet. But dozens of his works, in a dozen or more forms—mazurkas, polonaises, ballades, nocturnes, etudes (exercises or studies), scherzos, waltzes, and others—are now standard compositions for keyboard. Chopin was an unconventional musician who frequently abandoned the classical rules and disciplines. He created new harmonies and pioneered new musical forms in which to present his musical ideas.

II.

Chopin’s Life

Born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin in Żelazowa Wola, near Warsaw, of a French father and a Polish mother, he preferred to use the French translation of his name, Frédéric François Chopin. He began to play the piano as a young child and published his first composition, a short polonaise in G minor, at the age of seven. When he was eight years old he played at a private concert in Warsaw. The young prodigy soon became a favorite at the salons of the Warsaw nobility. In their elegant homes he developed a taste for good living and adopted an exaggeratedly refined manner.

In 1823 Chopin entered the Warsaw Lyceum, a high school, and continued his musical training privately under the director of the Warsaw Conservatory. In 1825 he was invited to play before Tsar Alexander I of Russia, and after the performance the emperor presented the young Chopin with a diamond ring. The following year, at the age of 16, Chopin enrolled in the Warsaw Conservatory; his graduation in 1829 marked the end of his formal musical training.

Later in 1829, seeking to impress publishers and the public, the young virtuoso visited Vienna, where he gave two very successful concerts, charming the critics with his music and the women of the city with his manner. In 1830 he returned to Warsaw to play three concerts and then embarked on a tour of western Europe. While at Stuttgart in 1831, he learned of the failure of the Polish rebellion against Russian authority. Chopin never saw Poland again.

After 1831, except for brief absences, Chopin lived in Paris, then the cultural capital of Europe and one of the centers of the growing romantic movement in the arts. His reputation as a composer and performer preceded him, and he began to move almost immediately in the best social and cultural circles in Paris. He was much sought as a piano teacher by princesses and countesses, and his long list of students was a roster of the rich and fashionable.

In 1836 Chopin met the remarkable Baroness Aurore Dudevant, whose affairs were the talk of Paris and who had become a well-known writer under the pseudonym George Sand. Chopin was 28 and Sand was 34 when they formed an intimate relationship that lasted until 1847. In 1838, on a vacation with Sand in Mallorca, bad weather and inadequate housing aggravated the tuberculosis from which Chopin suffered.

Chopin’s relationship with Sand was broken permanently in 1847 as a result of his involvement in quarrels between Sand and her children. By then Chopin was suffering from advanced tuberculosis. Although seriously ill, he gave several concerts in 1848 in France, Scotland, and England. He died of tuberculosis in his apartment in Paris on October 17, 1849.

III.

Chopin’s Music

Chopin’s compositional technique was largely unconventional, and much of it challenged the accepted rules of musical training and procedure. A spontaneous creator of melody, Chopin was among the first to bring into Western music the then-unfamiliar Slavic scales and melodic intervals. He thus tended to undermine the carefully established harmonies of the late 18th century.

Similarly, by using the rhythms of Polish folk dances, Chopin added immense variety to the store of rhythmic devices available to European composers. The piano works with a specifically Polish quality in their melodies, harmonies, and rhythms include the mazurkas and polonaises. Those that are preponderantly western European include most of his numerous etudes, preludes, scherzos, nocturnes, ballades, impromptus, rondos, and waltzes.

Chopin composed nearly 30 etudes as musical exercises to assist pianists in working out specific artistic or technical problems, such as the playing of octaves or thirds. These studies belong among the composer’s greatest achievements, and like the preludes and fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, survive as brilliant keyboard music in their own right, their instructive origin and purpose often largely forgotten.

Although Chopin confined himself primarily to smaller musical forms for the piano, the nature of his music was never so restricted. Part of the winter on Mallorca in 1838 was spent completing and polishing a series of 24 preludes, one in each of the major and minor keys. The preludes range in length and scope from tiny vignettes to full dramas and in mood from serene to wildly raging. The four scherzos he wrote are big, vigorous works, central to the literature of the keyboard. He also produced more than 40 nocturnes, which are lush, dreamy, poetic, predominantly lyric evocations. His more than 50 mazurkas—Polish folk dances in a waltzlike three-beat time—are brief pieces that reflect Slavic melodic turns and harmonies. The polonaises—stately, aristocratic Polish dances—are longer and larger in scope than the marzurkas.

Chopin occasionally composed larger musical structures, with similar success. They include the Barcarolle (1845-1846; see Barcarole), the Berceuse (1844), three sonatas (1828, 1839, and 1844), and the Fantaisie in F Minor (1840-1841). Chopin’s second sonata, in B-flat minor, contains a famous funeral march as its final movement. The Barcarolle, written in the ½ time of a Venetian gondolier’s song, has a varied melody above a steady, unchanging accompaniment. The quiet Berceuse also uses an unchanging left-hand accompaniment for 68 measures to support variations in the right-hand melody. In the Fantaisie, rather than following the outline of one of the classic 18th-century sonata patterns, Chopin let his own melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic ideas determine the form and forward movement of the music.

Chopin also composed works for piano with orchestra, including two piano concertos, one in E minor and one in F minor. In these works the orchestra is subordinate to the piano. Chopin also wrote a sonata in G minor for cello and piano, and a group of songs with piano accompaniment to Polish texts.

Chopin’s music, romantic and lyrical in nature, is characterized by exquisite melody of great originality, refined—often adventurous—harmony, subtle rhythm, and poetic beauty. By questioning the assumptions that governed classic music of the 18th century, Chopin greatly influenced other musicians, notably the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt, German composer Richard Wagner, French composer Claude Debussy, and Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.