FrédéricChopin

In February 1832 Chopin, a twenty-one-year-old Polish pianist, played in the Pleyel rooms in Paris. He had arrived the previous autumn, with two concertos behind him. The concert caught the attention of the city’s publishers, and teaching soon supplied his living. For the rest of his life his profession depended on people hearing him at close quarters. The great public virtuosos travelled from one concert city to the next; Chopin stayed in Paris and gave lessons.

Holidays took him out of the capital. At Szafarnia and other country estates he heard village musicians, attended weddings and harvest celebrations, and danced himself. Those uneven accents recur in the mazurkas he wrote throughout his life. In Warsaw he also heard Italian opera. The slow movements of his two piano concertos give the soloist long melodies that break into runs and ornaments, in the way an operatic singer might embellish a returning phrase. He wrote the F minor Concerto before the E minor; publication reversed their numbering.

1830–⁠32From Warsaw to Paris

He left Warsaw on 2 November 1830, and his friend Tytus Woyciechowski joined him in Kalisz. When news of the uprising against Russian rule reached them in Vienna, Woyciechowski went back to join it. Chopin stayed. After months of uncertainty he travelled west, learned in Stuttgart that Warsaw had fallen, and reached Paris in 1831. He never returned to Poland. Polish friends and émigré gatherings remained part of his daily life. He used the French spelling Frédéric and continued to write home in Polish.

In Paris his colleagues included Bellini, Liszt and Eugène Delacroix. He also had wealthy pupils, who paid for his exacting attention. He favoured Pleyel pianos, and in teaching he attended to the smallest difference between a singing note and the notes beneath it. He treated fingering as important because fingers differ, and the thumb and little finger could never become identical hammers. His pupils’ copies preserve alternative ornaments and fingerings worked out in lessons at the keyboard.

The piano lessonThe Études and the nocturnes

The first two Études of Op. 10 form a pair. In the first, the right hand plays wide arpeggios above a firm bass. In the second, its outer fingers play a chromatic scale while the thumb and index finger supply accompanying notes. In Op. 25 he writes studies in thirds, sixths and octaves, and in one the pianist must sustain a melody inside the figuration that surrounds it.

1838–⁠39Mallorca, Valldemossa and the Preludes

His relationship with George Sand began in 1838. That autumn they went to Mallorca with her children, Maurice and Solange. The weather turned bad. On 3 December Chopin wrote to Julian Fontana about the island’s three celebrated doctors: “One said I was dead, the second that I was dying, the third that I would die.” He had resisted bloodletting and wanted the news kept quiet. Eleven days later he wrote again: “My manuscripts are asleep, while I cannot sleep at all; I only cough.”

On 15 December they moved into the former Carthusian monastery at Valldemossa. Chopin described his vaulted cell to Fontana, its windows looking out on orange trees and cypresses, Bach on the table beside his own scribblings. His Pleyel had not yet arrived. Here he completed the twenty-four Preludes, which he had begun before the voyage. Each major key is followed by its relative minor, and the pairs move round the circle of fifths, from C major and A minor to F major and D minor. Some pieces stop soon after their opening figure is stated. In the E minor Prelude the narrow melody repeats while the chords beneath descend by semitones.

NohantSummers at Nohant and late works

From 1839 Chopin spent his summers working at Sand’s country house at Nohant, except in 1840. Delacroix visited; Sand wrote while Chopin composed and revised. He built the B♭ minor Sonata around a funeral march he had already written. The finale, which follows the march, has both hands playing together in bare octaves, with scarcely anything that can be called an accompaniment. The B minor Sonata of 1844 gives much more room to song, above all in its long B major Largo.

His single-movement pieces could be equally large in scale. In the four ballades the themes are changed when they return; in the Fourth the principal melody is passed through imitation and increasingly elaborate ornaments before the quiet chords that precede the coda. The scherzos keep triple metre but extend the dance with passages of loud repeated chords, fast passagework and sudden rests. In the late Barcarolle, two voices move in thirds and sixths over a rocking bass in the manner of a boat song; the Polonaise-⁠Fantaisie opens with isolated chords and arpeggios before the dance rhythm is established.

In the late Nocturnes, Op. 62, the trills form part of the melodic line and inner voices answer it. The Cello Sonata divides that exchange between two instruments. Chopin wrote it for his friend Auguste Franchomme. The piano part is substantial, and the cello holds notes that would die away on the piano. The short Largo stands between two much busier movements.

1847–⁠49Britain and death in Paris

Chopin and Sand separated in 1847 after quarrels within her family. The following year, with Paris shaken by revolution and his health failing, he accepted his pupil Jane Stirling’s help in arranging a visit to Britain. He played in England and travelled through Scotland, increasingly exhausted. His last public appearance was for Polish émigrés at London’s Guildhall on 16 November 1848. He returned to Paris and died of tuberculosis on 17 October 1849, aged thirty-nine. His sister Ludwika, who had come to care for him, took his heart to Warsaw; his body was buried at Père-⁠Lachaise.