Chopin, FRÉDÉRIC, virtuoso and musical composer, was born March 1, 1809, at Zelazova Vola, a village near Warsaw, in Poland, where his father, a native of Lorraine, had settled and married. Under the tuition of two professors at Warsaw, notably Elsner, the director of the Conservatoire,
Chopin made such rapid progress that at the age of nine he played with success in public. As a boy and, indeed, until his health broke down beneath the strain of Parisian life, he possessed a great fund of high spirits, and excelled in mimicry and caricature. In 1825 he published his first work, and by the time he was eighteen his parents acquiesced in his choice of music as a career. In the autumn of 1829 he visited Vienna, gave a successful public concert, and was in much request in the salons of that city. In the following year he left Warsaw for good, and travelling via Breslau, Dresden, and Prague, again visited Vienna, where he sojourned for several months, and he started for Paris in July 1831. Here, after sundry vicissitudes, he took root, found fame, and lost his health; here he became the idol of the salons of the Faubourg Saint Germain, giving lessons to a select clientèle of pupils, and employing his leisure in composition. Chopin rarely performed in public, for, as his biographer remarks, 'he could only play con amore when in the best society and among connoisseurs who knew how to appreciate all the niceties of his performance.' But in his element Chopin, by the admission of so competent a judge as Mendelssohn, was 'a truly perfect virtuoso' as well as a thorough musician, with a faculty for improvisation such as perhaps no other pianist ever possessed. In 1836 he was introduced to George Sand (Madame Dudevant) by his friend Liszt. The intimacy which thus began lasted for seven years, when George Sand, to quote Liszt, 'gave her butterfly the congé, vivisected and stuffed it, and added it to her collection of heroes for novels.' For George Sand's version of this episode, readers may be referred to the fourth volume of her Histoire de ma Vie, as well as to the portrait of Prince Carol in her novel Lucrezia Floriani. Chopin visited England on two occasions—once in 1837, and again in 1848. In the latter year he played at two matinées and at a Polish ball in London; twice in Manchester, once in Edinburgh, and once in Glasgow. His health, long enfeebled by consumption, gave way rapidly on his return to Paris, where on the 17th of October 1849 he passed away tranquilly, surrounded by a few devoted friends.
Of all virtuosi Chopin has achieved the greatest fame as a creative artist. Taking Slavonic airs and rhythms, notably that of the Mazur or Mazurek (Mazurka), for his groundwork, he raised upon this basis superstructures of the most fantastic and original beauty. His style is so strongly marked as to amount to a mannerism, and yet he has only been successfully imitated by men of genius like Schumann, who was amongst the first of the German critics to recognise in his early compositions gifts of the rarest order. Chopin had seldom recourse to the orchestra to express himself, and on these rare occasions treated it in perfunctory fashion, and as a mere foil to the solo instrument. But for the piano alone he wrote a great deal of music superlatively artistic in form, impregnated with subtle romance, and full of exuberant fancy—music which, though it must always primarily appeal to refined and fastidious natures like his own, bears on it the unmistakable stamp of spontaneous inspiration. Personally Chopin was of a reserved but amiable nature, singularly modest as to his merits, but unsparing in his efforts to realise the high and clearly defined aims he had set before him. His compositions, the best edition of which is that published by Carl Klinkworth of Moscow, extend to 74 works with, and 7 without opus numbers; and comprise upwards of 50 mazurkas, 27 études, 25 préludes, 19 nocturnes, 13 waltzes, 12 polonaises, 4 ballades, 4 impromptus, 3 sonatas, 2 concertos for piano and orchestra, and a funeral march. Besides rendering his friend the doubtful service mentioned above, Liszt is also responsible for having given currency in his picturesque apothecosis of Chopin to a good many inaccurate statements as to his education and temperament. See Lives by Karasowski (Eng. trans. 1879), Niecks (a standard work, 2 vols. 1889), and Willeby (1892); an essay by Finck (1889); and Hadow's Studies in Modern Music (1895).