Frédéric Chopin – Compositional Revolutionary, Lion of the Keyboard, and Symbol of National Identity
Often regarded as the greatest piano composer to ever live, Frédéric Chopin (1810 – 1849) was also one of the greatest pianists during the Romantic Era, which was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement in Europe from about 1800 to 1850. He is commonly recognized as one whose poetic genius was based on a professional technique that was without equal in his generation.
Chopin was born in a manor house belonging to Count and Countess Skarbek (same lineage as Krystyna Skarbek, Churchill’s favorite spy), where his father, Mikołaj, a Polonised Frenchman worked as a tutor. His mother was the Countess’s lady in waiting, herself from Polish nobility. Chopin’s French father quickly assimilated with his new homeland and, in 1794, took part in the Kościuszko Uprising against Russian empress Catherine the Great.
A child prodigy, Chopin completed his musical education and composed his earlier works in Warsaw. At age 18, he wrote the Fantasy on Polish Airs (Op. 13) and the Rondo à la Krakowiak (Op. 14), both of which are scored for piano with orchestra. At age 19, he wrote his two well-received piano concertos, also scored for piano with orchestra, with the first in E minor and the second in F minor. At age 20, he left Poland for Paris, right before the outbreak of the November Uprising against Tsar Nicholas 1 in 1830. Before he left, his old teacher Elsner presented him with a silver urn of Polish earth and said “May you never forget your native land wherever you go, nor cease to love it with a warm and faithful heartâ€. The urn was buried with Chopin when he died. Although he loved his country and expressed patriotic sentiments in his letters, he never returned to Poland.
His brilliant Paris debut in 1832, attended by Franz Liszt, opened the doors of highest French society to him and he was in such demand as a well-paid piano instructor that he was able to forego concertizing for teaching and composing. Chopin built up a book of rich contacts to whom he would give piano lessons. However, he felt too embarrassed to ask his pupils for money, so he looked away while they left the fee on the mantelpiece. After a failed engagement to Maria Wodzińska, he maintained an oftentroubled relationship with the French writer Amantine Dupin (known by her pen name, George Sand). Sand was a bohemian and feminist who had left her nobleman husband for a string of affairs while becoming the toast of literary Paris. Chopin spent several years with her in Majorca in relative seclusion and this is perhaps where he composed the most intense of his piano pieces. In his final years, he was supported financially by his admirer Jane Stirling, who also arranged for him to visit Scotland in 1848. For most of his life, Chopin was in poor health and he died in Paris in 1849 at the age of 39 from tuberculosis. He is buried in Paris near his friend, composer Cerubini, where the container of Polish soil he had kept was sprinkled over his coffin. His sister Ludwika brought Chopin’s heart back to Poland in a cognac-filled crystal urn, which is enshrined at the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw.
Among the influences on his style of composition were Polish folk music and the classical tradition of J. S. Bach. His composer friends and admirers included Liszt, Berlioz, Schumann, Mendelsohn, Debussy, and Brahms. His influence is hard to calculate because it appears where one would never suspect it. Wagner was heavily indebted to his work through the continually repeated leitmotifs that became his trademark. Brahms studied him carefully (but when somebody remarked on his borrowing early on, he testily claimed that he had never heard nor seen a work of Chopin in his life). Liszt and Rachmaninov borrowed openly and extensively from Chopin. So pervasive was his influence that it reached technically into all forms of piano writing and harmonically into the whole of Western style. 20th Century Polish composer Karol Szymanowski probably came closest to describing Chopin’s music when he wrote, “Chopin was an eternal example of what Polish music was capable of achieving – a symbol of Europeanized Poland, losing nothing of his national features but standing on the highest pinnacle of European cultureâ€.
This is a short video describing how Chopin developed his mazurka compositions from a simple folk dance into an artistic expression of Polish national identity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2vfnA_1pjk The mazurka is one of Poland’s five national dances and Chopin wrote at least 59 of them. This video was produced by Germany’s Deutsche Welle and begins with Mazowsze performing the mazurka. As you’ll hear in the video, the Polish national anthem is a mazurka and is called “DÄ…browski’s Mazurkaâ€. It was written shortly after the country lost its independence in the series of partitions by Austria, Russia, Prussia (1772, 1791, 1795). DÄ…browski’s Mazurka was created in July, 1795, in Italy when the Polish Legions, led by General Jan Henryk DÄ…browski (1755-1818), left to fight in the Napoleonic wars alongside the French Army. The Polish Legions saw combat in most of Napoleon’s campaigns, from the West Indies, through Italy, and Egypt. The hope was that, by fighting in support of Napoleon, he would help the Poles reestablish Poland as a nation state. However, with Napoleon’s eventual defeat, this did not occur. Many historians have argued that Napoleon used the Poles as a source of recruits and had little desire to invest in the recreation of the Polish state. Even so, Napoleon is reputed to have said that 800 Polish Legion soldiers would be the equivalent of 8,000 enemy soldiers.
