CHOPIN, FRÉDÉRIC FRANÇOIS

Romanticist composer; b. Zelazowa Wola (near Warsaw), Poland, Feb. 22, 1810; d. Paris, Oct. 17, 1849. He was the second of four talented children of Nicolas Chopin, a transplanted, vaguely Voltairean French schoolman, and Justyna Krzyzanowska, a Polish woman of refinement and piety. At age seven Frédéric first played in public and had his first piece published—a polonaise set in type in the print shop of Visitation parish, where the boy later was organist. After piano training with A. Zwyny, he studied at Warsaw Conservatory under J. K. Elsner (1769–1854), a prolific composer who fostered the boy's unusual creative impulses. Following respectable successes as composer-recitalist in lesser cities, he settled (1831) in Paris, where he was lionized by French and émigré Polish nobility (while supporting himself by giving lessons to their daughters) and accepted as peer by the ranking literary and artistic spirits. Through one of these (F. liszt) he met and entered upon a liaison with the freethinking writer George Sand (Mme. Aurore Dudevant), in whose household he remained for the next eight years, the arrangement being terminated by a sordid family quarrel. He died two years later, after receiving the last rites with great devotion (he had left the Church more through indifference than conviction). His body was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery, between the graves of bellini and cherubini.

However sentimentalized his image in film and fiction, Chopin was a hard-working, tough-minded perfectionist whose very personality was shaped and limited by the pressure of his genius. His musical idiom partakes of the rhythms and melancholy (Lydian) mode of Polish folk music, the bel canto vocalisms he had heard in Warsaw opera productions, J. S. bach's counterpoint and mozart's formal clarity, the configurations of duŠek, and the nocturne contour of the Irishman John Field. All such stimuli, however, were transformed by an act of intense parareligious self-discipline into a distinctive expression that revolutionized piano composition and performance, and in turn unleashed harmonic and melodic forces that were harnessed orchestrally by R. wagner and anticipated the edgeless sonorities of debussy, faurÉ, and 20th-century atonalists.

Bibliography: f. f. chopin, Selected Correspondence, collected and annotated by b. e. sydow, tr. and ed. a. hedley (London 1962). m. j. e. brown, Chopin: An Index of His Works in Chronological Order (New York 1960). a. hedley, Chopin (New York 1949); Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. e. blom, 9 v. (5th ed. London 1954) 2:252–267. f. liszt, Frederic Chopin, tr. e. n. waters (New York 1963), probably the work of Carolyna von Sayn Wittgenstein. a. boucourechliev, Chopin: A Pictorial Biography, tr. e. hyams (New York 1963). w. kahl, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. f. blume (Kassel-Basel 1949–) 2:1218–30. La Revue musicale, No. 121 (1931) and No. 229(1955), Chopin numbers. La rassegna musicale (Turin, Oct. 1949), Chopin number. p. h. azoury, ed., Chopin through His Contemporaries: Friends, Lovers, and Rivals (Westport, Conn. 1999). g. busch-salmen, "Bemerkungen zu den Flötenbearbeitungen der Werke Frédéric Chopins," Tibia: Magazin für Holzbläser, 20(1995) 443–452. j. m. chominski, "Sonaty Chopina: Twórcze nawiazanie do tradycji w Scherzu Sonaty h-moll," Studia Muzykologiczne (1955) 152–275. c. grabowski, "Les éditions originales françaises des ouvres de Frédéric Chopin," Revue de Musicologie, 82 (1996) 213–243. j. kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge, Mass.1999). n. meeÙs, "Question de Méthode: La Mazurka Op. 7 No. 5 de Chopin," Analyse Musicale, 32 (1993) 58–63. w. c. petty, "Chopin and the Ghost of Beethoven," 19th Century Music, 22 (1999) 281–299. w. d. sutcliffe, "Chopin's Counterpoint: The Largo from the Cello Sonata, Op. 65," Musical Quarterly, 83(1999) 114–133.

[m. e. evans]