Frédéric CHOPIN

The story

At seven Chopin played in public for the first time in Warsaw, at a charity concert given in the theatre of the Radziwiłł Palace; the papers compared him to Mozart and the aristocratic salons fought over him. In 1831, while Russia was crushing the Warsaw rising, he was stranded in Stuttgart. His diary still holds the cries of rage he set down there: out of those weeks came the first Scherzo and the Études op. 10.

In 1834 his father pressed him to put his papers in order at the Russian embassy, so as not to be classed among the political refugees. He never went, and in 1835 he took French papers: the act of a political émigré. He never saw Poland again.

From 1838 to 1847 his affair with George Sand gave his work its largest pages — the Heroic Polonaise, the fourth Ballade, the Barcarolle, all written at Nohant — and gave his health its hardest blow: in the very first winter, that of 1838, the freezing charterhouse of Valldemossa on Majorca.

He died of tuberculosis on 17 October 1849, on the place Vendôme, at thirty-nine. His funeral did not take place for another thirteen days: his friends wanted Mozart's Requiem, which calls for women's voices, and the Madeleine did not admit them. A dispensation had to be obtained. On 30 October, Pauline Viardot and Jeanne-Anaïs Castellan sang from behind a black curtain.

Chopin dreaded being buried alive and asked that his body be opened after his death. His sister Ludwika carried his heart to Poland the following year, hidden, it is said, under her clothes to get it past the Russian border; it is sealed inside a pillar of the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw. His body stayed in Division 11, under a grave that Polish visitors keep covered in flowers and small red-and-white flags.