Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric François Chopin (1810–1849) was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist whose music, almost exclusively for solo piano, constitutes one of the supreme achievements of Romantic art. Born near Warsaw to a Polish mother and French father, he showed prodigious musical gifts from early childhood, giving his first public concert at eight. He left Poland permanently in 1830, settling in Paris where he became the most sought-after piano teacher and salon performer of his generation, intimate with Liszt, Berlioz and Delacroix. His ten-year relationship with the writer George Sand was the most significant of his personal life.

Chopin's output — nocturnes, mazurkas, études, preludes, waltzes, polonaises, ballades, scherzos and two piano concertos — is of extraordinary range and depth, combining virtuosic brilliance with profound poetry. He almost never wrote for orchestra alone, and his works for other instruments are few. Nevertheless, his music has attracted choreographers throughout the history of ballet: Les Sylphides (orchestrated by various hands, including Anatoly Lyadov and Igor Stravinsky) used his piano pieces in one of the first plotless ballets; and Frederick Ashton used John Lanchbery's orchestration of selected Chopin piano works to create A Month in the Country (1976), one of his most emotionally intimate ballets.

Chopin died of tuberculosis in Paris aged 39, leaving his manuscripts to be burned — a wish his family did not fully honour.