He gave roughly thirty public concerts in his whole life. While Liszt was playing to thousands, Chopin chose drawing rooms of twenty or thirty people, and said the stage was not for him.
Chopin was born near Warsaw in 1810; his father was a French émigré who taught French in Poland. He published his first piece at seven and played in public at eight, and in Warsaw he was already spoken of as a prodigy.
In 1830, at twenty, he left Poland for western Europe on what was meant to be a tour. Weeks later an uprising broke out in Warsaw, and it was crushed the following year. He never went back. In the autumn of 1831 he reached Paris and lived there for the remaining eighteen years of his life.
In Paris he did not take the concert route. He made his living teaching, mostly aristocratic pupils and at high fees; his works were first heard in salons before audiences of a few dozen. He said that playing before a crowd made him lose himself — not modesty, simply something he did not do.
In 1838 he wintered on Mallorca with the writer George Sand, hoping it would help his lungs. It rained all winter, they ended up in a disused monastery, and he got worse. A large part of the twenty-four Preludes was finished there. The relationship lasted until 1847.
He died in Paris on 17 October 1849, aged thirty-nine. At his own request his heart was taken back to Warsaw and placed in a pillar of the Church of the Holy Cross; his body stayed in Paris, at Père Lachaise.
Almost everything Chopin wrote can be sung — a long right-hand line that breathes like a voice, over a left hand spread wide underneath.
One easy giveaway: the hands often do not line up. The melody arrives slightly before or after the bass, and that is not a mistake but the point — the nineteenth century called it rubato, literally "stolen time", borrowed from one beat and paid back on the next.
Harmonically he loves to let an inner voice slide down by semitones: nothing on top appears to move, yet the colour underneath keeps changing. The usual feeling is of something not yet finished.
