Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric Chopin was a child prodigy of the piano who left his beloved Poland at twenty, just before an uprising against Russian rule, and never saw his homeland again. He settled in Paris, the toast of its salons, a frail and elegant young man whose playing was so intimate and refined that listeners said he seemed to confide in the instrument rather than perform on it. Almost everything he wrote was for the piano alone.

Into that single instrument he poured an entire emotional world — the proud mazurkas and polonaises that beat with the rhythms of the country he had lost, the nocturnes that seem to murmur in the dark, the études that turned mere finger exercises into poetry. He never wrote a symphony or an opera; he did not need to. He found infinity in eighty-eight keys, and he changed forever what the piano could say.

His health was always fragile, and tuberculosis took him at just thirty-nine. He asked that his heart be removed and carried back to Warsaw, and so it was, sealed in a pillar of a church in the city he loved. We honor him as the poet of the piano — the exile who turned longing for a vanished home into music so tender and so Polish that, two centuries on, his country still hears its own heartbeat in it.