Frederic Chopin
Frederic Chopin
Frédéric François Chopin, born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era who wrote primarily for the solo piano. He gained and has maintained renown worldwide as a leading musician of his era, whose "poetic genius was based on a professional technique that was without equal in his generation." Chopin was born in what was then the Duchy of Warsaw and grew up in Warsaw, which in 1815 became part of Congress Poland. A...
NationalityPolish
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth1 March 1810
CountryPoland
Concerts are never real music, you have to give up the idea of hearing in them all the most beautiful things of art.
I am not fitted to give concerts. The audience intimidates me, I feel choked by its breath, paralyzed by its curious glances, struck dumb by all those strange faces.
Liszt commenting on the music of Frédéric Chopin: He confided . . . those inexpressible sorrows to which the pious give vent in their communication with their Maker. What they never say except upon their knees, he said in his palpitating compositions.
They want me to give another concert but I have no desire to do so. You cannot imagine what a torture the three days before a public appearance are to me.
The crowd intimidates me, its breath suffocates me. I feel paralyzed by its curious look, and the unknown faces make me dumb.
I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness, but I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them.
I shall create a new world for myself.
I don't know where there can be so many pianists as in Paris, so many asses and so many virtuosi.
As something has involuntarily crept into my head through my eyes,I love to indulge it, even though it may be all wrong.
My piano has not yet arrived. How did you send it? By Marseilles or by Perpignan? I dream music but I cannot make any because here there are not any pianos . . . in this respect this is a savage country.
Play Mozart in memory of me.
England is a country of pianos, they are everywhere.
Vienna is a handsome, lively city, and pleases me exceedingly.
I feel like a novice, just as I felt before I knew anything of the keyboard. It is far too original, and I shall end up not being able to learn it myself.