In memory of Chopin, the romantic pianist

Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) set romantic pianism with his extreme refinement and nuances of playing, the desparateness for perfection. George Sand, a notorious woman novelist and the most talked-about lover of Chopin, wrote, " He created spontaneously and amazingly. His ideas came to him, without his needing to seek or ponder them. But then he began to work more meticulously than I have ever seen another do. There was no end to the impatient, inconclusive attempts to fix the details of the theme as he has first heard it inwardly. What he had conceived as a whole, he tore to shreds in the writing down. His regret at being unable to present it whole cast him into deep despair. He shut himself up in his room for whole days at a time, paced up and down, broke pens, repeated, altered a single bar one hundred times, wrote it down afresh, and crossed it out once more, and started again the next morning with painful and desperate persistence. He spent six weeks working on one page, in order to formulate it finally as he had first conceived it."

A born master, Chopin published his first polonaise and first performed in public at the age of 8; and the Rondo op.1 at 15. His life was not eventful and even in his best years in Paris, he mainly published his pieces and taught music to students from top social circles for a living and rarely performed. Chopin's debut in Paris was on February 26, 1832, on a Pleyel piano at the Pleyer Salon, formed by French piano-maker's founders for beaus espirits who met to play and hear music attentively and respectfully.

Chopin concentrated on piano from the very first of his music business: four-fifths of Chopin output is for solo piano and the instrument has an active role in the rest which include cello, sonata, trio and songs. His works are the outcome of intense and scrupulously self-critical work and most are short and apparently improvisatory, like the 16-bar-long miniature mazurka, no.7 of the Preludes. The 24 of them are all concise and full of contrasts, encompassing every possible form of pianistic expressions.