Frédéric Chopin

Almost everything Frédéric Chopin wrote involves a piano. He trained in Warsaw under Józef Elsner, and left Poland in 1830 weeks before the November Uprising, settling in Paris and never returning. He performed in salons and earned his living principally through teaching. His piano catalogue includes two concertos, four ballades, four scherzos, three sonatas, the études, preludes, nocturnes, impromptus and waltzes. He also wrote mazurkas and polonaises. He died in Paris in 1849, at thirty-nine. His first piano teacher was Wojciech Żywny, with whom he worked until he was twelve, and a Polonaise in G minor survives from his seventh year. News of the Polish defeat reached him in Stuttgart, and from 1831 Paris gave him Berlioz, Liszt, Bellini, Heine, Mickiewicz, Delacroix, who painted him, and George Sand, in whose company he finished the preludes on Mallorca; lessons, not concerts, paid for this life. The B flat minor sonata carries the funeral march. The Barcarolle is for solo piano, while the Cello Sonata stands outside that catalogue; the unfinished Mazurka in F minor is traditionally known as his last work.