Frédéric Chopin

Residence 1

📍Szkolna 1, 96-503 Żelazowa Wola, Masovian Voivodeship, Poland

“I was born on the 1st of March 1810 in Żelazowa Wola, a village in the Mazovian plains west of Warsaw, the son of Nicolas Chopin, a French émigré teacher, and Justyna Krzyżanowska. The Mazovian landscape — flat, birch-forested, melancholy in autumn — entered my music before I had formal training. I left Poland at twenty and spent the rest of my life in Paris, but Poland never left my music: the mazurkas and the polonaises were acts of musical patriotism by a man who knew he could not return. My piano was always the instrument through which I was most fully myself, and the small forms I preferred — the nocturne, the étude, the ballade — suited a constitution that was never robust and a sensibility that preferred intimacy to display.”

Sources: Samson, J. Chopin (1996), Oxford University Press; Szulc, T. Chopin in Paris (1998), Scribner

Residence 2

📍9 Square d'Orléans, 75009 Paris, France

“George Sand found the Square d'Orléans and we took neighbouring apartments in the same courtyard — she at number 5, I at number 9, connected by a shared garden that gave us the fiction of separate lives. Paris suited me better than anywhere: the city understood that a man could be Polish, consumptive, and difficult while still being worth listening to. At the Square d'Orléans I wrote the nocturnes, the ballades, the études — music composed in a room smaller than my childhood drawing room in Warsaw, at a Pleyel upright because my lungs had grown too weak to press the keys of a grand. My students came three times a week; I taught because public performance had become impossible at altitude. The relationship with George ended in 1847 after Majorca and ten years and her novel that humiliated me. Two years later I was dead, at thirty-nine, in a different apartment on the Place Vendôme. But it was here, in this courtyard, that I was most completely myself.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Frédéric Chopin