Chopin
Frederic Chopin was born on 1st March 1810, not far from Warsaw, Poland to a Polish mother and a French father. When he was six months old, he and his family moved to Warsaw, where they lived in the grounds of the Saxon Palace, where Chopin’s father had gotten a job. Having previously been taught piano by his older sister, Chopin first started receiving professional music lessons in 1816 and it was immediately apparent that he had enormous talent. By the time he was eight years old, he had already given his first public concert. He attended the Warsaw Lyceum, where he took organ lessons; subsequently leaving school to attend the Warsaw Conservatoire of Music where he studied music theory, figured bass and composition. It was during his
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Though he may not have composed many pieces, and the majority of them being for the piano, the ones he did compose are very famous to this day, especially his Nocturnes and Preludes. The majority of his compositions being Nocturnes, Preludes, Polonaises or Mazurkas, his pieces are usually not very long. In his music, he explored a range of moods, his Preludes, for example, being at the same time, ecstatic and melancholic. He also expressed his love and longing for Poland in his music in his Polonaises and Mazurkas. Although added by publishers, Chopin himself did not give his pieces titles because he didn’t like the idea. Rubato is a rhythmic technique used in much if his music, and is it usually up to the performer as to how they would like to play the piece. This use of rubato creates different feelings such as that of tension. Taking ideas from Italian opera, he often used ornaments in order to create variation in a repeated melodic line.
As mentioned previously, Chopin composed several Nocturnes in his time, his romantic style of writing earning him the title: “poet of the piano”. An example of one of these is his ‘Nocturne No. 5 in F# minor’. The other genres he explored include the polonaise, for example ‘Polonaise in A♭Major’ (Opus 53) which has a powerful melody and is one of his most admired compositions; the waltz, such as his famous ‘Minute Waltz’; and the etude, for example ‘The Revolutionary Etude’, written when he heard Russians had captured his hometown of