Composer Frédéric Chopin Was Born
On this day · 1 March 1810
A French-Polish prodigy born in a Mazovian manor would reshape how the world plays and hears the piano.
Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin was born on 1 March 1810 in Żelazowa Wola, a village west of Warsaw in the Duchy of Warsaw. The date carries a quirk: his baptismal record lists 22 February, but the composer and his family always insisted on March 1, and that is the date generally accepted today.
His father, Mikołaj (Nicolas) Chopin, was a Frenchman from Lorraine who had settled in Poland; his mother, Justyna Krzyżanowska, was Polish. Months after Fryderyk’s birth, the family moved to Warsaw, where his gifts surfaced almost at once. He composed his first works and performed publicly while still a child.
A prodigy who left Poland at twenty, Chopin made Paris his home and the piano his entire world.
Writing almost exclusively for solo piano, Chopin became a defining voice of the Romantic era, his nocturnes, mazurkas and polonaises binding Polish folk idiom to a deeply personal harmonic language. He died in Paris in 1849, aged 39.
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