Tuesday, November 1
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Chopin gets out of town
On today's date in 1830, the Polish composer, Frederic Chopin, said farewell to his native land -- for good, as it turned out, although no one knew it at the time.
The occasion was a bon voyage dinner thrown by the composer's friends in Warsaw. It was all quite jolly, with singing, dancing, and drinking lasting well into the night. But on a more melancholy note, Romantic legend has it that someone presented Chopin with a vessel of Polish soil, which ended up being buried with him when he died in Paris 19 years later.
No doubt Chopin was an ardent Polish patriot, and, thanks to the repressive new czar of Russia, Nicholas the First, things were looking bad for Poland, politically speaking, in 1830. Musically, at least in Chopin's view, things weren't much better.
"One thing's for sure," Chopin wrote to a friend, "I'm not staying in Warsaw. You have no idea how dreary it is here. If it weren't for my family I simply couldn't stand it." Chopin kept himself busy by writing two piano concertos, bigger projects than anything he had tackled so far. "My second concerto is so original I'm afraid even I'll never learn to play it right," he confessed in a letter.
Even so, these new works were well received in Warsaw, and one critic even suggested, with prophetic foresight, "Fate has blessed the Poles with Mr. Chopin just as she gave the Germans Mozart."
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