Frederic Chopin

Frederic Chopin was a very famous pianist who started studying piano when he was four, and played at a private concert in Warsaw when he was eight years old.

At age 16 Chopin was already well known for his music, and at that time he was enrolled in the Warsaw Conservatory of Music. His teacher Joseph Elsner was said to have done a brilliant job preparing him for his life in music. His music, which is romantic and lyrical in nature, is characterized by originality, adventurous harmony, rhythm, and poetic beauty. His music is considered to be romantic in content, but very different from the romanticism of the time. Chopin felt that many performance details, such as phrasing, dynamics, pedaling, and articulation, were not fixed elements of his music, even though they have a substantial impact on the way it sounds. Another thing that sets him apart from other musicians is the fact that he received little or no criticism from anyone about his music. Very much unlike many other famous musicians, Chopin could not stand to perform in concerts and as a result it is said that he performed in less than thirty over the course of his entire life. When Chopin gave music lessons, he commanded as much as thirty francs per lesson, which at the time was a very large amount money. Chopin greatly influenced other composers, such as the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt, German composer Richard Wagner, and French composer Claude Debussy. As a pianist he created a style that dominated the entire second half of the nineteenth century and was not changed until Debussy and Prokofiev came along.

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