Chopin

"Welcome to Fryderyk Chopin Airport, Warsaw,” intones the flight attendant. And sure enough, there on the outside of the terminal building, looming through the darkness of a wintry evening, giant letters proclaim the name of the composer who wrote some of the best-loved piano music in the world. But Chopin is not a Polish surname, and his first one is often spelled Frédéric. Wasn’t he French? No. Chopin was Polish. In truth, there has never been any doubt about Chopin’s nationality. One only has to hear his music – with traditional dances underpinning all those mazurkas and dark, dramatic polonaises – to appreciate that he had an innate feel for the spirit of Poland. His letters show that he and his family conversed in Polish at a high intellectual level. But the situation is not simple. He was certainly born in Poland, in the village of Zelazowa Wola, and spent his early years in Warsaw. But his father, Nicolas, was of pure French stock, having moved to Poland only in 1787 with an aristocratic Polish family he had been working for in France. In 1831, Chopin did the exact opposite, leaving his homeland and spending the rest of his short life based in Paris, composing his matchless repertoire of poetically refined, passionate piano music. But it is significant that, whereas Chopin’s body is buried in Paris in the cemetery of Père Lachaise, his heart was taken back to Warsaw after his death in 1849, and is preserved there in an urn at the Church of the Holy Cross. Despite the fame that he accumulated in France and beyond, his spiritual affinities remained with the land of his birth.