Chopin was born of mixed French and Polish parentage, February 8, 1810, at Zelazowa-Wola, near Warsaw.  He was educated at the Warsaw Conservatory, and his eminent genius for the piano shone at this time most unmistakably.  He found in the piano-forte an exclusive organ for the expression of his thoughts.  In the presence of this confidential companion he forgot his shyness and poured forth his whole soul.  A passionate lover of his native country, and burning with those aspirations for freedom which have made Poland since its first partition a volcano ever ready to break forth, the folk-themes of Poland are at the root of all of Chopin’s compositions, and in the waltzes and mazurkas bearing his name we find a passionate glow and richness of color which make them musical poems of the highest order.

Chopin’s art position, both as a pianist and composer, was a unique one.  He was accustomed to say that the breath of the concert-room stifled him, whereas Liszt, his intimate friend and fellow-artist, delighted in it as a war-horse delights in the tumult of battle.  Chopin always shrank from the display of his powers as a mere executant.  To exhibit his talents to the public was an offense to him, and he only cared for his remarkable technical skill as a means of placing his fanciful original poems in tone rightly before the public.  It was with the greatest difficulty that his intimate friends, Liszt, Meyerbeer, Nourrit, Delacroix, Heine, Mme. George Sand, Countess D’Agoult, and others, could persuade him to appear before large mixed audiences.  His genius only shone unconstrained as a player in the society of a few chosen intimate friends, with whom he felt a perfect sympathy, artistic, social, and intellectual.  Exquisite, fastidious, and refined, Chopin was loss an aristocrat from political causes, or even by virtue of social caste, than from the fact that his art nature, which was delicate, feminine, and sensitive, shrank from all companions except those molded of the finest clay.  We find this sense of exclusiveness and isolation in all of the Chopin music, as in some quaint, fantastic, ideal world, whose master would draw us up to his sphere, but never descend to ours.

In the treatment of the technical means of the piano-forte, he entirely wanders from the old methods.  Moscheles, a great pianist in an age of great players, gave it up in despair, and confessed that he could not play Chopin’s music.  The latter teaches the fingers to serve his own artistic uses, without regard to the notions of the schools.  It is said that M. Kalkbrenner advised Chopin to attend his classes at the Paris Conservatoire, that the latter might learn the proper fingering.  Chopin answered his officious adviser by placing one of his own “Etudes” before him, and asking him to play it.  The failure of the pompous professor was ludicrous, for the old-established technique utterly failed to do it justice.  Chopin’s end as a player was to faithfully interpret the poetry