Izabela Chopin

Izabella Chopin (1811–1881) was the second eldest sister of Fryderyk Chopin. Like her siblings, she was musically and artistically gifted and given a thorough education. Izabella wrote a two-volume book entitled Pan Wojciech czyli wzór pracy i oszczędności [Mr. Wojciech, An Example of Work and Economy] with her sister Ludwika. This was reprinted many times. She married Antoni Barciński in 1834. They had no children.

Izabella was a self-sacrificing, modest and hard-working woman, who cared for her aged parents, then her widowed mother and finally the children of her deceased sister (Ludwika Jędrzejewicz). She was socially active and involved in national affairs. She inherited all the family mementoes of Fryderyk when her mother died in the 1860s. Unfortunately, many of these were soon destroyed during a brutal Russian reprisal in 1863 (Russian soldiers threw Chopin’s piano out of the window of her apartment, which inspired a famous but harrowing poem by Cyprian Kamil Norwid).