Marceli Celiński’s apartment

On Wednesday 12 August 1829, Fryderyk Chopin wrote in a letter to his family about the performance and reception of a concert he gave in Vienna: ‘My friends and colleagues positioned themselves about the various corners in order to hear the range of opinions and criticisms. Celiński can tell you how few were the reproaches to be heard’.

Marceli Celiński was born in 1809. In 1829, he accompanied Chopin on a journey to Krakow (the Jagiellonian Library visitors’ book records that they went there together), Wieliczka, Vienna, Prague and Dresden. The two young men often saw each other in Warsaw too (‘And now, here is Celiński, the executor of my strolls’, Chopin wrote to Tytus Woyciechowski on 10 April 1830, ‘a good-natured sort, he looks after my health’), and Chopin definitely visited the Celiński residence on Krakowskie Przedmieście. Marceli’s father, Józef, was, as Ferdynand Hoesick puts it, ‘a highly cultured person with a refined outlook. Apart from affluence, an atmosphere of refinement and of an exceptional intellectual level pervaded that house of his’. It was presumably on one of those visits, in 1830, that Chopin inscribed a Waltz in A flat major in the album of Marceli’s sister, Paulina Adelajda Le Brun.

Marceli studied to become a physician and a surgeon and was assistant physician at the Sapieha Barracks during the November Uprising.