Composers / Fryderyk Chopin / Routes

 

Trasa Concerts and performances

The concerts Chopin gave in Vienna, when he was nineteen, definitely paved the way for him to further his illustrious career. No less relevant – and perhaps even more so – for shaping his approach to the piano and getting him used to performing on stage were his childhood and youthful performances in his home city.

Chopin began performing in public as a charming boy who won the admiration of the Warsaw reviewers and the beautiful ladies in whose salons he played. ‘[…] our Frederick – Chopinek (diminutive of Chopin) they called him – became more than ever the pet of the aristocracy of Warsaw’, claims Frederick Niecks, one of the great composer’s first biographers. ‘He was invited to the houses of the Princes Czartoryski, Sapieha, Czetwertyński, Lubecki, Radziwiłł, the Counts Skarbek, Wolicki, Pruszak, Hussarzewski, Łempicki, and others.

The list of places where Chopin appeared – beginning with palaces and ending with the National Theatre, the most important stage in the capital at the time – is a long one. To follow their trail is to take a journey into the musical life of rich and colourful nineteenth-century Warsaw, the ‘Paris of the North’ as it was once known.

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Fryderyk Chopin – Ecossaise in D flat major Op. 72 No. 3 [WN 13b] (1826, 1830?) – Tatiana Shebanova (piano Erard, 1849), NIFCCD005, (C)(P) The Fryderyk Chopin Institute

Fryderyk Chopin – Polonaise in B flat minor [WN 10] (1826) – Tatiana Shebanova (piano Erard, 1849), NIFCCD018, (C)(P) The Fryderyk Chopin Institute

Fryderyk Chopin – Polonaise in G sharp minor [WN 5] (1824) – Tatiana Shebanova (piano Erard, 1849), NIFCCD018, (C)(P) The Fryderyk Chopin Institute