Chopin in Paris
The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer
Chapter One
Prelude
Late in the afternoon of the last Tuesday of September, 1831, Fryderyk
Franciszek Chopin, just six months past his twenty-first birthday, entered the
great city of Paris, determined to conquer it - and quietly prepared to die
there long before reaching old age. Both prophecies would be fulfilled.
Along with fifteen fellow passengers, Chopin arrived in an impossibly
overcrowded public stagecoach from Strasbourg on the final leg of his
exhausting two-week journey from Stuttgart in Germany where he had first
experienced - and described - the choking sensation of being a "living
corpse."
Slim and pale, five feet seven inches tall, almost feminine in his blue-eyed,
blond delicacy, Fryderyk Chopin was born in a village near Warsaw in 1810, the
Polish son of a Frenchman who had settled in Poland. Now, in turn, Chopin, the
genius musician, was bringing Poland to France, yet remaining unassailably
Polish until the moment his breathing ceased.
Two months before he left his native Warsaw on Novem ... read full excerpt from Chopin in Paris: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer ebook
