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Frederic Chopin music biography continued...

1810 in Poland to a French father and a Polish mother. When he was just twelve he started studying at the Warsaw Conservatory and by nineteen had written his F minor piano concerto and performed his first piano concert in Vienna. He arrived in Paris, the great center of European culture, in 1831, where he was surrounded by famous writers, painters and musicians, and set up a teaching studio under the auspices of the Rothschilds. Chopin soon developed a love affair with George Sand, and while traveling with her wrote many of the 24 Preludes, Op. 8, that would make him world renowned.
Chopin and Sand, who would stay together until 1847, lived in adjoining houses in Paris and they spent their summers at Sand's home in Nowat, where the writer was called on to take care of an increasingly frail Chopin and where the famed composer created some of his greatest music. All of Chopin's work included the piano in some role (predominantly as a solo instrument), and his compositions were widely considered to be pinnacles of the piano's repertoire. He invented new musical forms, such as the ballade, and introduced significant innovations into existing forms such as the piano sonata, waltz, nocturne, étude, impromptu and prelude. Additionally, Chopin was the first western composer to imbue his music with Slavic elements; to this day his mazurkas and polonaises are the cornerstone of Polish national classical music. Chopin and Sand ultimately split and Chopin died a year later on October 17, 1849.
Chopin, as early as 1831, expressed his "perhaps too audacious, but noble wish and intention to create for myself a new world." Music historians say he most certainly achieved his desires with music that was by turns "poetic, proud, defiant, elegant and heroic." Further, they have noted that Chopin's "discovery of the piano's potential to inhabit a complete and poetic world of song and color" would set the standard for all piano writing in the latter part of the 19th Century Romantic period and beyond.