Frederic Chopin bust statue

Frédéric Chopin, born in 1810 in the Polish village of Żelazowa Wola, transformed the language of the piano almost single-handedly in the brief twenty years between his arrival in Paris in 1831 and his death from tuberculosis in 1849. The nocturne, the mazurka, the ballade and the polonaise as the world now hears them are largely his inventions. He played rarely in public, preferring the intimate Parisian salons of the Marquise de Custine and the writer George Sand, with whom he shared a long and unsteady companionship. His bust portrait, often modelled after Auguste Clésinger's bronze on his Père Lachaise tomb, became one of the most replicated images of nineteenth-century musical Romanticism.