Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin (born in Zelazowa Wola, Poland 1810; died in Paris, 1849).

"One is loath to believe that the echo of Chopin's magic music can ever fall upon unheeding ears.  He may become old-fashioned, but, like Mozart, he will remain eternally beautiful."
James Huneker

"No one who loves music can be indifferent towards Chopin. [...] His music contains unfeigned feelings, a dream of the future, and crystal-clear, fervid, exciting ideas."
Dmitri Shostakovich

Almost two centuries have passed since Chopin's grand music talent lit up in Warsaw and then dazzled all of Europe and the rest of the world. Since that time the value of this formidable artist's work has been constantly increasing - and so has his popularity. His influence on our whole culture since the mid-19th century may be viewed in terms of a phenomenon, not only in music but also literature, visual arts, high art and popular art. There are some who call him the Elvis of his time.

A great number of American musicals of the 1940 are originated from Chopin motifs... Often films feature Chopin's music - not only as an illustrative sphere, but as an important source of inspiration, creation of the artistic reality. It can then be said without any hesitation that what we are experiencing is a cultural phenomenon which goes far beyond the convention of classical performances.

Chopin is a value that has been alive in all the world's cultures for nearly 200 years now. He is a specific symbol of excellence.

Undoubtedly, the fundamental thing in the sphere of Chopin's cult is the work of music itself - tending to it is what requires the utter most diligence and attention on our part. The Polishness which Chopin has in such an outstanding, beautiful way recorded in the form of music - similarly as Norwid or Mickiewicz managed to do in the form of literature. Not only through his work, but also because he was such an extraordinary personality of the perhaps most beautiful cultural period that Romanticism was, Chopin has become a radiating value - and radiating in an extraordinary way.

Fryderyk Chopin's output constitutes an exceptional and most exquisite gem in the treasury of our national culture.

QUOTES ABOUT CHOPIN DURING HIS TIME

by Franz Liszt
"Music was his language, the divine tongue through which he expressed a whole realm of sentiments that only the select few can appreciate... The muse of his homeland dictates his songs, and the anguished cries of Poland lend to his art a mysterious, indefinable poetry which, for all those who have truly experienced it, cannot be compared to anything else... The piano alone was not sufficient to reveal all that lies within him. In short he is a most remarkable individual who commands our highest degree of devotion."

by George Sand
"His music was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without seeking it, without previous intimation of it. It came upon his piano sudden, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he was impatient to hear it himself with the help of the instrument. But then began the most desperate labor that I have ever witnessed. It was a succession of efforts, hesitations and moments of impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he could hear; what he had conceived as one piece, he analyzed too much in trying to write it down, and his dismay at his inability to rediscover it in what he thought was its original purity threw him into a kind of despair. He would lock himself up in his room for whole days, weeping, pacing back and forth, breaking his pens, repeating or changing one bar a hundred times, writing and erasing it as many times, and beginning again the next day with an infinite and desperate perseverance. He sometimes spent six weeks on one page, only in the end to write it exactly as he had sketched at the first draft."

"Chopin has written two wonderful mazurkas which are worth more than forty novels and are more eloquent than the entire century's literature."

by Robert Schumann
"We may be sure that a genius like Mozart, were he born today, would write concertos like Chopin and not like Mozart."

by La France Musicale
"Chopin has done for the piano what Schubert has done for the voice. Chopin is unique as a pianist: he should not and cannot be compared with anyone."

by La Revue Musicale
"Chopin has broken new trails for himself. His playing and his composition, from the very beginning, have won such high standing that in the eyes of many he has become an inexplicable phenomenon... No one as yet has tried to define the special character and merit of those works, what distinguished them from others, and why they occupy such a high place."

by Felix Mendelssohn
"There is something fundamentally personal and at the same time so very masterly in his playing that he may be called a really perfect virtuoso."

by Wilhelm Lenz
"Every single note was played with the highest degree of taste, in the noblest sense of the word. When he embellished, which he rarely did, it was a positive miracle of refinement."