Chopin: The Public Face of Poland
During his brief life, the Polish master of the musical miniature became a living symbol of his troubled nation. Adam Zamoyski looks at the reception given to Chopin by a divided public when he visited Britain in 1848, a year of revolution through Europe.
Chopin may have been the most innovative and patriotic of composers, but he was no revolutionary. And, although he spent half of his life as a political exile, this was largely the result of circumstance. In November 1830, when revolution broke out on the streets of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland created by the Congress of Vienna attempted to throw off the Russian yoke, the 20-year-old composer was in Vienna on the first leg of a tour of Europe. He carried on to Paris, where he was to have gone anyway, and there manifested his solidarity with his fellow Poles by choosing a life of exile.
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