Chopin was born in the village of Żelazowa Wola, in the Duchy of Warsaw, to a Polish mother and French-expatriate father, and in his early life was regarded as a child-prodigy pianist. In November 1830, at the age of 20, he went abroad; following the suppression of the Polish November Uprising of 1830–31, he became one of many expatriates of the Polish "Great Emigration."

In Paris, Chopin made a comfortable living as a composer and piano teacher, while giving few public performances. An ardent Polish patriot,David Ewen, p. 164. in France he used the French versions of his names and eventually, to avoid having to rely on Imperial Russian documents, became a French citizen. After some ill-fated romantic involvements with Polish women, from 1837 to 1847 he had a turbulent relationship with the French writer George Sand (Aurore Dudevant). Always in frail health, in 1849 he died in Paris, at the age of 39, of chronic pulmonary tuberculosis.

Chopin's extant compositions were written primarily for the piano as a solo instrument. Though they are technically demanding, his style emphasizes nuance and expressive depth. Chopin invented musical forms such as the ballade Scholes, Percy (1938), The Oxford Companion to Music, "Ballade". and was responsible for major innovations in forms such as the piano sonata, waltz, nocturne, étude, impromptu and prelude. His works are mainstays of Romanticism in 19th-century classical music.

Childhood

Her brother would become the father of American Union General Włodzimierz Krzyżanowski.

According to family records, the couple's second child (and only son), christened Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, was born on March 1, 1810 . A parish church document found in 1892 Fact: date=August 2008 gives his birth date as February 22, 1810. Chopin and his mother, however, mentioned repeatedly in letters that he had been born not on February 22, but on March 1. Fact: date=August 2008

In October 1810, when the infant was seven months old, the family moved to Warsaw, where his father took a position as French-language teacher at a school in the Saxon Palace. The Chopin family lived on the palace grounds.