FREE ESSAY ON FREDERIC CHOPIN

FREDERIC CHOPIN

Frederic Chopin
Frederic Chopin was a very famous pianist who started studying piano when he was four,
and played at a private concert in Warsaw when he was eight years old.
At age 16 Chopin was already well known for his music, and at that time he was enrolled
in the Warsaw Conservatory of Music. His teacher Joseph Elsner was said to have done a
brilliant job preparing him for his life in music. His music, which is romantic and
lyrical in nature, is characterized by originality, adventurous harmony, rhythm, and
poetic beauty. His music is considered to be romantic in content, but very different from
the romanticism of the time. Chopin felt that many performance details, such as phrasing,
dynamics, pedaling, and articulation, were not fixed elements of his music, even though
they have a substantial impact on the way it sounds. Another thing that sets him apart
from other musicians is the fact that he received little or no criticism from anyone
about his music. Very much unlike many other famous musicians, Chopin could not stand to
perform in concerts and as a result it is said that he performed in less than thirty over
the course of his entire life. When Chopin gave music lessons, he commanded as much as
thirty francs per lesson, which at the time was a very large amount money. Chopin greatly
influenced other composers, such as the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt,
German composer Richard Wagner, and French composer Claude Debussy. As a pianist he
created a style that dominated the entire second half of the nineteenth century and was
not changed until Debussy and Prokofiev came along.