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Education
Józef Elsner (after 1853)
From September 1823 to 1826, Chopin attended the Warsaw Lyceum, where he received organ lessons from the Czech musician Wilhelm Würfel during his first year. In the autumn of 1826 he began a three-year course under the Silesian composer Józef Elsner at the Warsaw Conservatory, studying music theory, figured bass, and composition.[21] [n 5] Throughout this period he continued to compose and to give recitals in concerts and salons in Warsaw. He was engaged by the inventors of the "aeolomelodicon" (a combination of piano and mechanical organ), and on this instrument in May 1825 he performed his own improvisation and part of a concerto by Moscheles. The success of this concert led to an invitation to give a recital on a similar instrument (the "aeolopantaleon") before Tsar Alexander I, who was visiting Warsaw; the Tsar presented him with a diamond ring. At a subsequent aeolopantaleon concert on 10 June 1825, Chopin performed his Rondo Op. 1. This was the first of his works to be commercially published and earned him his first mention in the foreign press, when the Leipzig Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung praised his "wealth of musical ideas".[22]
From 1824 until 1828 Chopin spent his vacations away from Warsaw, at a number of locations.[n 6] In 1824 and 1825, at Szafarnia, he was a guest of Dominik Dziewanowski, the father of a schoolmate. Here, for the first time, he encountered Polish rural folk music.[24] His letters home from Szafarnia (to which he gave the title "The Szafarnia Courier"), written in a very modern and lively Polish, amused his family with their spoofing of the Warsaw newspapers and demonstrated the youngster's literary gift.[25]
In 1827, soon after the death of Chopin's youngest sister Emilia, the family moved from the Warsaw University building, adjacent to the Kazimierz Palace, to lodgings just across the street from the university, in the south annex of the Krasiński Palace on Krakowskie Przedmieście,[n 7] where Chopin lived until he left Warsaw in 1830.[n 8] Here his parents continued running their boarding house for male students. Four boarders at his parents' apartments became Chopin's intimates: Tytus Woyciechowski, Jan Nepomucen Białobłocki, Jan Matuszyński, and Julian Fontana. The latter two would become part of his Paris milieu.[28]
Letters from Chopin to Woyciechowski in the period 1829–30 (when Chopin was about twenty) contain erotic references to dreams and to offered kisses and embraces. According to Adam Zamoyski, such expressions "were, and to some extent still are, common currency in Polish and carry no greater implication than the 'love'" concluding letters today. "The spirit of the times, pervaded by the Romantic movement in art and literature, favoured extreme expression of feeling ... Whilst the possibility cannot be ruled out entirely, it is unlikely that the two were ever lovers."[29] Chopin's biographer Alan Walker considers that, insofar as such expressions could be perceived as homosexual in nature, they would not denote more than a passing phase in Chopin's life.[30] The musicologist Jeffrey Kallberg notes that concepts of sexual practice and identity were very different in Chopin's time, so modern interpretation is problematic.[31]
Probably in early 1829 Chopin met the singer Konstancja Gładkowska and developed an intense affection for her, although it is not clear that he ever addressed her directly on the matter. In a letter to Woyciechowski of 3 October 1829 he refers to his "ideal, whom I have served faithfully for six months, though without ever saying a word to her about my feelings; whom I dream of, who inspired the Adagio of my Concerto."[32] All of Chopin's biographers, following the lead of Frederick Niecks,[33] agree that this "ideal" was Gładkowska. After what was to be Chopin's farewell concert in Warsaw in October 1830, which included the concerto, played by the composer, and Gładkowska singing an aria by Gioachino Rossini, the two exchanged rings, and two weeks later she wrote in his album some affectionate lines bidding him farewell.[34] After Chopin left Warsaw they did not meet and apparently did not correspond.[35]
Chopin was friendly with members of Warsaw's young artistic and intellectual world, including Fontana, Józef Bohdan Zaleski, and Stefan Witwicki.[28] Chopin's final Conservatory report (July 1829) read: "Chopin F., third-year student, exceptional talent, musical genius."[21] In 1829 the artist Ambroży Mieroszewski executed a set of portraits of Chopin family members, including the first known portrait of the composer.[n 9]
Career
Chopin plays for the Radziwiłłs, 1829 (painting by Henryk Siemiradzki, 1887)
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