Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849)
Complete Piano Music Vol. 5
Nocturnes Vol. 1

The son of a French émigré of relatively humble origin, who had established himself as a schoolmaster in Warsaw and espoused the cause of Poland with enthusiasm, Fryderyk Chopin was to make his home and career in Paris, after early success at home, where he was trained at the Conservatory and gave a series of public concerts before trying his luck in Vienna. Paris, however, proved more suitable for his particular talents. As a pianist he excelled in a peculiar delicacy of nuance, while as a teacher and as a gentleman he proved acceptable in the elegant salons of the French capital.

For some ten years Chopin enjoyed or occasionally suffered a relationship with the strong-willed blue-stocking Aurore Dudevant, better known by her pen-name of George Sand, a woman of a distinctly liberated cast of mind, who was to find even in her inamorato a source for her own fiction.