Portrait of Fryderyk Chopin (1836)
Maria Wodzińska, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The son of a French immigrant who had traveled to Poland to escape the French Revolution, Fryderyk (or Frédéric) Chopin was born in 1810 and was soon a child prodigy on the piano. He began to play at the age of 4 and gave his first public performance at the age of 8. He studied at Warsaw Conservatory, where he forged a unique style of music combining classical techniques and styles with traditional Polish music. He popularized the mazurka, a type of Polish dance, and is well known for pieces called nocturnes and fantasies, terms which really don't tell you anything about the piece but are typically evocative Romantic titles. Inspired after hearing the Italian virtuoso Niccolò Paganini, Chopin dedicated himself to the piano, composing over two hundred solo works, as well as some chamber music and piano concerti.

He left Poland in 1830 on a concert tour of Western Europe, but after a Polish uprising was squashed by Russian forces, he never returned to his homeland, continuing on to France on a travel visa (which technically gave him permission to enter the country en route to London.) He was close friends with Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, and Robert Schumann, and also knew Felix Mendelssohn. Chopin remained in Paris, teaching, composing, and performing in the intimate salon atmosphere popular among Parisian artists. Despite spending the rest of his life in Paris, he always considered himself Polish and remains deeply associated with his homeland.

Chopin suffered from poor health throughout his life, dying of tuberculosis at the age of 39. He had a lifelong fear of being buried alive, and demanded he his heart be removed from his body upon death. It was preserved in a bottle of cognac and smuggled by his eldest sister past Russian customs back into Poland, where it remains to this day.