![]() You see, the Masovian district, which currently lies in the center of Polish territory, is basically flat as an iron (no pun intended). Well, a local would answer: hardly anything, and that’s the point. What do you see apart from an inconspicuous manor? Just take a little tour of his Masovian birthplace, now a museum devoted to him. So, where is Żelazowa Wola in all this? Well, perhaps omnipresent in Chopin’s subconscious. Kazur Right, courtesy of The Fryderyk Chopin Institute/ Radosław Jarosiński (Bottom row) Photo: Left and center courtesy of The Fryderyk Chopin Institute / M. (Top row) Left and center photos courtesy of The Fryderyk Chopin Institute / M. Having found their talents elsewhere, many of them already lived abroad, including the then-twenty-year-old Chopin, who, as a child prodigy, had long surpassed the capabilities of his piano teachers.Ĭhopin lived in Paris for the rest of his short life (he died at 39), teaching piano lessons and playing in Paris’s famed salons, not to mention developing friendships with the likes of Franz Liszt and a famous, yet scandalous romantic relationship with French writer Georges Sand. The first of such uprisings, the November Uprising, broke out in 1830 when the “rat pack” of romantic artists were young adults. With divergent ideas on politics and social affairs, Poles kept on fighting to have a country of their own through a series of uprisings that disrupted the imperial politics of 19 th-century Russia. ![]() After a failed attempt at establishing Napoleon-dependent Polish autonomy, Poland was partitioned yet again, and after 1815, it became part of Congress Poland, which was basically a Russian province. Delicate sounds peacefully flow, as if the pianist is barely touching the keyboard, then alternate with passionate, thunderstorm-like chords, called “flowers hidden among (or in) the cannons.”Īnd, in that era, it seemed that the cannons were what Poles needed the most. There’s more of a connection in this description of Chopin’s music than it may seem – at least in Poland. ![]() It was not that actual iron was smelted in the town, but rather that it was where iron cannons were forged. Photo: courtesy of The Fryderyk Chopin Institute / Czesław Olszewski View of the pergolas and Skarbek Manor seen from the southwest around 1934. Photo: courtesy of The Fryderyk Chopin Institute Photo: courtesy of The Fryderyk Chopin Institute Lithograph based on a drawing by Napoleon Orda (ca. ![]() (from left) Skarbek Manor, 1870, woodcut by M. Żelazowa Wola, Fryderyk Chopin’s Birthplace. Cannons and flowersįrederic (in Polish, Fryderyk) Chopin, the most notable inhabitant of Żelazowa Wola, was born here in 1810, over a decade after the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had lost its independence to the three adjacent empires: Prussia, Russia, and the Habsburg Empire of Austria. Fryderyk Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola, now populated by some sixty people, in a noble manor proportionate to the scale of the village. It takes less than an hour and a half to drive from Poland’s capital of Warsaw to its musical capital – the birthplace of the most famous and world-renowned Polish composer.
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