Nor are the events of his life of any particular significance. He was born near Warsaw, in Poland, in 1810, the son of a teacher who later became professor of French in the Lyceum of Warsaw. His father had sufficient funds for his education, and the lad received excellent instruction in music--in composition chiefly--at the Warsaw Conservatory. At nine he appeared as a concert pianist, and frequently thereafter. He was a sensitive child, but hardly remarkable in any way. There are child love affairs to be recorded by careful biographers, with fancied influences on his art. In composition he was not precocious, his Opus 1 appearing at the age of eighteen. A visit to Vienna in 1829 decided him in his career of professional pianist, and in 1830 he left Warsaw on a grand concert tour. In 1831 he reached Paris, where he lived most of his life thereafter. His Opus 2 was ‘announced’ to the world by the discerning Schumann, in the famous phrase, ‘Hats off, gentlemen. A genius!’ In 1837, through Liszt’s machinations, he met Madame Dudevant, known to fame by her pen name, George Sand. She was the one great love affair of his life. Their visit to Majorca, which has found a nesting place in literature in George Sand’s _Un Hiver à Majorque_, was a rather dismal failure. The result was an illness, which his mistress nursed him through, and this began the continued ill health that lasted until his death. After Majorca came more composition and lessons in Paris, with summer visits to George Sand at her country home, and occasional trips to England. Then, in 1849, severe sickness and death. All that was really important in Chopin’s life happened within himself. No other great composer of the time is so utterly self-contained. Though he lived in an age of frenzied ‘schools’ and propaganda, he calmly worked as pleased him best, choosing what suited his personality and letting the rest go. His music is, perhaps, more consistently personal than that of any other composer of the century. It is remarkable, too, that the chief contemporary musical influences on his work came from second and third-rate men. He was intimate with Liszt, he was friendly with the Schumanns. But from them he borrowed next to nothing. Yet he worshipped Bach and Mozart. Nothing of the romantic Parisian frenzy of the thirties enters into his music; the only influence which the creed of the romanticists had upon him seems to have been the freeing of his mind from traditional obstacles, but it is doubtful whether his mind was not already quite free when he reached Paris. All that he did was peculiarly his; his choice and rejection were accurate in the extreme.