Chopin as a child / "Barcarolle"

Nicolas Chopin, Frédéric's father, left France to try his luck in Poland when he was sixteen. After working for a while in a small tobacco factory run by a countryman, he managed to establish himself, by then an adult, as a teacher or tutor at the home of aristocratic Polish families. This is how he got to work for the Skarbek family, settled in the village of Zelasowa Wola, 60 km from Warsaw.

The mother, Justine
Mrs Skarbek, by those years a widow, was assisted in the house maintenance by a poor relative, an unaffected and charming twenty-year-old girl, with blond hair and blue eyes who wore a certain aura of distinction, despite her aquiline nose, which she will bequeath to one of her children. Yes indeed, she will be Frédéric's mother, because after four years, Justina and Nicolas, who saw each other every day during dinner and ran into each other through the halls and corners of the whole house, finally got married.

Ludwika and Izabella Chopin
Four children will be born from the marriage. Frédéric, the only male, is the second. His older sister, Ludwika, will be a kind of preceptor of little Chopin, in addition to being the one who started him on the path of music. Soon they will play four hands to their parents' delight. Ludwika is his affectionate advisor, almost his friend; long after, she will visit him in Paris and will be with his brother at the time of the final farewell.
The second sister, Izabella, is also a good musician but does not exceed Ludwika's brightness. Both, and also Frédéric, of course, have developed their piano skills guided by Justina, the mother, a talented amateur.

Emilia Chopin
The younger sister, Emilia, has decided to be a poet. At eleven, along with his brother, she writes a comedy in verse to celebrate the father's birthday. Later, Frédéric will join Ludwika to write children's books as a duo. Musicians, talkative, cheerful, friendly, adorable, with a talent for almost everything. So are the Chopin children. The one who shows the greatest talents is, no doubt, little Frédéric. Interestingly, he has an amazing facility for drawing and caricatures, and an unmatched gift for imitating characters. With these extra-musical skills, years later he will wow and impress those attending the artistic evenings in the Paris salons, where he has been invited, at first, to play the piano.

Barcarolle opus 60
The folk songs that Venetian gondoliers sing while they walk their passengers through the city canals are known as barcarolles. The tradition is ancient and it is said that the gondoliers did it so as not to listen to what their distinguished passengers, all noble people, would talk during the small journey.

A good number of classic authors approached the composition of barcarolles, after making a rigorous visit to Italy, and certainly Venice. Apart from the very popular one by Jacques Offenbach, from The Tales of Hoffmann (from which even Elvis Presley released his own version, a "rock" one, in the movie GI Blues), the most famous "classic" barcarolle is that of Frédéric Chopin, composed in 1845, during summer in Nohant, the summer residence of his companion of that time, the writer Georges Sand.

In a brief analysis that Maurice Ravel did on this little masterpiece, he said: "Chopin did in it everything that, by negligence, his masters only expressed imperfectly."

The impeccable rendition is by the Taiwanese pianist Ching-Yun Hu.

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