Frédéric Chopin: Difference between revisions

Chopin's father, [[Nicolas Chopin]], was a Frenchman from [[Lorraine (region)|Lorraine]] who migrated to Poland in 1787 at age sixteen. When Adam Weydlich (manager of an estate owned by a Pole, {{ill|pl|Michał Jan Pac}}, where Nicolas had lived with his family) was returning to his native Poland, young Nicolas came with him and got engaged in Weydlich's Warsaw tobacco factory. During the 1794 [[Kościuszko Uprising]] heNicolas served in the Warsaw municipal militia, rising to the rank of lieutenant. In France he had been baptized ''Nicolas''; in Poland he used the Polish form of the name, ''Mikołaj''. Though he had come from a foreign country, he became [[Polonization|Polonized]] and, according to the Polish historian and archivist Łopaciński, "''undoubtedly considered himself a Pole.''".<ref name="chopin" />

Frédéric was the couple's second child and only son. (Thethe eldest child, [[Ludwika Jędrzejewicz|Ludwika]], was to become his first piano teacher, and several decades later was to repatriate his heart from Paris.). He was born at [[Żelazowa Wola]], forty-six kilometres west of Warsaw, in what was the [[Duchy of Warsaw]]. The parish baptismal record, discovered in 1892, gives his birthday as 22 February 1810,<ref name="baptism" /> but a date one week later, 1 March, was stated by the composer and his family as his birthday;<ref name="chopin.pl biography" /> according to Chopin in a letter of 16 January 1833 to the chairman of the Polish Literary Society in Paris,<ref name="googleusercontent" /> he was "born 1 March 1810 at the village of Żelazowa Wola in the Province of Mazowsze."<ref name="hedley" />