Chopin is not what he seems. The familiar conception of the intense, fragile artist, with his exquisite sensibility, his aloofness from the world, and his affecting and (in the 19th-century sense) picturesque consumptive cough: this is no more than a small and distorted part of the truth.

It is only the interpretation that is in question - the facts are clear enough. Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, to give his name its original form, was born on or about I March 1810 at Zelazowa Wola, near Warsaw, the second child and only son of a schoolteacher who had emigrate from France with his Polish wife. Before the end of the same year the father accepted a new post at Warsaw High School, and the family moved to the capital. The boy thus had an almost entirely urban childhood. When he was seven, his first polonaise was published, and in the same year he made his public debut as a pianist. At 15 he played for the Tsar, meanwhile pursuing studies in piano and composition and writing music assiduously. After making his first visits abroad -to Berlin in 1828 and to Vienna in 1829- with some success, he left his beleaguered country for good toward the end of 1830. Spending a few months in Vienna, and then traveling by way of Munich and Stuttgart (where he heard the news of the Russian capture of Warsaw), he reached Paris in September 1831.

There he soon established himself as a highly fashionable piano teacher. Henceforth most of his appearances as a pianist were private ones at the great salons of the day. Professionally, apart from a progressive deepening of mastery in composition, the rest of his life saw little change. But after further travels, and an abortive engagement to one Maria Wodzinska, his routine changed in 1838: that was the year he began to live with the novelist George Sand (pen-name of Aurore Dudevant), and until 1847 he spent almost every summer with her at Nohant, where she had her country home, returning to Paris for the rest of the year. Finally they separated, and in the following year, 1848, Chopin went to England and Scotland for a long visit precipitated by the outbreak of revolution in Paris.

All this time consumption had been gaining a firmer grip on Chopin, and by the time he returned to Paris in November 1848, his health was completely broken. Eleven months later, on 17 October 1849, in Paris, Chopin died.

Before long the legend sketched at the beginning of these notes was fully formed. 19th-century society circles had a talent, transferred in our day to the gutter press, for heightening every scrap of color in the lives of those who interested it. An early death was an open invitation to imaginative embroidery - there is a droll story that one particular Polish countess used to be pointed out as the only lady of her class in whose arms Chopin did not die. And of course, if there was a breath of scandal to be inflated into a gale, so much the better.

But notwithstanding his affair with George Sand, Chopin was no Bohemian. On the contrary, he was very quick to learn and adopt the social standards of the highest aristocratic circles, and his natural charm helped him to gain complete acceptance in them. Significantly, that first polonaise published when he was seven bears a dedication to a countess, and from this socially oriented beginning Chopin never deviated. Sensitive he certainly was, but on the whole he was no more aloof than his malady dictated. And though that malady made him, throughout his life, relatively fragile in a physical sense, his character was an unusually firm one even in his student days. He was soon conscious of the special direction in which his talent lay, and refused to be diverted from it. In 1831, when his teacher Elsner protested, “Your genius should not cling to the piano: operas must make you immortal,” Chopin's reply was uncompromising in its emphasis on his “perhaps too audacious but noble wish and intention to create for myself a new world.”

In due course, though less than 18 years remained to him for the task, Chopin created that world, and the piano has never been the same instrument since. Paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw's dictum concerning the violin compositions of Beethoven and Mendelssohn on the one hand and of Wieniawski on the other, we may say: “Schumann and Brahms were great composers of music for the piano; but Chopin was a great composer of piano music. There is all the difference in the world between the two.”

Never has a composer been more profoundly identified than Chopin with the spirit of an instrument. His piano writing grew out of his piano playing, and his playing was the most aristocratically poised, the most tasteful, and at the same time the most sensitive and poetic playing his listeners had ever heard. His absorption in the piano is illustrated most directly in the 24 Studies and the 24 Preludes. In these -and preeminently, of course, in the Studies - he was more closely than ever concerned with the nature of the instrument itself and the problems it posed. In the first and seventh studies of Opus 25, both composed in 1836, the topic is the quintessentially pianistic one of the interplay between melodic theme and accompaniment, the latter being dissolved into arpeggios in No. 1 and presented chordally in No. 7. At the same time, despite the Studies' preoccupation with the technical demands of a “modern” medium, it is here too that we may discern most clearly the classical roots of Chopin's composing style. He was not at all in sympathy with the big, splashy romantic idioms that were already prevalent in his time. Bach and Mozart were the only two composers he unreservedly admired, and the clean, lucid part-writing of the one and the polish of the other are frequently reflected in the Studies and Preludes. But as well as being firmly rooted in the finest of tradition, these compositions also look forward - in harmonic boldness and instrumental imagination alike - to Debussy, and through him to the whole modern school of piano music.

Scarcely less limpid are the Waltzes, which are the closest of all Chopin's works to the spirit of the elegant salons where he spent a great part of his musical life, and to the same category - with the addition of specific touches of local color or sentiment - belong single pieces like the Barcarolle, the Berceuse, and the Tarantella. Another group among Chopin's dance-style pieces, the Mazurkas, breathes a deeper kind of local sentiment: the Polish patriotism with which the composer, though half French by descent and almost entirely French in manner of life, was profoundly and sincerely imbued. It runs like an unbreakable thread through the four examples recorded here, from the Opus 7 piece written the year after he left his native country, by way of the Opus 41 and Opus 56 pieces composed respectively in 1838 and 1844, to the crepuscular and shadowy F Minor Mazurka of 1849 that was the last work he wrote.

The same patriotic passion is expressed on a more epic scale in the four Scherzos, which, together with the four great Ballades and at any rate the second and third of the three Sonatas, stand among Chopin's most substantial and individual contributions to the literature of his chosen instrument. Dating respectively from 183 1-32, 1837, 1839, and 1842, the Scherzos characteristically show us the composer's vivid emotional world being brought under ever stronger discipline. The turbulence and broadly limned emotional extremes of No. 1, whose central trio section is based on the traditional Polish Christmas carol Lulajze Jesuniu (Sleep, Little Jesus), give place to a finer balance of contrasts in Nos. 2 and 3, and No. 4 turns in a more classical direction altogether, and one closer to the traditional sense of “scherzo” as a relatively lighthearted and unstressful genre.

Chopin's music in general, like his personality, has been widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. He has often been dismissed as a mere miniaturist, with no capacity to handle the larger forms. Some of his works are miniature: witness the Nocturnes, which are almost the only things he wrote in the perfumed vein of 19th-century romance, and which evoke a sense of period more clearly than the rest of his work. On the other hand, a piece like the B Minor Sonata, Op. 58, shows that he could fill a large canvas in a manner certainly untraditional but none the less satisfying on its own terms.

In any case, we should not confuse the physically circumscribed with the artistically negligible. The forms of music can be small in physical extent without being small in emotional depth or musical significance, and Chopin's genius lay precisely in his ability to make a mere handful of notes say a great deal: it is the concentration, not the sheer brute quantity, of feeling that gives any composer's work its value. And so it is not only the expanses of his sonatas, nor even the medium-sized works like the Ballades and Scherzos, but also the depth and perfection of his “smallest” creations that entitle Chopin to be celebrated as a composer of true genius.