The music rooms of his youth
Chopin and the Warsaw salons
Chopin played in Warsaw salons and palaces from childhood. What the Chopin Institute and Wikipedia record about those rooms and the salon he preferred later.
Book a seat in the salon ↗Where the salon idea came from
Wikipedia traces salons to Italy in the 16th century and says they flourished in France through the 17th and 18th centuries; the word itself first appeared in France in 1664. Warsaw had its own: the article mentions the Thursday Lunches given by King Stanisław II Augustus late in the 1700s, and it lists Princess Izabela Czartoryska among the Polish-Lithuanian salonnières, describing her as a patron of Chopin. The salon was a society as much as a room, and music was one of its pleasures.
A prodigy in a city of salons
Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola and grew up in Warsaw, where his family moved in October 1810, six months after his birth. English Wikipedia says it quickly became clear that he was a child prodigy, and that by the age of seven he had begun giving public concerts. The Fryderyk Chopin Institute adds that he often performed in the city's salons from a very young age. A salon, in the old sense, is a gathering held by a host, where conversation, poetry and music mixed, and that is the room the Chopin Salon tries to recall.
The palace on Krakowskie Przedmieście
On 24 February 1818, the Chopin Institute writes, eight-year-old Fryderyk amazed the company gathered at the Radziwiłł Palace, at the invitation of Countess Zofia Zamoyska. The Institute calls it probably his first public concert and says it was a charity event whose listeners included Warsaw's most eminent personalities of the time. Wikipedia's article on the Presidential Palace shows a plaque commemorating that first performance, and says the palace is now the residence of the Polish head of state.
Other doors in Warsaw
The same account lists more rooms. The young pianist was invited to the Belvedere Palace, then the residence of Grand Duke Konstanty and his wife. In 1823 he gave a concert for the poor for the Warsaw Charitable Society. At sixteen he played at the Blue Palace, which gathered the political and intellectual elite of the capital, and a concert was organised a few days before Christmas 1829 at the Morsztyn Palace. The Institute concludes that concerts in Warsaw parlours were undoubtedly valuable schooling for Chopin.
A last home at the Czapski Palace
Wikipedia records that in 1827–30 Chopin lived with his family in the south annex of the palace now known as the Czapski Palace, at 5 Krakowskie Przedmieście, and it calls the building his last home before exile. The palace houses the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts today. A second-floor room in the annex, the Chopin Family Parlor, is open to the public with period furniture and memorabilia, so check access arrangements before you plan a visit. A visit also puts the street, the annex and the avenue outside into one picture of where a young pianist lived and worked.
Leaving Warsaw
Wikipedia says Chopin left Poland at the age of 20, less than a month before the outbreak of the November 1830 Uprising. He set out on 2 November 1830 into the wide world, in the article's words, with no very clearly defined aim, forever. It adds that he would never return to Poland. The Warsaw salons were therefore the rooms of his youth, and everything he wrote afterwards was written abroad, with the memory of those rooms in the background.
The salon he chose in Paris
In Paris Chopin played to the public rarely. Wikipedia says he gave only 30 public performances afterwards, favouring the salon, a more intimate setting. He played more often at salons but preferred playing at his own Paris apartment for small groups of friends. In later years he generally gave a single annual concert at the Salle Pleyel, a hall that seated three hundred. A room for 42 guests, like the Chopin Salon, is a small version of the scale he liked, and it is a different thing from the large hall that a modern recital fills.
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