false 6582583 1 "Life of Chopin" is a biography of Chopin by Franz Liszt. Frédéric Chopin (1 March 1810 – 17 October 1849) was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic period. He is widely regarded as one of the world's great composers for piano. Chopin was born in the village of Żelazowa Wola, in the Duchy of Warsaw, to a French-expatriate father and a Polish mother, and in his early life was regarded as a child-prodigy pianist. In November 1830, at the age of twenty, he went abroad; following the suppression of the Polish November Uprising of 1830–1831, he became one of many expatriates of the Polish "Great Emigration." In Paris, Chopin made a comfortable living as a composer and piano teacher, while giving few public performances. Though an ardent Polish patriot, in France he used the French versions of his names and eventually, to avoid having to rely on Imperial Russian documents, became a French citizen. After some ill-fated romantic involvements with Polish women, from 1837 to 1847 he had a turbulent relationship with the French writer George Sand (Aurore Dudevant). Always in frail health, he died in Paris in 1849, at the age of thirty-nine, of chronic pulmonary tuberculosis. Chopin's extant compositions were written primarily for the piano as a solo instrument. Though they are technically demanding, his style emphasises nuance and expressive depth. Chopin invented musical forms such as the ballade and was responsible for major innovations in forms such as the piano sonata, waltz, nocturne, étude, impromptu and prélude. His works are masterpieces and mainstays of Romanticism in 19th-century classical music.<br><br>Franz Liszt (October 22, 1811 – July 31, 1886) was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist and teacher. Liszt became renowned throughout Europe for his great skill as a performer during the 19th century. He is said to have been the most technically advanced and perhaps greatest pianist of all time. He was also an important and influential composer, a notable piano teacher, a conductor who contributed significantly to the modern development of the art, and a benefactor to other composers and performers, notably Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg and Alexander Borodin. As a composer, Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the "Neudeutsche Schule" ("New German School"). He left behind a huge and diverse body of work, in which he influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated some 20th-century ideas and trends. Some of his most notable contributions were the invention of the symphonic poem, developing the concept of thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form and making radical departures in harmony. - Wikipedia 6776059 2 4 2009 Life of Chopin total:1|4:1| 1 4 1 1 4 0 false false Wed Jul 01 06:10:26 -0700 2009 Wed Jul 01 06:12:58 -0700 2009 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=6582583