Artists often reflect ancient conundrums. To varying degrees, the driving force of their work consists of seeing the world as few others do—more deeply, with greater sensitivity, more laden with feeling, judgment, nuance, beauty, curiosity, obsession, mystery. A common refrain: they feel in the world but not of it, with warring impulses to hold it close and finally break its code or push it away as something alien and irredeemable.
The classical (Romantic Era) composer Frédéric Chopin, born in Poland in 1810, embodied all these conundrums and more in a life often compromised and ultimately cut short by tenuous health that saw him dead at age 39 from multiple complications of tuberculosis.
But like many artistic geniuses almost bouncing out of the cradle eager to begin dropping their works into posterity (he wrote his first polonaise, a traditional Polish dance form, at age 7), Chopin at 20 was alrea...
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