Excerpt:
CHOPIN: AN INVENTORY
Almost sixty mazurkas; about thirty etudes;two dozen preludes; a score of nocturnes;
some fifteen waltzes; over a dozen polonaises;
scherzos, improvisations, ballades, four of each;
three sonatas for piano; and two concertos for piano and orchestra,
one berceuse, one barcalole, one fantasy, one tarantella, etc.,
besides some seventeen songs for voice and piano; a fatal case of tuberculosis;
a talent for concertizing; many mundane successes; an unhappy passion;
a celebrated liaison with a famous woman; other assorted liaisons;
a country without sure borders or definite independence;
the French Europe of Romanticism; several friendships with the eminent;
and scarcely thirty-nine years of life. Others lived less, wrote more,
tasted more bitterly the classically bitter bread of exile, were ignored
or persecuted, died forsaken, didn’t linger in alcoves
or salons of glory, confined themselves less to the instrument they had mastered most,
and were exiled longer in suffering for a non-existent country.. ~Jorge de Sena
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