Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric Chopin was born on 1 March 1810 in Zelazowa Wola near Warsaw, to a French father and a Polish mother, and died in Paris on 17 October 1849, aged thirty-nine. He was a genuine prodigy - performing publicly at seven and composing polonaises by 1817 - and studied at the Warsaw Conservatory under Jozef Elsner.

On 2 November 1830 he left Warsaw, in his own words with no very clearly defined aim, forever. Less than a month later the November Uprising against Russian rule broke out. He never went home. He became part of the Polish Great Emigration, and the news of the uprising's failure reached him abroad and marked him permanently; the country he wrote about for the rest of his life was one he had left at twenty and could not return to.

Why did Chopin avoid concert halls?

Because he was constitutionally unsuited to them and knew it. He arrived in Paris on 5 October 1831 and built a reputation of the highest order on the basis of scarcely more than thirty public appearances in his whole life, preferring to play in salons for small gatherings where the dynamic range he actually used - much quieter than his contemporaries - could be heard. Liszt filled halls; Chopin played to thirty people and was regarded by other musicians as the finer artist. He met the writer George Sand in 1836 and they became lovers by July 1838; the winter they spent in Majorca from November 1838 to February 1839 was miserable, with hostile locals who objected to an unmarried couple and appalling conditions, and he composed prolifically through all of it. He had tuberculosis, his health declined badly from 1842, and he wrote almost nothing that was not for solo piano.

Chopin is dominant Fi, and the shape of the output is the evidence. He wrote almost exclusively for one instrument for his entire career, which in an era of symphonies and operas is a remarkable refusal. The piano is the instrument you play alone, and what he wrote for it is interior music - nocturnes, mazurkas, ballades - built around an emotional exactness that has almost nothing to do with public effect.

The auxiliary Ne is where the invention lives. Within that self-imposed constraint he was radical: harmonically years ahead of his contemporaries, rhythmically free in a way that had to be invented as it went, and structurally willing to let a piece find its own shape rather than fill an inherited one. The mazurkas take a Polish dance form and open it into something nobody had heard.

Why did Chopin write so much about Poland?

Because Fi attaches permanently and inferior Te could do nothing about the situation. He left at twenty, the rising failed, and the country he was writing about ceased to exist as a political fact - so the polonaises and mazurkas became a form of possession, an insistence maintained in music for nineteen years by a man with no other means of insisting. The tertiary Si is audible in it too: these are remembered dances, held with enormous specificity by someone who was not going to hear them again. The refusal of the concert platform belongs to the same stack - a private standard about what the music was for, held against every commercial incentive of the age.

INFJ is the most common alternative, given the interiority and the emotional depth. The difference is that his work has no programme and makes no address to an audience. He was not communicating a vision to listeners; he was refining an interior standard, and the almost complete absence of public performance from a career of that stature is the strongest evidence available.

ISFP is occasionally suggested because of the sensuous surface of the music and his famous physical delicacy at the keyboard. But the harmonic invention is genuinely conceptual - he was hearing relations between chords that nobody had used and building whole forms out of them, which is Ne rather than Se.