Nocturne in E-flat Major, Op. 9, No. 2

Chopin arrived in Paris in September 1831, twenty-one years old, carrying a silver goblet filled with Polish soil and the knowledge that he could never go home. The November Uprising against Russian rule had been crushed while he traveled. Warsaw had fallen. Friends who had fought were dead or in Siberian exile. Chopin, who had left before the uprising began, would spend the rest of his life feeling guilty about surviving and furious about the occupation. He channeled both emotions into the piano with a precision that still makes grown adults weep in concert halls.

The Nocturne in E-flat was published in 1832, one of his first works to reach the Parisian public. It is, on the surface, the gentlest piece imaginable — a singing melody over a rocking accompaniment, the musical equivalent of a silk scarf. Underneath that surface, the harmonic language is radical. Chopin moves through key centers that nobody in 1832 would have predicted, creating moments of almost unbearable sweetness followed by shadows that pass so quickly you're not sure you heard them. He was twenty-two and already composing like someone who understood loss at a cellular level.

The Parisian salons went crazy for him. Chopin was slight, pale, beautifully dressed, and coughed discreetly into monogrammed handkerchiefs — he had tuberculosis, which in the Romantic era was essentially a fashion accessory. Wealthy women competed to host his private performances. He charged accordingly and spent lavishly, maintaining apartments that impressed even Parisian standards. The man who carried Polish soil in a goblet dressed in French silk and played music that belonged to no country at all.

George Sand — the novelist, born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, who wore men's clothing and smoked cigars in public — became his lover in 1838 and his caretaker for the next nine years. She called him 'my dear corpse.' He called their time in Mallorca, where they fled for his health and encountered rain, hostile locals, and a damp monastery cell, one of the worst experiences of his life. He composed some of his greatest preludes there, proving that misery and genius maintain an uncomfortable lease agreement.