Frédéric Chopin

Born near Warsaw, Chopin left Poland at twenty and never returned. Almost everything he wrote was for the piano alone, and much of it — the mazurkas and polonaises above all — kept the music of a country he could not go back to.

He died of a long lung illness at thirty-nine. His body lies at Père-Lachaise under soil brought from Poland; at his own request his heart was taken to Warsaw, where it is sealed in a pillar of the Church of the Holy Cross.