Plans are well under way for a year of celebrations to mark the upcoming bicentennial of one of Poland&39;s favorite native sons-Frédéric, Chopin.
The prestigious International Chopin Competition for pianists will mark its 16th edition in October 2010. Held every five years, the competition draws scores of young musicians from all over the world. In addition, Warsaw&39;s Chopin Museum, with the world&39;s largest collection of Chopin documents and other artifacts, will undergo a total redesign, modernization and expansion.
A lavishly illustrated new guidebook called "Chopin&39;s Poland" was already published this year. It leads visitors to dozens of sites in Warsaw and elsewhere around the country where the composer lived, ate, studied, performed, visited or even partied.
"Actually, Chopin doesn&39;t need to be promoted, but we hope that Poland and Polish culture can be promoted through Chopin," said Monika Strugala, who is coordinating the Chopin 2010 program under the aegis of the Fryderyk ChopinInstitute, a body set up by the Sejm in 2001 to promote and protect Chopin&39;s work and image.
"We want to confirm to all that he is a very, very important Polish symbol," she said. Indeed, it&39;s not much of an exaggeration to say that Chopin&39;s music flows through the Polish national consciousness like some sort of cultural lifeblood. The son of a Polish mother and a French émigréfather, Chopin was born in a manor house at Zelazowa Wola, about 50 kilometers, or 30 miles, west of Warsaw, and moved to Warsaw as an infant.
The manor is something of a Chopin shrine-since the 1930 s it has been a museum and center for concerts. Like the Chopin Museum in Warsaw, it, too, is undergoing extensive renovation as part of bicentennial preparations.
Chopin spent his first 20 years in and around Warsaw. He was already a noted pianist as a boy and composed concertos and other important works as a teenager. He carried Polish soil with him when he left Warsaw on a concert tour in 1830, just a few weeks before the outbreak of the November Uprising, an abortive Polish revolt against Czarist Russia, which then ruled Warsaw and a broad swath of Polish territory.
Chopin remained in exile in France after the uprising was crushed. But so attached was he to his native land that after his death in Paris in 1849 his heart-on his own instructions-was brought back to Warsaw for interment. The rest of his body is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,"reads the Biblical inscription on a plaque where his heart is kept today, preserved in an urn and concealed in a pillar of the Holy Cross Church in central Warsaw. Mozart&39;s"Requiem" will be performed here as part of Bicentennial events.
Exile and patriotism, as well as extraordinary genius, have long made Chopin&39;s appeal transcend all manner of social and political divides.
Polish folk motifs thread through some of his finest pieces, and patriotic fervor, as well as homesick longing, infuse some of his best-known works.