Chopin & The Concerto That Said 'Goodbye'
- Joe Duffy
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 13 hours ago
On the night of October 11, 1830, Warsaw's National Theatre was packed for a concert nobody in the room wanted to think too hard about. Twenty-year-old Fryderyk Chopin sat down to play a piano concerto he had just finished, in front of his teachers, his family, and most of musical Warsaw, knowing he was leaving the country in three weeks. He didn't say so publicly. He just played. Three weeks later he boarded a coach for Vienna, and — as the story has come down to us — friends pressed a small silver vessel of Polish soil into his hands at the farewell dinner, soil that was still with him, by most accounts, when he died in Paris nineteen years later.
Chopin never set foot in Poland again.
By then, Chopin wasn't some promising newcomer stepping in front of an audience for the first time — he'd been Warsaw's prodigy for over a decade. He was giving public performances by age seven, the same year he started composing, and by fifteen he'd already played for the two men effectively running Russian-controlled Poland: Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, for whom he wrote a march, and Tsar Alexander I himself, who rewarded the teenager with a diamond ring. A Vienna concert tour the year before, in 1829, had made him a name outside Poland too. So when Chopin sat down that October night, the room wasn't watching an unknown talent. It was watching the country's biggest musical export say goodbye.
The piece Chopin played that night, in a room that didn't yet know it was watching a goodbye, opens NCO's season on January 30: the Piano Concerto No. 1, with soloist Zach
Cheong.
Explore our 2027 Season Premiere - January 30th - featuring our soloist, Zach Cheong.
A Concerto With Its Numbers Backwards
Here's the part that trips up even seasoned concertgoers: the Piano Concerto No. 1 was not the first one Chopin wrote. That honor belongs to the concerto he now calls No. 2, in F minor, which he composed in 1829 and premiered in Warsaw that March. The E minor concerto — the one Zach Cheong will perform with NCO — came second, finished and premiered seven months later at that October farewell concert. It simply reached the printing press first, so it got first billing, and the numbers have stayed backwards ever since.
Friedrich Kalbrenner
Chopin dedicated his Piano Concerto No. 1 to Friedrich Kalkbrenner, a pianist he admired enough in Paris that he briefly considered becoming Kalkbrenner's student instead of striking out on his own.
The Woman in the Roses, Not in the Music
There's a popular story about this concerto's slow movement being written for a woman Chopin loved and never told. It's a wonderful story. It's also about the wrong concerto. The letter where Chopin confesses to his friend Tytus that he has fallen for a young soprano named Konstancja Gładkowska, and that her image guided the dreamy adagio he was composing, refers to the F minor concerto — the "No. 2" — not the piece NCO is performing.
What actually ties Gładkowska to the E minor concerto is better than a myth, because it's documented. She sang that same October 11 farewell concert, performing a Rossini aria in a white dress trimmed with roses, and Chopin wrote to Tytus afterward describing exactly how she looked. So the woman who inspired one concerto's slow movement was, quite literally, standing in the room for the premiere of the other — two Chopin love stories tangled together on the same Warsaw stage, three weeks before he left for good.
Konstancja Gładkowska
There's a popular story about this concerto's slow movement being written for a woman Chopin loved and never told.
A Polish Dance Smuggled Into the Finale
The concerto's closing Rondo trades Parisian polish for something more local: a krakowiak, the fast Polish dance from the Kraków region, built on a syncopated rhythm any Warsaw audience in 1830 would have recognized instantly from village festivals and ballrooms alike. Chopin folds folk-dance energy into a concert-hall showpiece, which was very much the point. He was twenty, about to leave Poland indefinitely, and closing his farewell concerto with a dance that could only have come from home.
Not Everyone Was Convinced
Not every critic loved what Chopin did with the orchestra. Nineteenth-century writers, and more than a few since, have complained that the orchestral writing in both concertos is thin — accompaniment rather than argument, there mainly to get out of the soloist's way. Robert Schumann disagreed, defending Chopin's originality and comparing his boldness to the spirit Mozart once brought into the concert hall. Worth noting either way: Chopin never wrote a conventional cadenza into this concerto at all, because the piano writing is inventive enough, start to finish, that the whole piece already behaves like one long, unbroken improvisation. Listen for it on January 30: the orchestra sets the table, and then largely steps back and lets Chopin's writing for the soloist do the talking.
The Pianist Who Already Knows This Music
Most soloists arrive at a concerto through study. Zach Cheong arrived at this one through his own history with it. He made his orchestral debut at age nine with the Macao Orchestra, and when they invited him back in June 2022, this was the concerto he chose to play — the same E minor concerto he brings to Naples.
By then Cheong had already won first prize and the Special Excellence Prize at the 19th International Chopin Piano Competition in Asia, held in Japan in 2018, a competition built around exactly this kind of repertoire and one of the more demanding proving grounds a young Chopin interpreter can enter. He trained for eight years at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts before a full scholarship took him to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and he's now at Juilliard studying with Robert McDonald. Along the way he's picked up prizes from the Steinway & Sons International Youth Piano Competition and the Hilton Head International Piano Competition, and he holds the Hong Kong Philharmonic's Bernard van Zuiden Scholarship.
Zach Cheong is our soloist for our 2027 Season Premiere
A winner at the International Chopin Piano Competition in 2018, Zach brings an authoritative interpretation of Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1.
Ask Cheong what actually matters in a performance, though, and the competition résumé isn't where he goes. In one interview reflecting on his training, he put it simply: a thousand finger-works cannot rival a single tear shed. For a concerto Chopin wrote as he was quietly saying goodbye to everyone he knew, that's not a bad philosophy to bring into the hall.
Listen to Zach's 1st Round performance at the 19th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in the video below.
Love, Memory, Empire
Three weeks after that farewell concert, Poland rose up against Russian rule. The uprising was eventually crushed, and in its aftermath Russian authorities made it plain that a composer wrapped up in Polish national feeling wasn't welcome back. Chopin spent the rest of his life in Paris, among Poland's exile community, and never returned home even to visit — the same empire that once put a diamond ring on a fifteen-year-old's finger is the one that, within a few years, closed the door behind him for good.
That's what makes this concerto fit so naturally into an evening billed as Love, Memory & Empire. The love is Konstancja Gładkowska, singing in the same room as Chopin's farewell, and Chopin's own quiet ache for a home he was about to lose. The memory is the concerto itself — the last major piece Chopin composed and performed on Polish ground, carried out of the country the way that vessel of soil was, as something to hold onto rather than something to leave behind. And empire is simply the force underneath all of it: large enough to turn a twenty-year-old's trip abroad into permanent exile, remembered now mostly for the music that got out anyway.
Hearing It Live
Almost two hundred years later, this concerto returns to the stage in the hands of a pianist who has already lived with it — who chose it himself when the Macao Orchestra invited him back, and who has the titles to prove he knows his way around Chopin's writing better than most his age ever will.
Come hear both stories meet on January 30.
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