Taken to the train station by John Broadwood, the piano builder, they were seen-off by well-wishers before Chopin suffered a seizure on the train. He’d written to his friend in Paris, ‘One day longer here and I won’t just die – I’ll go mad’. The visit to Great Britain very nearly killed Chopin and he was eventually helped back to Paris in November 1847, when the fog and cold weather had descended on London, by his traveling companion, Leonard Niedzwiedzki.He did, though, play for the new Queen, Victoria and Prince Albert the Queen, who rarely spoke to anyone, actually spoke to him twice. For a sickly man with tuberculosis, the wet and windy weather of Scotland and England was hardly going to be good for him.
Although he only played 30 public concerts in his life, five of these were in Britain during an ill-fated visit there for seven months in 1847.Chopin only gave around 30 public concerts in his life he preferred to play to small social gatherings in the salons of wealthy Parisiens.The composer, Robert Schumann, was a talented writer as well as a musician, and it was he who wrote the words, ‘Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!’ after hearing the young Chopin playing for the first time.Georges, in her anger, suggested that Chopin had been in love with her daughter all the time, and not her. Unfortunately, it was Solange who was partly responsible for the pair splitting when Georges accused Chopin of siding with her daughter in a dispute over the marriage of Solange to the sculptor Auguste Clesinger, and with whom George and her son had had a blazing row which had descended to violence and threats of death. She had been divorced and had two children, Solange and Maurice. Georges Sand was 32 when Chopin first met her – he was only 26.Delacroix was a collector of waistcoats and Chopin, gloves both were reserved, discreet, and refined people. As a result, the two men became friends and they exchanged letters where they discussed their fashion tastes. The French Romantic artist, Ferdinand Delacroix, was to paint a portrait of Chopin and Georges Sand together, but the piece was never actually completed.As the time got close, Chopin asked the young Countess de Potoska who had been tending him, to sing the national anthem of Poland, their country Jeszcze Polka nie zginela (‘No – Poland is not lost’). As death approached, Chopin lay in his bed surrounded by a group of friends and admirers for some days.Although we know Chopin as being Polish – he was born near Warsaw in 1810 – his father, Nicholas Chopin, was a French émigré.Clearly, he eventually changed his view as they became lovers not long after. When Chopin was first introduced to George Sand at Liszt’s house in the autumn of 1836, he exclaimed ‘what an unpleasant woman’.
Thankfully, a wealthy French lady on the island who wasn’t so superstitious bought the piano from them. The fact that Chopin suffered from tuberculosis also meant that they weren’t able to sell the ‘infected’ piano (as the locals thought).