The Passionate Stories of Composers Starstruck By Their Wives

 by Emily E. Hogstad

For some composers, falling in love was gradual; for others, it was like being struck by lightning.

A performance, a chance meeting, a dinner party, or even a single conversation could leave these men completely captivated – and sometimes they moved fast between fascination, courtship, and marriage.

What makes these stories especially fascinating is how often the women who captured their attention were great artists themselves. Actresses, singers, pianists, sculptors, and composers became not only their wives but also creative collaborators, muses, interpreters, and sometimes accomplished artists in their own right.

Here are some remarkable composer marriages that feature especially starstruck husbands.

Composers Who Married Women They Fell In Love With at First Sight

Hector Berlioz and Harriet Smithson, 1833

Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, 1830  

The most famous example of a composer falling in love at first sight is surely French composer Hector Berlioz.

In 1827, the 23-year-old composer watched Irish actress Harriet Smithson play Ophelia with an English-language touring theatre troupe. Her craft magnetised him – along with the rest of Paris.

Martinet rue du Coq St Honoré: Harriet Smithson as Ophelia in Hamlet, 1827–1833 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Musique)

He began sending her love letters in French (she didn’t – and couldn’t – answer), and even moved in across the street from her lodgings to monitor her comings and goings.

That spirit of unrequited obsession found its way into his 1830 Symphonie Fantastique, a programmatic symphony about a lovesick artist who descends into a drug-fueled reverie.

Hector Berlioz and Harriet Smithson

His obsession with Smithson inspired the use of a technique known as the idée fixe – a theme heard in various guises throughout the work, standing in for the idea of the beloved.

Understandably, Smithson initially stayed away from Berlioz for quite a while. But after some time had passed, and she attended a performance of the symphony, she became intrigued by the composer who had written such bold music about her. They began dating and eventually married in 1833.

Gustav Mahler and Alma Schindler, 1902

Mahler’s Adagietto from Symphony No. 5, 1901–1902   

Gustav Mahler had a similar epiphany in early November 1901 upon meeting Alma Schindler, a 22-year-old aspiring composer at a Viennese dinner party. They got into a quick-witted sparring match about music and beauty.

Although he was nearly twice her age, his physical attraction to her was overwhelming. At this time, Mahler was arguably the most famous musician in Vienna, serving as the music director at the court opera, and he invited Alma and her family to visit him there the following day.

Alma and Gustav Mahler with their children

They’d met on 7 November 1901. Less than three weeks later, he was talking to her as if the question of their getting married was already settled.

They announced their engagement on 27 December and began sleeping together shortly afterwards. She became pregnant quickly, and they married on 9 March 1902.

Felix Mendelssohn and Cécile Jeanrenaud, 1837

Mendelssohn’s Paulus, 1836     

Felix Mendelssohn’s love thunderbolt was less scandalous than Berlioz and Mahler’s – but no less impactful.

On 4 May 1836, while visiting Frankfurt, he stepped in to conduct a choir for a friend who had fallen ill. There he was introduced to soprano Cécile Jeanrenaud, the young unmarried daughter of a pastor.

Cécile Charlotte Sophie Mendelssohn Bartholdy (née Jeanrenaud, 1817–1853)

He was deeply taken with her and could not get her out of his mind. A couple of days later, he left Frankfurt for Düsseldorf to oversee the premiere of his oratorio Paulus. After that, he travelled to the Dutch seaside town of Scheveningen, preoccupied by thoughts of Cécile and weighing whether to return to Frankfurt.

On 7 June 1836, he did. Three months later, he proposed to her while on a picnic. She said yes, and they were married in March of 1837.

Composers Who Married a Prominent Artist

Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck, 1840

Robert Schumann’s Widmung, 1840  

In 1828, 17-year-old Robert Schumann, newly arrived in Leipzig to study law, saw 8-year-old piano prodigy Clara Wieck perform at a house concert.

He was deeply impressed by what he saw – so much so that he ultimately gave up studying law and moved in with Clara’s father, Friedrich, to study piano with him.

He and Clara became friends in between her international tours, as he found his voice as a musician and ultimately composer. Eventually, they fell in love.

Robert and Clara Schumann, daguerreotype

Friedrich, however, fought against the match – ferociously. The family ended up in court. They finally achieved legal permission to wed, and on 12 September 1840, the day before her 21st birthday, they were married.

Clara went on to become one of the great pianists of the 19th century, integral to both Schumann’s creativity and the promotion of his work after he died in 1856.

Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Brodersen, 1891

Nielsen’s Symphony No. 1, 1891–1892  

On 2 March 1891, while Danish composer Carl Nielsen was studying in Paris, he met a sculptor and fellow Dane named Anne Marie Brodersen. He was intrigued by her from the start, writing in his diary that she was “really quite pretty.” They went out to the Moulin Rouge, where they danced together past two in the morning.

Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen working on a sculpture

Eighteen days later, they “considered themselves married.” They had a party celebrating their union on 10 April and made it legal on 10 May in Florence during a whirlwind Italian honeymoon.

Unlike many women artists of her generation, she continued working even after her marriage. She became one of the most prominent Danish sculptors of the early 20th century.

That career strained their relationship, and they endured several periods of separation. (Nielsen even had a child out of wedlock with another woman that she never found out about.) They ultimately reconciled…even if they never rediscovered the emotional intimacy they’d once enjoyed.

Richard Strauss and Pauline de Ahna, 1894

Strauss’s “Morgen”, 1894      

Richard Strauss met soprano Pauline de Ahna in Munich in 1887. He was 23 – just over a year older than her – but despite his youth, he’d already won a position as music director of the Bavarian State Opera, and he began giving her vocal lessons.

They worked together professionally for years. In 1894, she was cast in the premiere of Strauss’s first opera, Guntram.

Pauline de Ahna

During one rehearsal that May, he corrected the tenor multiple times, as de Ahna grew increasingly irritated. Eventually she started screaming at Strauss that she wanted to be interrupted, too – and threw her vocal score at him before storming offstage. He excused himself to confer with her, then returned to the podium to announce that they were engaged.

Their marriage was long and happy. Although she retired from the operatic stage in 1897 after the birth of their only son, she continued performing his works, inspiring many of them, until 1948’s Four Last Songs.

Olivier Messiaen and Claire Delbos, 1932, and Yvonne Loriod, 1961

Messiaen’s Thème et variations, 1932   

Over the course of his life, composer Olivier Messiaen married two great artists.

He met his first wife, violinist and composer Claire Delbos, in the 1920s while studying at the Paris Conservatoire. They became recital partners, fell in love, and married in 1932.

Her reproductive health suffered during the marriage, and she had a series of miscarriages; only their son Pascal, born in 1937, survived.

Claire Delbos and Olivier Messiaen in Neussargues-Moissac

In 1949, when she was 43, her recovery from a hysterectomy went wrong, resulting in a cerebral infection that in turn caused severe brain damage and amnesia. She lived the final ten years of her life in an institution.

In the early 1940s, Messiaen taught a talented pianist named Yvonne Loriod and even wrote works for her to play. Their intense creative relationship raised eyebrows and eventually evolved into something romantic – but, being devout Catholics, they remained celibate, even after Delbos’s institutionalisation. They only married in 1961, two years after Delbos’s death.

Yvonne Loriod and Olivier Messiaen

Loriod remained Messiaen’s primary inspiration and greatest interpreter until he died.

Conclusion

Regardless of what ultimately happened in their relationships, all these composers had early encounters with their wives that proved to be more than a fleeting attraction.

In many cases, the woman who initially captivated them became deeply intertwined with their creative lives. Harriet Smithson inspired one of the most famous musical portraits of romantic obsession; Clara Wieck became an essential interpreter of Robert Schumann’s music; Pauline de Ahna championed Richard Strauss’s works for decades; and Yvonne Loriod ultimately became Olivier Messiaen’s greatest interpreter.

Of course, love at first sight did not guarantee an uncomplicated marriage. Some of these relationships endured happily for decades, while others were marked by separation, infidelity, illness, or profound personal hardship.

But they all began with the same extraordinary initial experience: a composer encountering a talented woman who was impossible to forget.

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In Memory of the Past: Goethe’s ‘Erster Verlust’

by Maureen Buja 

Erster Verlust	First Loss
Ach wer bringt die schönen Tage,	Ah, who can bring back the beautiful days,
Jene Tage der ersten Liebe,	Those days of first love,
Ach wer bringt nur eine Stunde	Ah, who can bring back even one hour
Jener holden Zeit zurück!	Of that lovely time!
Einsam nähr’ ich meine Wunde	Lonely, I nurse my wound
Und mit stets erneuter Klage	And with ever-renewed lament
Traur’ ich um’s verlorne Glück.	I mourn for lost happiness.
Ach, wer bringt die schönen Tage,	Ah, who can bring back the beautiful days,
Jene holde Zeit zurück!	That lovely time!

Joseph Karl Stieler: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at age 79, 1828 (Neue Pinakothek)

Johann von Goethe (1749–1832)’s poem entitled ‘Erster Verlust’ (First loss) was first written in 1785 for his Singspiel Die ungleichen Hausgenossen (The Unequal Housemates), intended to be an aria for the Baroness, in Act II. The play was never completed, sidetracked, perhaps, by Goethe’s plans for his upcoming Italy trip. Luckily, he salvaged the poem (and two others) and included them in his Schriften of 1789. For the Schriften printing, Goethe wrote stanzas 2 and 3 anew.

Because of its small size and simple expression, the poems became a favourite of many composers, with some 50 setting it to music. We will look at the song and its setting over the century from 1813 through 1919. In this 8-line poem, Goethe expresses that painful memory of what was lost when one’s first love is no longer your love. There’s no idea of death, but rather hints of decisions made, time lost, and a mourning for the past.

Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832) was one of Goethe’s favourite composers and became the poet’s musical advisor. He was a detailed chronicler of musical events of his time, and his letters are a prime source of information about significant events, such as the famed 1812 meeting of Beethoven and Goethe. Organised by Bettina Brentano, the two men met in the Bohemian spa town of Teplitz. As expected, they did not agree with each other’s self-assessment: Beethoven thought the poet too loving of the court atmosphere, and Goethe thought the composer had ‘an absolutely uncontrolled personality’. Goethe was 63 years old and Beethoven a mere 42.

Zelter wrote over 200 lieder, 75 of them to texts by Goethe. He detailed his thoughts on lieder writing in a letter to the composer Carl Loewe: the text must take priority, the strophic song is to be preferred to ‘absolute through-composing’, and the accompaniment must stay in the background.

Goethe, for his part, had his musical demands, the primary of which was that the music should support the poet’s words. This led Zelter to write music that was plain and strophic, even when the textual manner was more emotional. The music serves the poet’s words, and we can understand why Goethe was so taken with him. Famously, Goethe preferred Zelter’s setting of the poem Erlkönig, rather than the more dramatic setting by Schubert that is so well known today.

The song was published in 1813 as part of Zelter’s collection of 48 sämmtliche Lieder, Balladen und Romanzen; the four-volume collection was in its second edition by 1816.

Carl Begas: Carl Friedrich Zelter, 1827 (Sing-Akademie zu Berlin)

Franz Schubert (1797–1828) picked up the text in 1815 and made it part of his Op. 5 collection, setting it in a precise and concise manner, and reserving his emotion for the last word of the 2nd stanza, ‘Wunde’ (wound). The minor-key setting is full of wistful memory and desire.

Wilhelm August Reider: Franz Schubert, 1875 after a 1825 watercolour (Vienna Museum)

Bohemian composer Václav Jan Křtitel Tomášek (1774–1850) led the musical world of Prague in the first half of the 19th century. He was the central point of the Mozart cult in Prague, and his fame spread through his lieder and piano compositions. Of his 63 lieder, 41 are settings of Goethe, and Goethe made a point of telling Tomášek in 1822 how much he approved of Tomášek’s work.

Tomášek met the 73-year-old poet in the Bohemian town now called Cheb, and after discussing music, poetry and minerals (Goethe had a famous rock collection), the poet encouraged the composer to play for him. Goethe gave him a book of poetry, and the 48-year-old composer played his music from memory. It was after Mignon’s Sehnsucht that the poet exclaimed, ‘you have understood the poem’, and then went on to say that he could not ‘understand how both Beethoven and Spohr could so entirely misinterpret it and treat it as though it were an aria and not a Lied.’

Tomášek’s setting is full of simple declarations, less full of melancholic regret than we find in other settings. There is still the emphasis on ‘Wunde’, but the setting of the first work of the first and last stanza’s first word, ‘Ach’ (Ah), that seems to carry the sharp despair.

Antonín Machek: Portrait of the Composer V. J. Tomášek, after 1816 (Prague: National Gallery)

Felix Mendelssohn’s setting in 1841, as part of his Op. 99 collection Sechs Gesänge, expands the setting enormously, setting the same lines multiple times. The impression of the setting is somehow of deeper regret. The contrasting music for the second verse again puts emphasis on the word ‘wound’. The song concludes with decoration on the word ‘holde’ (lovely), bringing the beloved back one more time.

Horace Vernet: Felix Mendelssohn, 1831

Austrian composer Hugo Wolf (1860–1903) set the poem in 1876, as part of his Op. 9 collection, which set the poetry of Lenau, Goethe, and V. Zuzner. Wolf started writing music to the texts of Goethe at age 15, starting with 3 songs for male chorus.

When he set Erster Verlust, he was following the model set for him already by Reichardt, Zelter, Tomášek and Mendelssohn. Although this early setting, created in 1875 when he was just 15, shows much skill, we’re still dealing with the composer’s juvenilia. It is nothing compared to the lieder where he would show his genius.

Hugo Wolf

Nicolai Medtner (1879–1951) published his op. 6 collection of 9 Goethe-Lieder between 1901and 1905. The majority of Medtner’s published songs are Russian, but Goethe was one of the most important German poets he set to music. Three of his Goethe collections resulted in him being awarded the Glinka Prize in 1909.

The lied was composed as a wedding present for his brother Emil and his bride Anna; however, the present had more than good wishes behind it. Nicolai had been forbidden marriage with Anna, and so his older brother Emil took his place; the marriage was never consummated. Eventually, Emil and Anna divorced, and then Nicolai and Anna were free to marry.

As a collection, it must be regarded as a wedding gift not to his brother but to his sweetheart, and a text such as Erster Verlust becomes particularly poignant. However, since his first lost love would eventually become his wife, this is one time when the story has a happy ending.

Nicolai Medtner

In his setting, Alban Berg (1885–1935) cuts off the last couplet of the poem, setting only the first two stanzas. The work was written in 1905 when he was just beginning as a composer. He worked with Arnold Schoenberg between 1904 and 1911 and was able to combine Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique with his own late-Romantic lyricism. He started with Schoenberg studying harmony, counterpoint, and music theory, and then, from 1907, composition. Even before studying with Schoenberg, he was a prolific composer, with some 80 lieder to his name. Schoenberg thought he was stuck in song, and over the years of study, made him work on his instrumental compositions.

Of all the Second Viennese School composers, he’s the one who has remained the most listenable. His operas remain in the repertoire.

The simplicity of this early song compared to what we know of his later works gives us true indication of what he learned from Schoenberg. Erster verlust was one of only three songs Berg wrote to a Goethe text, as he gradually started working with texts by more modern poets.

Alban Berg

Justus Hermann Wetzel (1879–1973) set Goethe’s text in 1919, as part of his Op. 3 Liederkreis collection. Over his long life, Wetzel composed over 600 songs of which fewer than 150 are still in the repertoire.

His style of clear melodic lines matched with an intense mood makes this song sound less like 1919 and more like 1819.

Erick Büttner: Justus Hermann Wetzel, 1930 (Berlin: Neue Natioanalgalerie)

Tracking the setting of this song for a century reveals an enormous amount about what composers read into the text and how tastes in lied writing circle around. Goethe’s insistence on the primacy of the text (as befitted him as the poet) could be seen as standing in the way of the composer’s need to create interpretations and filter for the material. Probably one of the most effective settings is Medtner’s, truly written for a lost love and given to the woman herself.

A composer takes his text and then decides what to emphasise (‘wunde’ or ‘Ach’) and how to place that emphasis. Realisation of the meaning of the text can happen in many ways. Not every composer wrote in a minor key, and not every composer read the poem the same way. A survey such as this gives us a deeper appreciation for the way certain composers (including Schubert) were able to find their way through such a seriously emotional path.

BodyMinded Thinking in the Performance of Music

 by Greg Holdaway 

© The Vital Gaitway, Center for Body Education

Musicians contribute so much to the personal and cultural well-being of the community and play music because they love it. Given that, it is a shame that for some, a career and/or long-term love of playing is associated with levels of stress and discomfort – sometimes a great deal of stress and discomfort. There are musicians who have become so injured as a consequence of their playing that they have been unable to continue with their beloved music making. Thankfully that is not everyone, but in the ranks of committed musicians, struggling with well-being while performing at their best is more common than you might realise.

That statement is supported by research into musicians’ wellbeing that is growing year by year1. As a result, physical and psychological struggles with playing, particularly high intensity playing, is being increasingly recognised as a professional problem that needs to be addressed.

This series of articles from BodyMinded in Australia aims to provide a practical guide to preventing and addressing playing related injury and stress, and in the process support development of musical potential at all levels of achievement.

If your focus is on performance, rather than dealing with injury, these articles will also provide support. Musicians move in order to make music, and as an embodied sense of how to cooperate with your own structure and your instrument takes hold, you will find your instrument becoming an integrated extension of the sense of yourself and the music will flow increasingly with ease, power and facility2.

And finally, after years of providing professional development training for music teachers, I’m aware of how deeply teachers take their responsibility for the well-being of their students. Creatively teaching safe body-use as a part of music lessons will help to prevent the kinds of difficulties that often arise when a musician becomes more serious and begins spending many more hours playing.

Treating the instrument as an extension of the self is common amongst long-term instrumentalists. I had a student in a workshop one day who, when I said “hello”, leant sideways to reply to me. Curious about that, I moved to the other side of the person and asked another question. Sure enough, he leant to the other side in order to answer! The next day he came to a musician’s class, with his instrument. A large tuba, which he sat with on his lap…

© K.C. Strings Violin Shop

Let’s get started with a practical illustration. Many instrumentalists experience shoulder and neck stiffness or discomfort, or experience heaviness in the arms after playing for a while. Here is a simple question: where do your arms attach to your body? Take a moment to point or touch that part of your body. Did you point to the outside of your shoulders? This is most usual representation.

Now feel your collarbones, at the top front of your chest. Feel along towards the centre until you find the bump where the collarbone attaches to the breastbone. This is the only bony joint where the arm bones attach to the rest of the skeleton. You can feel this by using one hand to feel how your collarbone moves as you lift the other arm. Can you feel it? When your arm moves the whole shoulder girdle (collarbone and shoulder blade) are involved. The arms are suspended from the spine, via those shoulder and neck muscles that are sometimes so uncomfortable. The shoulder blades are embedded in muscles that mean they can move a whole lot; up, down, forward, back, always in support of and following the movements of the arm.

This means that when you raise or use your arms for any purpose, your shoulder girdle is involved. The collarbones and shoulder blades are arm bones! See what happens if you try to keep your shoulder girdle held still or back while moving your arms, and then compare that to letting the shoulders move with and in response to movements of your arms. Can you feel the difference?

Arm Shoulder Girdle Movement    

Thinking about this a pianist comes to mind who complained of long-standing shoulder and arm discomfort while playing. Nothing had made a difference, and she had lived with that for a long time. After exploring how much her shoulder girdle can move the instruction became: “let your shoulders move when you bring your hands to the keyboard”. The result, so much relief she burst into tears.

This story illustrates how discomfort may be a consequence of simple misunderstanding about how things work. The BodyMinded process is to practise conscious cooperation with the way things work. This is sometimes stated as: Let everything move that needs to move in service of your activity.

Each article in this series will cover a specific example of BodyMinded thinking in practise, concluding with a general principle that applies to achieving and teaching good coordination as a musician. In this way I hope to assist you with your enjoyment and wellbeing in playing, and support those who are teaching others.

Four Fascinating Love Interests of Frederic Chopin

 by Emily E. Hogstad  February 8th, 2026

Frédéric Chopin had one of the most famous love lives of the great composers due to his unconventional partnership with the great writer George Sand.

Maria Wodzińska: Frédéric Chopin, 1836 (Wasaw: National Museum)

From his teenage infatuation with soprano Konstancja Gładkowska to the turbulent affair with Sand, he had quite the run of bad luck in his romantic relationships.

Today, we’re looking at some of the remarkable women (and one man) who inspired romantic feelings in one of the Romantic Era’s most romantic composers.

Konstancja Gładkowska (1829-1830)

Konstancja Gładkowska

Konstancja Gładkowska was born to an apartment manager and his wife in Warsaw in 1810, a few months after Chopin.

She began studying voice at the Warsaw Conservatory in 1824. In her late teens, her father died, leading the Polish government to step in and pay for her musical education.

Historians believe that she met Chopin in the spring of 1829, when he developed an intense crush on her.

One Sunday morning, she glanced at him at church. He was so stunned by that glance that he found himself stumbling out the door. He ran into his family doctor outside, and he explained his clumsiness away by saying a dog ran between his legs. He immediately regretted the lie, bemoaning to a friend, “It is terrible to think what a lunatic I sometimes seem to be.”

In October 1829, he wrote a letter to his best friend (and possible crush) Tytus Woyciechowski:

“It is perhaps my misfortune that I have already found my ideal, whom I have served faithfully for six months, though without saying a word to her about my feelings; whom I dream of, who inspired the Adagio of my Concerto, and also this morning the little waltz that I am sending you. No one but you will know what it means.”

In the summer of 1830, Chopin visited Tytus Woyciechowski’s family estate in the countryside, but he cut that visit short to return to Warsaw to see Gładkowska’s operatic debut, which he was impressed by.

The following autumn, after putting his departure off, Chopin decided to leave Warsaw to pursue an international career. He gave a goodbye concert, and Gładkowska sang a Rossini aria at it.

The Rossini aria that Gładkowska sang at Chopin’s farewell concert   

She also wrote a poem in his autograph book about how his Polish friends would miss him, and the two even exchanged rings. (However, there is no evidence that they were ever formally engaged.)

For a while, they corresponded, but they eventually lost touch.

In 1831, he wrote, “Her image is before my eyes! – it seems to me that I do not love her, and yet she does not leave my head.”

Gładkowska’s mother wasn’t thrilled about the idea of her daughter making a living on the stage, and eventually she gave up her singing career. In 1832, she married a well-off widower named Aleksander Józef Grabowski.

Chopin’s sister Izabella commented acidly about Gładkowska’s marriage: “I am as surprised as you that she could have been so insensitive. The palace was clearly more alluring to her.”

Before she died, she burned her correspondence with Chopin. She only found out about his intense crush on her when she was an elderly woman, and a caretaker read a Chopin biography to her.

Tytus Woyciechowski (ca. 1827–1830)

Tytus Woyciechowski

Tytus Woyciechowski was born two years before Chopin in present-day Lviv, Ukraine. At fourteen, he moved to Warsaw.

The following year, when Chopin was thirteen, Woyciechowski moved into the Chopin household as a boarding student.

He and Chopin became inseparable, studying with the same piano teacher and playing four hand piano together.

After Woyciechowski graduated, he left for his family’s estate in the Polish countryside.

But Chopin missed him and hero-worshipped him. In 1827, when he was seventeen, Chopin composed his Variations on “Là ci darem la mano”, a fantasy for piano and orchestra based on a theme from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. He asked Woyciechowski if he could dedicate it to him, and he said yes. (Chopin would later rearrange it for solo piano.)

Yunchan Lim – CHOPIN – Variations on “Là ci darem la mano,” op. 2    

The variations ended up becoming the work that jump-started his career, inspiring Robert Schumann to write, “Hats off, gentlemen! A genius!”

Chopin went to visit Woyciechowski in the summer of 1830. That March, while planning the trip, Chopin wrote him:

“As always, even now, I carry your letters with me. How blissful it will be for me, having gone beyond the city walls in May, thinking about my approaching journey, to pull out a letter of yours and assure myself sincerely that you love me, or at least to gaze at the hand and the writing of him, whom only I am able to love!”

A couple of weeks later, he wrote an even more homoerotic passage:

“I will go and wash. Don’t kiss me now, because I haven’t yet washed. You? Even if I were to rub myself with Byzantine oils, you still wouldn’t kiss me, unless I compelled you to do so with magnetism. There is some sort of force in nature. Today you will dream that you’re kissing me. I have to pay you back for the nasty dream you brought me last night.”

They spent an idyllic time together, riding horses and partaking in archery together. Chopin later wrote:

“I tell you sincerely that it is pleasant to recall all of this. Your fields left in me some sort of longing; that birch under the windows just will not leave my memory. That crossbow! How romantic it all was! I remember that crossbow, with which you really wore me out – for all my sins.”

When Chopin decided to leave Warsaw to try his luck at an international career, he invited Woyciechowski to travel with him, and he accepted.

The two made it as far as Vienna before the November Uprising, which consisted of Poles fighting back against their Russian oppressors, began in Warsaw. Woyciechowski left Chopin to fight. The uprising eventually failed.

Chopin wrote to him:

“My dearest life! I have never missed you as I do now; I have no one to pour things out to, I have not you. One look from you after each concert would be more to me than all the praises of the journalists.”

They never saw each other again. Chopin lived his life in exile, while Woyciechowski went on to marry in 1838. He and his wife named their second child Fryderyk after Chopin.

Toward the end of his life, when he was dying of tuberculosis, Chopin wrote to Woyciechowski again, expressing a desire to see him. Unfortunately, a reunion never took place.

This may not have been a traditional love relationship, and we’ve lost Woyciechowski’s side of the correspondence, making it impossible to know what they truly felt for one another. But if Chopin had written what he wrote to Woyciechowski to a woman, even if they never formally dated, we’d likely classify her as a love interest, so we’re including him today.

Maria Wodzińska (1835–1837)

Maria Wodzińska, year 1840

Maria Wodzińska was born to a prominent Polish family in Warsaw in January 1819.

She entered Chopin’s circle when her two younger brothers began boarding with Chopin’s family while attending school (like Woyciechowski had).

The two families became good friends, and Chopin met her when she was a young girl. Even though he was nine years older, Chopin would run around and play alongside her.

However, he lost touch with them after the November Uprising of 1830. The family fled to Berlin, Dresden, and then Geneva, waiting for political tensions to cool.

While in Geneva, Wodzińska studied piano with John Field (the same composer who pioneered the piano nocturne, a genre that Chopin would later perfect), and also began studying art. She also composed.

In 1835, when she was sixteen, and Chopin was 25, he met her while traveling in Dresden. When he had to leave, he gifted her with the waltz that eventually was published posthumously as his Op. 69, No 1 in A-flat major.

Chopin Valse op 69 No 1 in A flat major. Valentina Lisitsav    

The Wodzińska family kept in touch via letter and reconnected the following summer in the spa town of Marienbad, spending two months together at the same hotel.

During that summer, Wodzińska made a famous pencil and watercolour sketch of Chopin.

On September 9, 1836, he secretly proposed to her, and she accepted. However, due to her father’s disapproval, they kept their engagement secret.

They resumed their relationship by letter, but it was difficult for them to connect emotionally while dating long-distance. In the end, the relationship fizzled out within a year.

Wodzińska married a count in 1841 (interestingly, the son of Chopin’s godfather). However, the marriage was unhappy, and they divorced.

She remarried in 1848 to Władysław Orpiszewski, a leaseholder of her first husband’s estates. They had one child together, but he died at the age of three.

As for Chopin, he took the rejection hard, tying up letters from the family in a bow and labeling the stack “My sorrows.”

In 1837, he wrote his famous Funeral March, which eventually became the third movement of his second piano sonata. Some people connect the march to the failed love affair.      George Sand (1838–1847)

Portrait of Frédéric Chopin and George Sand by Eugène Delacroix

While Chopin was having his heart broken, George Sand was busy breaking hearts.

Born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil in the summer of 1804, she married at the age of eighteen and had two children. However, she left her marriage in 1831.

She then had affairs with a number of talented men and began an overwhelmingly successful writing career. She thumbed her nose at traditional gender roles and became famous for her masculine wardrobe.

In the autumn of 1836, she reportedly asked Franz Liszt for an introduction to Chopin. Chopin is said to have asked Liszt afterwards, “Is she really a woman?”

It wasn’t the most promising of starts, but she couldn’t stop thinking about him.

In May 1838, she discreetly made inquiries about whether Chopin’s engagement to Wodzińska was well and truly over. When she found out it was, she approached him again.

Historians aren’t entirely sure how, but they became friends and then lovers. That winter, they took an untraditional honeymoon-like vacation to Majorca.

It wasn’t a particularly pleasant stay (the weather was bad and the townspeople were suspicious of them), but it was a creatively productive time, resulting in many of the 24 Preludes.    

Chopin began spending the summers at Sand’s country house in Nohant, France. During the other months of the year, they each rented their own apartments in Paris, but still stayed near to one another.

Eventually, the two began drifting apart. Chopin’s health was deteriorating; Sand eventually became more of a caretaker mother figure than a lover.

She wrote a semi-autobiographical novel called Lucrezia Floriani about a strong woman caring for a self-absorbed neurotic invalid prince. It didn’t help their relationship. Then Chopin began siding with Sand’s daughter, Solange, in mother-daughter arguments, and Solange even developed a crush on him.

The situation simply grew too messy and complicated to continue. On July 28, 1847, Sand wrote to him:

“Goodbye, my friend. May you soon be cured of all your ills, as I hope that now you may be… If you are, I will offer thanks to God for this fantastic ending of a friendship which has, for nine years, absorbed both of us. Send me your news from time to time. It is useless to think that things can ever again be the same between us.”

They met for one last time in March 1848. Solange ended up becoming estranged from her mother, and it was Chopin who delivered the news that Solange had had a baby.

Chopin’s health deteriorated quickly, and there wasn’t time for him to pursue another relationship. He died a year later of tuberculosis at the age of 39. George Sand didn’t attend the funeral.

Conclusion

All four of these romantic relationships ended in a sad and quiet kind of way.

Maybe they were all doomed to, given Chopin’s introverted and prickly personality, as well as the constant chronic health struggles that made it difficult for him to sustain long-term relationships.

In the end, the most consequential love affair he’d ever have was with music.