5 Composers Who Were Also Accomplished Visual Artists

 by Emily E. Hogstad  December 28th, 2025

While they’re known primarily for their music, several iconic classical music composers also expressed their creativity through visual art.

From Felix Mendelssohn and his Romantic era landscapes to John Cage and his chance-driven ink washes, these five composers created drawings, sketches, and paintings that help illuminate their artistic inner worlds.

Today, we’re looking at the lesser-known art by five great composers.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)

Felix Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn was not just a celebrated composer; he was also a prolific visual artist.

He began taking drawing and painting lessons at an early age. Over the course of his lifetime, he produced hundreds of pieces of art in pen-and-ink, watercolour, and oils.

It’s no surprise that this child of the early Romantic era favoured subjects like dramatic natural landscapes and historic architecture.

Mendelssohn’s landscape painting

During one family tour of Switzerland in 1822, the 15-year-old Mendelssohn drew over forty ink-and-pencil landscape sketches of the Alps.

Later trips to Scotland (in 1829) and Italy (in 1831) likewise inspired numerous scenic drawings and watercolours of breathtaking locales.

He would also create memorable musical portraits of those countries, most famously with his Hebrides Overture and his Fourth Symphony, nicknamed the “Italian.”

Mendelssohn wrote in 1838 that while vacationing in Switzerland, “I composed not even a bit of music, but rather drew entire days, until my fingers and eyes ached.”

The beloved hobby allowed him to remain creative even when he was struggling with finding musical inspiration.     

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)

Composer Arnold Schoenberg is remembered best today as a composer and pioneer of atonality, but he was also a gifted Expressionist painter.

He began painting around 1907 and started focusing on the hobby in earnest months later during a particularly tumultuous period in his life.

Arnold Schoenberg

That year, his wife, Mathilde, left him for several months to have an affair with painter Richard Gerstl. After she returned to Schoenberg that November, Gerstl died by suicide.

While dealing with the emotional fallout, Schoenberg created a series of intense portraits characterised by stark colours, exaggerated features, and haunted gazes.

These paintings – which Schoenberg often titled “Gaze” or “Looking” – were meant to express something profound about his interior emotional state at the time of their creation.   

He ended up aligning with the loose Vienna-based group of artists known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), named after Wassily Kandinsky’s 1903 painting of the same name.

In fact, Schoenberg showed paintings at the Heller Gallery in Vienna (1910) and in the Der Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich (1911) at Kandinsky’s invitation.

Schoenberg painted around 60–70 paintings, mostly between 1908 and 1912. After 1912, his output dipped, and he returned to focusing on music.

Arnold Schoenberg’s self portrait, “The Red Gaze”

He later mused about the connections between the two arts in an interview:

I planned to tell you what painting meant to me. In fact, it was to me the same as making music. It was to me a way of expressing myself, of presenting emotions, ideas, and other feelings.

And this is perhaps the way to understand these paintings, or not to understand them. They would probably have suffered the same fate as I have suffered; they would have been attacked. The same would happen to them that happened to my music.

I was never very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don’t know whether this is why I did it in music, and also why I did it in painting.

George Gershwin (1898–1937)

George Gershwin is famed as a composer of jazz-influenced classics, but he was also an avid painter: he created over 100 works during his lifetime.

He took up painting in 1927, encouraged by his younger brother Ira and their cousin, the artist Henry Botkin.

He worked primarily in oil painting and charcoal or pencil sketches, focusing on portraits and figure studies of the people in his world. He was especially fond of impromptu, casual portraiture.

George Gershwin, self-portrait, 1936

Among Gershwin’s best-known paintings is his portrait of his Hollywood tennis partner, fellow painter-composer Arnold Schoenberg (c. 1934–36). Today, that painting hangs in the U.S. Library of Congress.

George Gershwin painting Arnold Schoenberg

One friend, Merle Armitage, noted that Gershwin “was in love with colour and his palette in paint closely resembled the colour of his music. Juxtaposition of greens, blues, sanguines, chromes, and greys fascinated him.” Appropriate favourites for the composer of Rhapsody in Blue!   

It should also be noted that Gershwin was an art collector as well as artist, owning works by Picasso, Chagall, Modigliani, Kandinsky, and others.

He even kept Mark Chagall’s painting, The Rabbi, over his piano, where he would see it every day he went to work.

It’s tantalising to think about how the aesthetics of these artists might have affected his own music.

As he once told a friend, “Painting and music spring from the same elements, one emerging as sight, the other as sound.”

Paul Hindemith (1895–1963)

Paul Hindemith, 1923

In addition to his compositions and viola-playing, German composer Paul Hindemith was known for his whimsical drawings.

Although he never formally trained as a visual artist, he drew prolifically from childhood until the end of his life.

He would regularly seize any scrap of paper at hand – menus, napkins, concert programs – and fill them with impromptu sketches and cartoons.

Hindemith’s doodles

His subjects were numerous and tended toward the bizarre: he’d portray whimsical, fantastic subjects in a cartoonish style, such as tubas with legs, cats who played musical instruments, or even dancing elephants.   

Hindemith always treated his drawing as a casual, fun outlet. He never catalogued his visual art in any systematic way, or treated them as anything but throwaway doodles.

The only meticulously dated collection of Hindemith’s visual art is his series of Christmas cards, which he drew and sent out to friends, family, students, and colleagues every year. He kept up the tradition for decades, until his final Christmas in 1963.

John Cage (1912–1992)  

John Cage, avant-garde composer of 4’33” fame, created a significant body of visual art during the last twenty years of his life.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Cage turned to printmaking, drawing, and watercolour as extensions of his experimental philosophy. By the time of his death, he had produced a large and distinctive oeuvre of works on paper.

Cage’s visual art is notable for applying the same principles of chance and indeterminacy that he used in music. While making his watercolours and prints, Cage would let random operations guide the creation of the works.

John Cage’s painting

As a result, Cage’s art has a uniquely serene yet unpredictable quality – splashes of colour or delicate pencil lines appear according to coin flips and computer-generated randomness, not by his own subjective aesthetic judgment.

Cage’s largest sustained visual art project was done in collaboration with the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia. Between 1983 and 1990, he spent several week-long residencies there, creating a total of 125 unique watercolours. All of them were later published in the compendium The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors.

Conclusion

The visual artworks these composers left behind are compelling in their own right, but they’re also fascinating for what they say about their creative spirit and vision.

Whether it was Mendelssohn sketching alpine peaks in Switzerland, Schoenberg confronting his inner turmoil on canvas, or Cage embracing indeterminacy with brush and ink, each of these composers used visual media to explore ideas that sound alone didn’t allow them to.

Appreciating their artwork gives us an invaluable lens for hearing – and better understanding – their remarkable music.

The Most Memorable Composer Christmases: Mahler, Rachmaninoff, and More

by Emily E. Hogsta

Everyone approaches the winter holidays differently: some people feel excitement, while others feel dread. It can be a season of celebration, crushing loneliness, and everything in between.

The great composers also experienced a wide variety of Christmas celebrations. Today, we’re looking at five memorable Christmases from the lives of five great composers. (Read Part 1 here: The Most Memorable Composer Christmases: Chopin, Schumann, and More)

Mahler’s Devastating Breakup – 1884

Gustav Mahler

In mid-1883, 23-year-old Gustav Mahler took a job conducting opera at the Königliches Theater in Kassel, Germany.

While there, he began working with 25-year-old coloratura soprano Johanna Richter and fell in love with her. It was his first intense love affair.

We are not sure if Richter reciprocated Mahler’s feelings quite as intensely; only one letter from her survives.

In 1884, he began composing for her, writing lyrics based on folksongs and setting them to music. He called the resulting song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, or Songs of a Wayfarer. His December 1884 was absorbed by the project.   

Despite his passion for Richter, the couple was ultimately doomed.

He spent New Year’s Eve of 1884 with her and wrote to a friend about the experience:

I spent yesterday evening alone with her, both of us silently awaiting the arrival of the new year.

Her thoughts did not linger over the present, and when the clock struck midnight, and tears gushed from her eyes, I felt terrible that I, I was not allowed to dry them.

She went into the adjacent room and stood for a moment in silence at the window, and when she returned, silently weeping, a sense of inexpressible anguish had arisen between us like an everlasting partition wall, and there was nothing I could do but press her hand and leave.

As I came outside, the bells were ringing, and the solemn chorale could be heard from the tower.

Although the relationship didn’t work out, Mahler did reuse ideas from Songs of a Wayfarer in his first symphony, which he composed between 1887 and 1888. He wasn’t about to let his holiday heartbreak go to waste!

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel Is Disappointed by the Christmas Singing of Papal Singers – 1839

Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel

Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny Mendelssohn were two of the most talented child prodigies in the history of music. They remained close for their entire lives.

Felix, however, was encouraged to pursue a musical career, while Fanny’s musical accomplishments were viewed as mere feminine adornments. (Luckily, her husband understood her talent and encouraged her music-making.)

Long story short, Felix got support that she never did, and in 1830, when Fanny was 24, and Felix was 21, the family sent him on a ten-month trip to Italy…without Fanny. The trip was formative, and Fanny was fascinated by the stories of his travels.   

Happily, Fanny got to go eventually. Between 1839 and 1840, Fanny, her husband, and her baby son Sebastian took their own trip to Italy, following in Felix’s footsteps.

On 1 January 1840, she wrote to her brother, sharing some observations about musical life in Rome:

We’re enjoying a pleasant life here. We have a comfortable, sunny apartment and thus far have enjoyed the nicest weather almost continuously. And since we’re in no particular hurry, we’ve been viewing the attractions of Rome at our leisure, little by little.

It’s only in the realm of music, however, that I haven’t experienced anything edifying since I’ve been in Italy.

I heard the Papal singers 3 times – once in the Sistine Chapel on the first Sunday in Advent, once in the same place on Christmas Eve, and once in St. Peter’s basilica on Christmas day – and have to report that I was astounded that the performances were far from perfect.

Right now, they seem to lack good voices and sing completely out of tune…

One can’t part with one’s trained conceptions so easily.

Church music in Germany, performed with a chorus consisting of a few hundred singers and a suitably large orchestra, assaults both the ear and the memory in such a way that, in comparison, the pair of singers here seemed quite thin in the wide expanses of St. Peter’s.

With respect to the music, a few passages stood out as particularly beautiful. On Christmas Eve, for instance, after the parts had dragged on separately for a long time, there was a lively, 4-part fugal passage in A-minor that was very nice.

I later discovered that it began precisely at the moment when the Pope entered the chapel, and I didn’t know it at the time because women, unfortunately, are placed in a section behind a grille from which they cannot see anything.

This section is far away, and in addition, the air is darkened by the smoke from candles and incense.

On the other hand, I could at least occasionally see the officials on Christmas day in St. Peter’s very well, and found them quite splendid and amusing.

We naturally had a Christmas tree, because of Sebastian, and constructed it out of cypress, myrtle, and orange branches. The branches were very lovely, but it wasn’t the best-looking tree, and Sebastian and I attempted to outdo each other the entire day in feeling homesick.

Johannes Brahms Surprises Clara Schumann – 1865

Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann’s wife, virtuoso pianist Clara Schumann, stayed close friends until the end of their lives.

They never had a traditional romance, but they loved each other deeply, and over their decades-long relationship, Brahms spent many holidays with Clara and her children.

At Christmas 1865, Johannes was 32, and Clara was 46. Both had busy performing careers that necessitated frequent travel, and Clara assumed that she wouldn’t be seeing Johannes for the holidays.   

She sent him a traveling bag as a Christmas gift. With the gift, she included a letter talking about her daughter Julie, who had recently been ill.

She wrote, “Thank heaven we have fairly good news of Julie. She has got over the danger of typhoid, but it will be a long time before she has completely recovered.”

The family was worried about Julie’s health, and they didn’t even bother lighting candles on the tree that year.

But then the door opened – and Brahms appeared! He had made a seven-hour journey to Düsseldorf to surprise the family and check in on Julie himself.

Clara wrote in her diary that she was “very pleased and excited.”

Read our article about Christmas with Brahms.

Rachmaninoff Flees Russia – 1917

Kubey-Rembrandt Studios: Sergei Rachmaninoff, 1921

The Russian Revolution began in February 1917, leading to Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication in March and a provisional government taking power.

During that year’s October Revolution, a Bolshevik insurrection overthrew the provisional government. Once the Bolsheviks took power, a broader civil war broke out.

The conflict impacted Rachmaninoff’s life deeply. In the spring of 1917, he returned from touring to find that his estate had been seized by the Social Revolutionary Party. He departed, disgusted, and vowed never to return.

He and his family moved to Moscow. As tensions rose throughout the fall, he made edits to his first piano concerto with the sound of bullets flying in the background.   

During this tense time, he received an invitation to give a series of recitals in Scandinavia. He accepted because it would give him and his family an excuse to flee the country.

On 22 December 1917, the Rachmaninoffs got on a train in St. Petersburg, crowded with terrified passengers who feared arrest. Fortunately, the officials who met them were kind.

The following day, they arrived at the Finnish border. To get across it, Rachmaninoff, his wife, and two daughters had to travel in an open peasant sleigh during a blizzard.

They arrived in Stockholm on Christmas Eve. Exhausted, the family stayed in their hotel.

After escaping Russia, Rachmaninoff would go on to a celebrated performing career, but he would compose less and less. Later in his life, he would remark, “I left behind my desire to compose: losing my country, I lost myself also.”

Leonard Bernstein Conducts the Historic Berlin Wall Concert – 1989

Leonard Bernstein

In November 1989, the Berlin Wall was taken down, signaling the demise of the so-called Iron Curtain that had hung across Europe for a generation.

Conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein helped to organise a performance at the present-day Konzerthaus Berlin. This venue had been burned out during World War II but was reconstructed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, opening just a few years before this concert.

Musicians from all around the world participated, including men and women from Leningrad, Dresden, New York, London, and Paris.

Together on Christmas Day 1989, they performed a concert celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Bernstein programmed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and changed the Ode to Joy to the Ode to Freedom.

It was broadcast all over the world and became one of the most famous orchestral performances of the twentieth century, seen live by around 100 million viewers. How’s that for a memorable Christmas?

Seven of the Best Musical Instrument Museums Around the World

by Emily E. Hogstad  

For classical music lovers, there’s often something deeply moving about seeing instruments once played by the musicians and composers of the past.

Whether it’s a violin crafted by Stradivari, a clavichord from the Baroque era, or a grand piano once played by Chopin, musical instrument museums offer a tangible connection to what can feel like a very intangible art form.

Here are seven of the most fascinating musical instrument museums in the world.

1. Musée de la Musique (Paris, France)

Official website: https://philharmoniedeparis.fr/en/musee-de-la-musique

Musée de la Musique

The Musée de la Musique’s origins date back to the French Revolution, when instruments were gathered from the estates of fleeing aristocrats and given to the Paris Conservatory.

The collection continued to grow over the generations. In 1978, the holdings were transferred from the conservatory to the government.

The first museum spotlighting these instruments opened in 1997. When the Philharmonie de Paris was opened in 2015, the collection was moved into the complex.

Today, the collection numbers over 8,000 items, showcasing musical treasures from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.

When you visit, don’t miss:

• Stradivari’s only surviving pochette (a small stringed instrument)
• The 1708 “Davidoff” and 1716 “Provigny” Stradivari violins
• The 1742 “Alard” Guarneri del Gesù violin
• An octobass
• Early instruments by the inventor of the saxophone, Adolphe Sax
• Pianos played by Liszt and Chopin

2. Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) (Phoenix, Arizona, USA)

Official website: https://mim.org/

Musical Instrument Museum (MIM)

Former Target CEO Bob Ulrich retired in 2008. Two years later, he founded the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix.

The collection has grown to 15,000 instruments in a $250 million building. Their goal is to collect instruments from every country in the world; currently, they have instruments from over two hundred.

The museum is designed with different sections for different areas of the world. In the European portion of the museum, there are a number of instruments used to play classical music.

The museum hosts nearly 300 concerts a year in its 300-seat auditorium.

3. Galleria dell’Accademia (Florence, Italy)

Official website: https://www.galleriaaccademiafirenze.it/en/

Galleria dell’Accademia

This museum is best known as the home of Michelangelo’s David, but the building also features an extraordinary collection of musical instruments.

The Galleria dell’Accademia was founded in 1784 by Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II. In 1873, the sculpture David was moved from an outdoor location to the Galleria, making it a prime tourist attraction.

Much later, in 2001, the instrument museum opened. It includes roughly fifty instruments owned by the Grand Dukes of Tuscany, the Medici family, and the Lorraine family.

This collection includes a tenor viola by Stradivari, a piano by Cristofori (the first piano maker), harpsichords, wind instruments, and even percussion instruments.

There are also paintings of the Medici family with their musicians and stringed instruments.

4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City, USA)

Official website: https://www.metmuseum.org/departments/musical-instruments

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Tucked within one of the world’s most famous art museums is a stunning musical instrument sub-collection.

This collection began in 1880, just ten years after the founding of the museum, with a handful of ancient instruments.

In 1889, a woman named Mary Elizabeth Adams Brown donated nearly three hundred instruments. Over the following decades, she continued collecting them on behalf of the museum. By 1918, the year she died, the museum had acquired over 3500 instruments.

In 2019, the Met opened a remodeled musical instrument gallery. It features six hundred instruments: viols, lutes, wind instruments, string instruments, and more.

The crown jewel of the collection is the earliest known surviving piano, an instrument by Bartolomeo Cristofori, dating from 1720.

5. Musikinstrumenten-Museum (Berlin, Germany)

Official website: https://www.museumsportal-berlin.de/en/museums/musikinstrumenten-museum/

Musikinstrumenten-Museum

This collection was founded in 1888 and contains around 3000 musical instruments. Its European instruments date from the sixteenth century to the present day.

The museum features harpsichords, spinets, flutes, and other instruments played by musical royals like Queen Sophie-Charlotte of Prussia and Frederick II.

The website also advertises: “The collection of Naumburg wind instruments, the almost complete instrumentarium of a central German town pipe workshop from around 1600, is outstanding.”

One of the most famous instruments in the collection is the “Mighty Wurlitzer” organ, which has 1228 pipes, making it one of the biggest instruments of its kind in Europe. It also features sound effects like birdsong, thunder, sirens, and more.

6. The National Music Museum (Vermillion, South Dakota, USA)

Official website: https://www.nmmusd.org/

The National Music Museum

The National Music Museum was founded in 1973 on the campus of the University of South Dakota in Vermillion (current population: 11,700). Despite the small size of Vermillion, the NMM has become one of the great musical instrument museums in the world.

The museum’s collection began with Arne B. Larson, who was born in Minnesota in 1904. He grew up to become a piano tuner, teacher, and collector. In 1966, he was hired by the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, and he brought his massive musical instrument collection with him.

Highlights of the collection include the earliest surviving grand piano from France (dating from 1781), a virginal from ca. 1520, hundreds of historical band instruments, and a collection of stringed instruments by Stradivari, Amati, Andrea Guarneri, and others. They also own one of the only two surviving Stradivari mandolins.

7. The Cobbe Collection (East Clandon, UK)

Official website: https://www.cobbecollection.co.uk/

The Cobbe Collection

The Cobbe Collection is one of the most remarkable assemblies of historic instruments in the world, and it exists in an eighteenth-century English country house in Surrey.

The setting adds to the atmosphere: visitors can see these instruments in elegant vintage rooms, much as they would have appeared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Many of the instruments were played by major composers. Highlights of the collection include several pianos that Chopin played while traveling in England, as well as pianos that once belonged to Elgar, Mahler, and even Marie Antoinette!

Conclusion

Whether you’re a professional musician or just a listener who loves music, these museums offer a rare chance to get up close with the instruments that helped shape classical music history.

Frédéric Chopin and George Sand: The Real Story Behind Their Relationship

 by Emily E. Hogstad  November 15th, 2023

It’s one of the most romanticized love affairs in music history: dashing cross-dressing woman novelist George Sand becomes obsessed with, and then seduces, the sickly consumptive pianist-composer Frédéric Chopin.

But how much of this story is real, and how much of it is just mythologizing?

Today we are looking at the real story behind the love affair between George Sand and Frédéric Chopin.

George Sand’s Childhood and Marriage

George Sand

Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil was born on 1 July 1804 in Paris.

As a girl, she lived with her grandmother at the family manor house in Nohant, roughly three hundred kilometers from Paris.

In 1821, her grandmother died, and Aurore inherited the manor. The house at Nohant became a home base for her throughout her life.

In 1822, at the age of eighteen, Dupin married a man named Casimir Dudevant, whose biggest accomplishment in life ended up being George Sand’s ex.

They had two children together: a son named Maurice in 1823 and a daughter named Solange in 1828. (That said, Solange’s paternity is questioned.)

After almost a decade, the marriage deteriorated. Mrs. Dudevant left her husband in 1831 and, scandalously, began seeing other men. In 1835, she separated from him legally and took custody of her two young children.

George Sand’s Writing Career

In her twenties, the former Mrs. Dudevant embarked on romantic relationships with a wide variety of accomplished artistic men, including novelist Jules Sandeau, writer Prosper Mérimée, dramatist Alfred du Musset, and others. (She also developed intense romantic feelings for actress Marie Dorval. The two would remain friends for the rest of their lives.)

The former Mrs. Dudevant’s writing career began in the early 1830s, when she began collaborating on stories with her lover Jules Sandeau. They signed their joint efforts “Jules Sand.”

It quickly became obvious that she was a very talented writer. In 1832, at the age of twenty-eight, she wrote a novel on her own and published it under the pseudonym George Sand.

It wasn’t long before this divorced mother of two was one of the most respected authors in Europe. Her work was actually more popular in England than either Hugo’s or Balzac’s!

As her career progressed, she didn’t restrict herself to just novels: she also wrote literary criticism, theatrical works, political commentary (she was a socialist), and more.

The Meeting of George Sand and Frédéric Chopin

Josef Danhauser: Franz Liszt Fantasizing at the Piano

Apparently, Sand was intrigued by Chopin even before they met. It is believed she encouraged their mutual friend Franz Liszt to arrange an introduction.

On 24 October 1836, in the salon of fellow author (and Liszt’s mistress) Marie d’Agoult, George Sand and Frédéric Chopin met each other for the first time.

Chopin was initially repulsed by Sand, reportedly asking Liszt, “Is she really a woman?”

Despite this rocky first impression, Sand still remained intrigued by him.

It seems they were not close before 1838. In May of that year, she asked a mutual friend in a letter if he was still engaged (at one point, he had been betrothed to his former pupil Maria Wodzińska). If so, Sand wrote, she would back off. However, it turns out that the relationship with Wodzińska was well and truly over.

It’s unclear exactly how, but eventually Chopin and Sand became friends, and then lovers.  

Their Trip to Majorca

To celebrate their new partnership, Sand planned a trip to Majorca, Spain, over the winter of 1838. She was hopeful that the change in climate would help Chopin’s declining health.

The trip started off on a high note. “The sky is like turquoise, the sea is like emeralds, the air as in Heaven,” he wrote in a letter.

Chopin ended up composing some of his best-known works in Majorca, including his 24 Preludes. The work tied most closely to this place in time is undoubtedly the Raindrop Prelude, said to be inspired by the rain dripping off the eaves of their lodgings.    

The trip became a struggle when, as the Raindrop Prelude suggests, the winter weather turned damp. Instead of improving, his health deteriorated. The couple’s gloomy accommodations didn’t help matters: they had sought refuge in a deserted monastery in Valldemossa.

Soon Catholic locals began viewing the unmarried divorcée and her invalid partner with suspicion. The couple’s reputation grew even worse when rumors spread that Chopin’s cough would spread communicable disease. In the end, the locals grew so impossible to work with that Sand was eventually forced to lug a handcart to the capital city of Palma just to load up on basic supplies.

Their nightmare came to an end ten weeks after they arrived, but unfortunately their return voyage to Barcelona occurred during rough seas, and Chopin suffered from seasickness on the way home.

Life in France

Portrait of Frédéric Chopin and George Sand by Eugène Delacroix

A much more agreeable destination turned out to be Sand’s country home in Nohant. Chopin and Sand settled into a schedule of spending half the year in Nohant and the other half in Paris (albeit in separate apartments).

Although they never officially moved in together full-time, in 1842, they did take the step of renting adjacent apartments.

Chopin ended up writing many great works at Nohant. Today the home is a museum.     

The Breakup

So why did these two titans of the Romantic Era break up?

One blow was Sand’s novel Lucrezia Floriani, which starred a sickly Eastern European prince being cared for by Lucrezia, the protagonist. The Polish Chopin grew increasingly resentful of this particular creative choice, feeling that his health troubles had become nothing but grist for Sand’s creative mill.

A second blow came when Chopin sided with Sand’s daughter, Solange, in various fierce mother-daughter arguments. Sand interpreted Chopin’s loyalty to Solange as his being in love with her. It didn’t help matters that Sand’s other child, Maurice, didn’t like Chopin, either.

Ultimately, after almost a decade together, the two great artists split up for good.

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.”

Backlash to the Breakup

Sand herself predicted the backlash that would come: “His own particular circle will, I know, take a very different view [of the breakup],” she wrote. “He will be looked upon as a victim, and the general opinion will find it pleasanter to believe that I, in spite of my age, have got rid of him in order to take another lover…” Her predictions about public opinion turned out to be cannily accurate.

It’s also noteworthy that their relationship is often boiled down – wrongly – as one between nurse and caretaker. In his own writings, Liszt, for whatever reason, enjoyed emphasizing Chopin’s weakness and medical troubles, and therefore Sand’s role as his patient helper. However, Sand seemed to chafe against the idea. The relationship was simply more complex than that. She wrote of the Majorca disaster, “It was quite enough for me to handle, going alone to a foreign country with two children…without taking on an additional emotional burden and a medical responsibility.”

Sand and Chopin’s Final Meeting

Both Chopin and Sand left accounts of their final meeting. Comparing them is fascinating.

“I saw him again briefly in March 1848,” Sand wrote in her autobiography. “I clasped his trembling, icy hand. I wanted to talk to him; he vanished. It was my turn to say he no longer loved me.”

Chopin, on the other hand, wrote a longer account in a March 1848 letter to Solange: “Yesterday… I met your Mother in the doorway of the vestibule….” He asked whether Sand had any news about Solange, and let Sand know that Solange had had a baby, since mother and daughter weren’t on good terms at the time. He “bowed and went downstairs.” Then he decided he had more to say, so he asked a servant to bring her to him again. They talked some more. “She asked me how I am; I replied that I am well, and asked the concierge to open the door.”

Chopin died a little more than a year later. Sand opted not to attend his funeral. She lived many more years and wrote many more books.

Despite that tragic end to their love affair – or maybe because of it – George Sand and Frédéric Chopin remain one of the most iconic couples of the Romantic Era.