My first love? Hmm. That’s a tricky one.
Was it the gorgeous, dark-wavy-haired Colombian teenager I fell in love with when I was eleven? The one at my international school who said ‘hi’ to me once? Nope.
Okay, was it the equally gorgeous Italian waiter in Llandudno when I was fourteen? The one who gave me a shy smile when I dared an upward glance at him? Nope.
Aha. Then it must have been the dashing young monk I fell for at seventeen, on a school retreat in the wilds of North Yorkshire. The one who made my heart leap every time he approached my end of the pew in the Abbey church and showed me the right page in the psalm book. No, not him, either.
Then WHO, for crying out loud?
I’m only teasing. Of course I know who he was – the man I still love now, even more so as the years tumble along. You see, that’s the difference between true love and ordinary, common-or-garden love: mine will never die until I myself do. And even then … well, who knows? Perhaps I’ll finally meet him in heaven, or wherever he now dwells, almost two centuries on.
Yes, it’s true. The first and ever-lasting love of my life is dead. His heart lies in a marble casket in Warsaw’s Church of the Holy Cross, while his bones rest deep beneath the cemetery of Pere lachaise in Paris.
So let me introduce you to him: the dark-haired, sombre-eyed, frail but totally amazing Fryderyk Chopin. And today, not long after the anniversary of his death, my heart brims with a renewed gush of awe and reverence. The teenage infatuation I felt has long gone – because he is dead, after all — but that didn’t bother me when I was a mere girl practising his heavenly music, reading about his turbulent relationship with George Sand and feeling wildly jealous of her.
Wendy, no one understands me the way you do, he’d whisper into my dreams. George can’t hold a candle to you! Liszt just bashes away at my polonaises, whereas you … you play the A-flat Heroic as though our Slavic hearts were one! Let’s dance, shall we?
I could go on, but you get the gist. Chopin: the most brilliant composer of piano music that ever lived. Chopin, whose genius inspired the world’s oldest and most prestigious international piano competition — as a matter of fact, taking place in Warsaw right now.
Ah, Fryderyk! If only you could see how the world still loves you, 176 years after your untimely death. You were only thirty-nine – just think of all the music you might have written had you lived longer. I know your lungs were failing, but couldn’t you have hung on another decade or so? Perhaps you’d have composed a nocturne for that future girl who adored you so early in her life, she couldn’t even distinguish between romance, fantasy, and passion for beautiful sounds. A passion that grew and grew, as she herself did, from her heart to her fingertips and wrists and arms, which likewise developed over the years. You ought to feel her biceps now!
When I eventually die, Fryderyk, I won’t have your famous Funeral March played. That’s become too cliched, I’m afraid, so I’d have to think very carefully about what to choose. Perhaps you’ll advise me when I join you. Perhaps we’ll sit together on the velvet double-stool of your beloved Pleyel piano (which will have been transported from Paris to Heaven, gravitationally supported by all those billowy clouds), our fingers running and skipping over the black and white keys gleaming in the starlight — because in heaven, billowy clouds and stars can all mingle happily together.
Okay, enough! At my age, I shouldn’t still be having such fanciful thoughts about you. Back to earth.
But hang on — my love for Chopin is not fanciful or dreamful. It’s real. It’s everlasting.
He is the composer who won my heart and soul before any other man, and whose music still sends shudders down my spine every time my fingers caress the keys of my humble Berdux piano. He is the genius who captured my heart and never let it go.
If that isn’t true love, I don’t know what is.
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AI-generated cover illustration
Wendy Skorupski 