ADD1. Federic Chopin: Polonaise in A-flat major, opus 53 2. Federic Chopin: Polonaise in C minor, opus 40 number 2 3. Federic Chopin: Polonaise in F-sharp minor, opus 44 4. Federic Chopin: Polonaise-Fantaisie, opus 61 5. Federic Chopin: Andante Spianato 6. Federic Chopin: Grande Polonaise, opus 22 The Polonaises of Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) have the relation to the Polish National dance of that name that a flower has to a seed, and they are a form Chopin made his own. Chopin had been given a solid grounding in principles of composition by Jozef Elsner at the Warsaw Conservatory. He played the keyboard music off Bach, all his life. He played the sonatas of Beethoven "divinely", as the painter Delacroix wrote. But he could not follow the paths laid out by his predecessors even in the sense that his romantic contemporaries, Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Schumann, altered these paths to suit their own personality. He went back to simple song and dance forms, many of them Polish in origin, and expanded them to embody his own searching thought and deeply passionate feelings, with a profusion of intensely stirring and beautiful melody, a new richness of piano color and ornament, a striking freshness of armony and a development that seemed to take them beyond the bounds of any known architectural or clearly organized structure. They attained unity through the conviction carried by the drama they generated. This was a drama both intensely inward, or personal, and with broad social meanings. For close to Chopin"s heart was the yearning and struggle for freedom of his native Poland, and this found echoes in the general rebelliousness against stifling authority shared by most sensitive spirits in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.