Maria Szymanowskaaus classic

Maria Szymanowska by Deutsch: Gemälde im Musée Mieckewicz in Paris (1932). / Public domain

Maria Szymanowska, née Marianna Agata Wołowska (* 14 December 1789 in Warsaw; † 25 July 1831 in Saint Petersburg) was a Polish piano virtuoso and composer.

Life

Józef Elsner taught Maria Szymanowska piano and composition together with Antoni Lisowski and Tomasz Grem. She gave her first public concerts in 1810 in Warsaw and in Paris.

She married the landowner Józef Szymanowski in 1810. Three children were born, but the marriage was unhappy. Her husband had no understanding for her musical work. She divorced him in 1820 and devoted herself more to composing piano pieces and chamber music. She gave concerts largely only to friends and visitors. Her famous piano cycle “Vingt Exercices et Preludes” and the majority of her songs date from this period.

Her concert life began in Warsaw in 1822, which she had to support despite caring for her three children. She was one of the first female musicians to be able to make a living from her artistic profession. From 1823 to 1827 she toured Europe extensively: Germany, England, France, Switzerland, Italy and Russia. Maria Szymanowska was presumably the first pianist to play her pieces from memory in concert. She played for royalty in Berlin and London, and for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Weimar. In 1828, she received a call to come to the court of the Tsarina in Petersburg as a court pianist. She moved to Russia, where she also gave piano lessons at court. She maintained a musical salon which was frequented by Polish and Russian artists and aristocrats, as well as by members of a student society to which her two Polish sons-in-law belonged. These were the poet Adam Mickiewicz, who married her daughter Celina, and the lawyer Franciszek Malewski, who married her daughter Helena. Maria Szymanowska died of cholera in Petersburg at the age of only 41.

Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Szymanowska