Frédéric Chopin

Chopin arranged for most of his mature works to be published in France, Germany and England, usually by three different firms, because copyright protection between the countries was weak. The three printings of a piece often differ, which scholars of the first editions attribute to his own revisions and proof corrections.

Chopin taught piano in Paris from the early 1830s and, according to the University of Chicago Library's exhibit, was the city's favoured piano teacher by the end of 1832. In the early 1840s he sketched the beginnings of a method for playing the instrument, which he never completed.

Chopin gave his last Paris concert on 16 February 1848 at Pleyel's rooms. The programme included a Mozart trio with Alard and Franchomme and part of his own cello sonata with Franchomme; admission was by a list of applicants, and the Gazette musicale reported that patronage was needed to obtain a ticket.

In letters of December 1831 to a friend and to his former teacher Elsner, Chopin wrote that Friedrich Kalkbrenner, then the leading pianist in Paris, had offered to teach him for three years, and that he had declined because the time was too long and he did not want to become a copy of Kalkbrenner. Ferdinand Hiller, recalling the episode in 1874, wrote that Chopin nevertheless went a few times to Kalkbrenner's class for advanced pupils.

The episode is consistent with a preference for shaping his own training and career, though Hiller's account suggests he did not simply refuse the older pianist outright. Need for Autonomy

On 1 and 2 August 1844 Chopin wrote from Nohant to Franchomme asking him to place two sets of manuscripts with another Paris publisher, Meissonnier or Lemoine, if Schlesinger insisted on delaying publication beyond the 20th of the month. He also worried that Härtel's Paris correspondent might lower his German fee if he learned how little Paris paid, and on 4 August he thanked Franchomme for settling the Schlesinger matter.

The letters, which are Chopin's own account, illustrate a practical habit of arranging alternatives when one publisher delayed and of weighing how one market's price might affect another. Resourcefulness

Chopin left Vienna in 1831 after eight fruitless months and in Paris needed about seven more to organise a concert; the University of Chicago Library's exhibit describes his first Paris concert, on 26 February 1832, as poorly attended. Hiller, writing in 1874, described a Pleyel-rooms soirée of the period at which Chopin played his E minor Concerto, mazurkas and nocturnes and won over the sceptics. The same exhibit says that by the end of 1832 he was the city's favoured piano teacher and that lessons and publishing gave him an alternative to the concert circuit.

The change is consistent with adjusting his way of working to the circumstances he found, although the sources differ on how the first concert was received. Adaptability