Chopin is buried in Paris. His heart has been in a jar, in a church pillar in Warsaw, since 1879.
Just before midnight on 14 April 2014, thirteen people stood in Holy Cross Church in Warsaw: the Archbishop of Warsaw, the Polish culture minister, scientists, and staff of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute. They had been sworn to secrecy. They took a crystal jar out of a pillar, photographed it, added hot wax to its seal, and put it back. They did not open it. The news came out that September.
The jar holds Frédéric Chopin's heart.
Paris, October 1849
Chopin left Warsaw in November 1830, aged twenty, and never went back. He died in Paris on 17 October 1849, at thirty-nine, after a long illness that everyone at the time called consumption. His body was buried at Père Lachaise. His heart was not.
At his wish, his doctor, Jean Cruveilhier, removed it at the autopsy, and it was kept in alcohol in a crystal jar. The alcohol is traditionally said to be cognac; no one has opened the jar to check. Artur Szklener of the Chopin Institute quotes Chopin as saying: "Paskiewicz will not allow my body to be taken to Warsaw, so at least take my heart." We haven't been able to find where that line was first written down, so treat it as reported, not recorded.
The better-known line, a note in French asking to be cut open so as not to be buried alive, is often printed as Chopin's last request. Szklener attributes it to Chopin's father, Nicolas, and no one has produced a reference for the original. We've left it out of the video for that reason.
Getting it home
His sister, Ludwika Jędrzejewicz, went back to Warsaw in early January 1850, and the heart went too. On 17 March 1850 the Kurier Warszawski told its readers that, in accordance with Chopin's wish, his heart had left Paris "and has now arrived on our soil".
How it traveled is another matter. The family story goes that Ludwika hid the jar under her skirts and carried it past the border guards. That story has one source: her son, Antoni Jędrzejewicz, writing it down some fifty years later. A transport document, meanwhile, lists "a coffer with a heart" among the items sent, which suggests nothing was hidden at all. Szklener's view is that the smuggling tale was a later invention. It's a very good story. We tell it as one.
The pillar
For almost thirty years the heart was kept by the family and then in the church's catacombs. On the thirtieth anniversary of his death, in 1879, the Warsaw Music Society had it walled into the first pillar on the left of the nave of Holy Cross, the family's parish church. An epitaph marks the spot.
The one time it left
In August 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising, the church burned. Sylwester Braun photographed it on fire on 23 August. After the insurgents were driven out on 7 September, German troops took the heart from the pillar. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the SS general who commanded the suppression of the uprising, then staged a handover of it to Bishop Antoni Szlagowski, filmed by the Germans as propaganda. The heart spent the rest of the war hidden in Milanówek, outside Warsaw.
On 17 October 1945, the ninety-sixth anniversary of his death, it was brought back to Warsaw in a state ceremony and returned to the pillar.
What happened after
The 2014 photographs went to a team led by Michał Witt, who published in the American Journal of Medicine in 2017. From the pictures they described a heart that was enlarged and covered with a whitish fibrous coating, and concluded that Chopin probably died of tuberculous pericarditis, a complication of tuberculosis. They could not rule out cystic fibrosis, which some have proposed, without DNA; a request for DNA testing had been refused in 2008. The next inspection is due in about fifty years.
Sources
- Artur Szklener (Fryderyk Chopin Institute), "The History of Fryderyk Chopin's Heart": link (the Kurier Warszawski notice of 17 March 1850, the Paskevich line, the transport document, the 1879 immurement, 1944–45)
- Classic FM / Associated Press, "Chopin's heart exhumed in secret ceremony", November 2014: link
- Science in Poland (PAP), on the 14 April 2014 inspection
- Alex Ross, "Chopin's Heart", The New Yorker, 5 February 2014
- Witt M. et al., "A Closer Look at Frederic Chopin's Cause of Death", American Journal of Medicine 131(2), 2018 (online 11 October 2017), doi:10.1016/j.amjmed.2017.09.039
- Bożena Pettyn, Chopin w Milanówku (2010)
- Music in the film: Chopin, Prelude in E minor, Op. 28 No. 4, performed by Ivan Ilić (CC BY 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons: link
- Images: Wikimedia Commons; public domain except the epitaph photograph, CC BY 3.0, Maciej Szczepańczyk (User:Mathiasrex), 2009: attribution required (given in the caption above).
The design
