Author Terry Lee Marzell and her husband Hal visited Royal Lazienki Park in Warsaw, {plans, where a monument has been erected to honor the brilliant composer Frederik Chopin. Photo credit: Terry Lee Marzell
Summer is prime time for teachers—and students—to incorporate travel into their vacation plans. Many people, both young and mature, know that travel, in addition to being fun and intellectually stimulating, is one of the most meaningful learning opportunities available. That’s why last month, my husband Hal and I planned a tour of the countries of Eastern Europe.
While my husband Hal and I were touring Warsaw in Poland, we were offered an optional excursion to attend a piano recital of selected works by celebrated composer Frederic Chopin. To be honest, neither Hal nor I are big classical music fans, but as we told each other, how could we go to the city that loves her native son so devotedly and not sample the good man’s music?
Earlier in the day, our tour group visited Royal Lazienki Park where a monument has been erected to honor the brilliant composer. There Chopin is depicted sitting beneath a windswept weeping willow, his eyes closed and his hand extended, as if he were playing an invisible piano. The pose is said to symbolize his connection to nature.
The statue was originally erected in 1926, but when the German Army rolled in to occupy Warsaw in 1940, the monument was blown up. A local legend says that the next day a handwritten placard was found among the rubble bearing the message, “I don’t know who destroyed me, but I know why: So that I won’t play the funeral march for your leader.” Fortunately, a cast of the original statue had been made, so when WWII was over, a duplicate was constructed and erected in 1946. Today, the memorial is graced by a placid reflecting pool, impeccably manicured lawns, and a field of profusely flowering rose bushes. The scene was lovely.
And also educational. Our local tour guide led us to a park bench and pressed a button embedded in the bench. “Well, there’s something you don’t see every day,” I commented to Hal in an aside. Yolante explained that in Warsaw, there are fifteen of these Chopin Benches located at various sites that were significant to the composer’s life, each featuring a button that when pressed plays a short excerpt of his music. Each bench plays a different Chopin composition.
Yolante told us that Chopin, who’d been sickly all his life, passed away in Paris, in 1849. He was only 39 years old. He is buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery. Hal and I remember stumbling upon his grave there when we visited France in 2015. On a macabre note, per his deathbed request, after Chopin’s passing, his heart was removed by his doctor, preserved in alcohol, and returned to Poland in 1850, where today it is enshrined in Warsaw’s Holy Cross Church.
On the night of the concert, we made our way to Warsaw’s Fryderyk Concert Hall. This elegant space was comparatively small, with chairs for only about 100 people. We were fortunate enough to be seated in the front row.
Our pianist for the evening was a well-known Polish chamber musician, recording artist, and music educator. He’s played at festivals and concerts all over Europe, and he’s a regular guest of the National Philharmonic Orchestra in Warsaw.
The audience was filled with anticipation as the pianist entered the concert hall and took his seat at the Steinway. For about an hour he regaled us with skillful renditions of Chopin’s compositions. The composer’s work is well-known for being technically complex—very difficult to master—and for evoking strong emotional responses with his music. Neither Hal nor I are Chopin experts, but we agreed that the pianist appeared to perform the pieces with great technical skill—I had a close, clear view of the keyboard and watched with awe at the speed and dexterity with which his hands dashed across the keys. When the recital was concluded, we came away feeling it was certainly worth the effort and expense.
Certainly it may be very rare that a public school music educator in the United States would be able to escort his or her students to Warsaw to explore Chopin’s memorial and attend a concert there, but it might be possible to attend a recital in your home town. Why not see if you can provide such an excursion for the young people in your classroom?
I always enjoy reading stories about adventurous teachers who have taught under the most unusual circumstances. One of these is Hannah Breece, a teacher who spent nearly a decade and a half educating Athabascans, Aleuts, Inuits, and Russians in the Kodiak Archipelago in the Alaskan frontier before the Territory became a state. I recently read about the exploits of this remarkable trailblazer in her memoir, A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska: The Story of Hannah Breece.
