Frédéric Chopin Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
60 free Frédéric Chopin trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Frédéric Chopin trivia quiz covers the composer who wrote almost nothing without a piano in it and almost never played in public. The easy questions cover the nationality, the instrument, the famous lover, the city he lived in for eighteen years and the age at which he died. From there it moves through the life: the French father who insisted on Polish at home, the polonaise written at seven, the diamond ring from a Tsar, the passport that read 'in transit to London via Paris', Schumann's 'Hats off, gentlemen!', the friendship and rivalry with Liszt, and the winter in a Valldemossa monastery where the Preludes were finished. The harder end covers the failed engagement to Maria Wodzińska and the envelope marked 'My sorrow', the three Mallorca doctors, the guinea-an-hour London lessons, Queen Victoria at Stafford House, the last concert at the Guildhall, Mozart's Requiem at the Madeleine, the heart preserved in alcohol, the 2017 study of the jar, and the pianist who invented the nocturne before him. Every answer was checked against Chopin's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our classical music and famous composers quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which village, 46 kilometres west of Warsaw, was Chopin born in 1810?
Żelazowa Wola
Żelazowa Wola. His father was a tutor on the estate, but the family left for Warsaw when the baby was only a few months old, so the composer grew up in the capital rather than his famous birthplace.
Q 02Which film opens with a live Chopin recital on Polish radio being cut short by German bombs in 1939?
The Pianist
The Pianist. It tells the true story of Władysław Szpilman, who survived the war in hiding and, when Polish Radio returned to the air in 1945, sat down and played the same Chopin again.
Q 03Chopin was known for avoiding which staple of a keyboard virtuoso's career?
Public concerts
Public concerts. He told a fellow virtuoso that the crowd intimidated him and its breath stifled him, so he played mostly for small gatherings and earned his living largely by teaching.
Q 04Who was Chopin's first professional piano teacher, taking him on when he was six?
Wojciech Żywny
Wojciech Żywny. Within a few years the boy played better than his teacher, who had nothing more to show him and bowed out.
Q 05Seven-year-old Chopin's first published composition was what kind of dance?
Polonaise
A polonaise, printed in 1817. Early the next year he made his debut at a charity evening, and when his mother asked what people had liked best, he is said to have answered that everybody had been looking at his new collar.
Q 06Which ruler rewarded the 15-year-old Chopin with a diamond ring after hearing him play in Warsaw in 1825?
Tsar Alexander I
Tsar Alexander I. In Warsaw to open the Polish parliament, he asked to hear a newly invented organ-like keyboard instrument, and the schoolboy was the one chosen to show it off.
Q 07Under which Silesian composer did Chopin study composition at the Warsaw Conservatory from 1826?
Józef Elsner
Józef Elsner. When others complained that his pupil ignored the rules, he told them to leave the boy in peace: an uncommon talent, he said, needs an uncommon way.
Q 08Which singer was the 'ideal' who inspired the Adagio of Chopin's concerto?
Konstancja Gładkowska
Konstancja Gładkowska. Chopin told a friend he had adored her for six months without once speaking to her of his feelings, and after he left Warsaw in 1830 the two never met again.
Q 09Which violinist's visit to Warsaw in 1829 moved the young Chopin to write a set of variations in tribute?
Niccolò Paganini
Niccolò Paganini. The piece is known as Souvenir de Paganini, and the virtuoso's feats may also have spurred him to begin his own études, testing what the piano alone could do.
Q 10Chopin's Op. 2 Variations, praised by Schumann, are on a duet from which Mozart opera?
Don Giovanni
Don Giovanni. The duet is 'Là ci darem la mano', and at the Vienna premiere in 1829 the applause after each variation was so loud that Chopin could not hear the orchestra.
Q 11How did Robert Schumann hail Chopin's Op. 2 Variations in 1831?
'Hats off, gentlemen! A genius.'
'Hats off, gentlemen! A genius.' is spoken in the review by Eusebius, an imaginary friend Schumann invented, who lays the unknown composer's score on the piano without showing its title.
Q 12What broke out in Warsaw less than a month after Chopin left Poland in late 1830?
The November Uprising
The November Uprising. The friend travelling with him turned back to join the fight, while Chopin, left alone in Vienna, wrote: 'I curse the moment of my departure.'
Q 13What did Chopin's passport endorsement say when he arrived in the French capital in 1831?
Q 21What was the birth name of the novelist George Sand?
Aurore Dupin
Aurore Dupin. She took her pen name from her lover Jules Sandeau, with whom she had co-written a first novel signed 'J. Sand', and kept it for her own books from 1832.
Q 22What did Chopin say of George Sand after first meeting her in 1836?
'Is she really a woman?'
'Is she really a woman?' He found the cigar-smoking novelist repellent at first, yet within two years they were lovers, and they stayed together for nine.
Q 23On which island did Chopin and Sand spend the miserable winter of 1838-39?
Mallorca
Mallorca. Their landlord turned them out, fearing that Chopin's cough was catching, and they saw out the wet winter in the bare cells of a former monastery in the hills.
'In transit to London via Paris'
He never did return to Poland, becoming one of the Great Emigration.
Q 14Whom did Chopin meet at Carlsbad in 1835, never to see them again?
His parents
His parents. He never went back to Poland, so after nearly five years apart they met abroad, at the spa where his father's doctors had sent him for a cure.
Q 15Which piano maker's instruments did Chopin favour for life after Kalkbrenner introduced him?
Pleyel
Pleyel. He is quoted as saying that on days he felt unwell an Érard gave him a ready-made tone, but when he was strong enough to find his own sound he had to have a Pleyel.
Q 16Which wealthy banking family's patronage opened Paris salons to Chopin from 1832?
The Rothschilds
The Rothschilds. He is said to have been on the point of leaving Paris when a prince took him to one of their soirées, where his playing won him a rush of wealthy pupils.
Q 17To whom did Chopin dedicate his Op. 10 Études?
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt. Hearing him play them, Chopin wrote to a friend: 'I should like to steal from him the way to play my own études.'
Q 18Chopin played at an 1833 benefit for actress Harriet Smithson, who soon married which composer?
Hector Berlioz
Hector Berlioz. He had poured his obsession with her into the Symphonie fantastique before the two had even met, and they married six months after the benefit.
Q 19What did Chopin tell Liszt after hearing him embellish one of his nocturnes?
Play it as written or not at all
Play it as written or not at all. As the story is told, Chopin then sat down and played in the dark himself, and Liszt embraced him and admitted he had been right.
Q 20To whom was Chopin engaged from 1836 to 1837, until her mother cooled on the match?
Maria Wodzińska
Maria Wodzińska. He tied her family's letters into a bundle, wrote 'Moja bieda' ('My sorrow') on it, and kept it in his desk for the rest of his life.
Q 24What did Chopin report from the three doctors who examined him in December 1838?
Dead, dying, and going to die
Dead, dying, and going to die: one verdict from each. In the same letter he mocked their methods: one sniffed at what he coughed up, one tapped his chest, and one poked about and listened.
Q 25Which set of pieces did Chopin complete during his winter abroad with George Sand in 1838–39?
The 24 Preludes, Op. 28
The 24 Preludes, Op. 28. He finished them on a small piano sent from Paris, which customs officers held for weeks while demanding a steep duty, so it reached him only near the end of his stay.
Q 26What was the name of George Sand's country estate, where Chopin spent most summers from 1839 to 1846?
Nohant
Nohant. There, Sand wrote, he would shut himself in his room for days on end, weeping, pacing and breaking his pens, and alter a single bar a hundred times.
Q 27How did George Sand refer to Chopin in letters to friends during their last years together?
Her 'beloved little corpse'
Her 'beloved little corpse'. By then she was more his nurse than his lover, and the grim endearment was her comment on how thin and frail his illness had left him.
Q 28In the family quarrel that ended his nine years with George Sand, whose side did Chopin take?
Her daughter's
Her daughter's. Sand had fallen out with Solange and her new husband, a sculptor, and when Chopin stayed loyal to the young couple she ended things by letter in 1847.
Q 29Which painter, a close friend, made a double portrait of Chopin and George Sand that was later cut in two?
Eugène Delacroix
Eugène Delacroix. He kept the unfinished canvas in his studio until he died, and it was then cut apart: Chopin's half hangs in the Louvre and Sand's in a museum in Copenhagen.
Q 30Which soprano, appearing in Britain in 1848, sent Chopin a prime seat for her own performance after the two met?
Jenny Lind
Jenny Lind. After hearing her from that seat, Chopin told a friend she was 'a typical Swede', lit not by ordinary light but by 'some sort of Polar dawn'.