成人快手

Donald Macleod explores the music and life of Chopin, zooming in on five key places on his lifetime itinerary. Today, the composer visits Majorca, where despite primitive conditions and appalling weather he produces some of his best-known music.

The trip to Majorca wasn't simply a vacation. Chopin and his new lover, the writer George Sand, were, in effect, on the run; they had to get away from Paris for a while. Sand's previous lover, one F茅licien Mallefille, had cottoned on to his old mistress's new relationship, and took a potshot at her as she left her apartment building; the bullet, as the story goes, was deflected by a passing wagon. Sand was unscathed, but nonplussed. Majorca was remote enough in those pre-package-holiday days to provide her and Chopin with a bolt-hole until M. Mallefille was able, as they say, to move on, so they decamped there, with Sand's children Maurice and Solange, in November 1838. Initially Palma, where they settled, seemed like a paradise; Chopin wrote to a friend of "sky like turquoise, sea like azure, mountains like emerald, air like in heaven". But then the temperature dropped and the heavens opened. In the cold, damp conditions, Chopin's consumption kicked in, and the local authorities, worried about the risk of a contagion, insisted that the eccentric strangers should move out of town. They upped sticks to an old monastery at Valldemossa, a largely uninhabited area several hours' journey from Palma. Chopin threw himself into his work, but in the rudimentary conditions in which they were now forced to live he eventually became so ill that Sand decided to abandon Majorca and make the journey home to France.