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Donald Macleod explores the music and life of Chopin, zooming in on five key places on his lifetime itinerary. Today, an invitation to London turns into an extended tour of Britain, with disastrous consequences for the composer's fragile health.

Chopin had visited London once before, in 1837, but on that occasion he went strictly incognito. This time, he was invited to play - and as the invitation coincided with fallout from the 1848 Revolution, he was more than happy to have an excuse to get out of the French capital for a few weeks. The main facilitator of Chopin's British sojourn was a middle-aged Scotswoman, Miss Jane Wilhelmina Stirling, a sugar heiress. She had studied the piano with Chopin in Paris, and clearly held something of a torch for him. After a hectic round of concerts, matinées and soirées in the English capital, Miss Stirling whisked her beloved teacher off to her ancestral home north of the border - then back down south to a concert in Manchester, attended by what must have seemed to Chopin an intimidatingly large audience, of 1,200 people - then up to to Scotland again for a round of aristocratic socializing he could well have done without, followed by concerts in Glasgow and Edinburgh - then down once more to what Chopin was by now calling "this hellish London", whose infernal fogs must have been a nightmare for the consumptive composer. Here Chopin performed one final engagement before returning, a husk of his former self, to Paris. He never recovered his health.