Frederic chopin garden of eden
Precisely what he recorded is not known - the notes he made were lost. The forensic and genetic scientists who had gathered months earlier at the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw for that unprecedented examination revealed their conclusions at a news conference. One medical paper suggested cystic fibrosis - undiscovered in - was the killer. The scientists who carried out the examination had wanted to open the jar and test its contents, but faced implacable opposition from "everybody, starting with the great great granddaughter of one of Chopin's sisters", Prof Dobosz said in September.
Chopin's patriotism found expression in his music, and for Poles it came to symbolise Polish nationalism. The scientists wanted to check that it was in good condition and to answer the question - what killed the man whose works are regarded by Poles as the musical embodiment of their country? Another, that Chopin had inherited a form of emphysema, Alphaantitrypsin deficiency.
But doubts soon arose about the diagnosis, and a scientific examination of the heart earlier this year, while at first appearing to confirm the TB theory, left the mystery unresolved. The same doctor, Jean Cruveilhier, removed Chopin's heart and carried out an autopsy. It was the dead of night when a secret ceremony took place at a church in the Polish capital, Warsaw, in April this year. But the examination was only visual.
The mystery of Chopin's death
When Polish composer Frederic Chopin died in he seemed to have suffered a classic Romantic death from tuberculosis. The jar contained a heart preserved in alcohol - most likely cognac - for more than years. The composer left Warsaw aged 20, never to return.
It had been swallowed by Russia, Prussia and Austria in , and only re-materialised as an independent country years later. A crystal jar, encased in one of the church's pillars, was removed and its contents examined solemnly by genetic and forensic scientists. On his return to Warsaw Radio in , having survived the utter destruction of the city and the Holocaust, he began by playing the same nocturne - a story immortalised in Roman Polanski's film The Pianist.
Garden of Eden (Venice) - Wikipedia
However, reports suggest he referred to something other than TB, a "disease not previously encountered". It belonged to arguably Poland's most famous son, the great composer and pianist Frederic Chopin. No tissue sample was taken for testing. His dying wish was for his heart to be removed before burial - in Paris's Pere Lachaise cemetery - and his sister then smuggled it past Russian guards into Poland.
The legend is that a German soldier removed the heart from its pillar in the church during the war, before both the church and the pillar were flattened. Find out more from BBC Music. Throughout his life Poland did not exist. To meddle with the heart of a man so bound-up with the struggles for Poland would, for many Poles, be sacrilegious.
The jar bearing Chopin's heart had not been opened, and had never left the church. In a bizarre twist, one of the men who supposedly looked after the heart and saved it from destruction is the same man who carried out that destruction - SS Gen Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, commander of the German forces that put down the Warsaw Uprising with great brutality in the summer of But as Rose Cholmondeley says, it's hard to know how much of this is true, and the possibility remains that the heart reinterred in the pillar of the church in October , amid patriotic celebration in the ruins of a devastated city, is not Chopin's.
Is a visual examination of a heart inside a jar enough to give conclusive proof of TB? Nodules sound good for TB as the diagnosis, but other diseases can mimic that appearance - cancer, and a fungus infection such as aspergillosis. But Cholmondeley also thinks there could be another reason why a DNA test might make people uncomfortable.
Top Stories
To understand this opposition, it's worth considering what Chopin means to Poland. Many years later, in September the pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman happened to be in the middle of a live broadcast of a Chopin nocturne when German bombs fell on the radio station and he was forced off air. It is then said to have passed through a variety of hands before being returned to a Polish cardinal.
Then in September, the debate appeared to be over. But things then became less clear.
You can't tell which one by the naked eye. Chopin's heart was well preserved and bore "TB nodules" they reported.
Chopin died in an apartment in Place Vendome, in Paris, on 17 October , at the age of France's greatest authority on tuberculosis had diagnosed him with the disease months earlier, and duly noted it as the cause on the death certificate. It was also "much enlarged, suggesting respiratory problems, linked to a lung disease". Eventually new theories began to emerge.