Fryderyk Chopin Museum in the Ostrogski Palace

Why is it significant?

Stand at the foot of the grand stairway and tilt your head back: the pale baroque palace above you sits on the very lip of the Vistula escarpment, like a box at the opera looking down over the river. This is the Ostrogski Palace, and inside it lives the Fryderyk Chopin Museum.

Key Facts

Listen · 2:28

Stand at the foot of the grand stairway and tilt your head back: the pale baroque palace above you sits on the very lip of the Vistula escarpment, like a box at the opera looking down over the river. This is the Ostrogski Palace, and inside it lives the Fryderyk Chopin Museum. Chopin was not born in Warsaw. He was born in 1810 in Żelazowa Wola, a village about fifty kilometres west, and his family moved to the city when he was a baby. But Warsaw is where he learned to walk, to read, to play, to fall in love and to compose his first masterpieces. He left at twenty, in November 1830, and never came back. Everything on this walk happened in those twenty years, inside about two kilometres. Before the composer, this palace had a legend of its own. The story goes that deep in its cellars lived the Golden Duck, a princess under a spell, who offered a poor young shoemaker a fortune on one condition: he had to spend a hundred gold ducats in a single day, all on himself. He gave one coin to a beggar... and the treasure vanished. Warsaw children still learn the moral. The museum reopened on Chopin's two-hundredth birthday in 2010, and it treats music as something you can walk into. Among its treasures is the Pleyel piano Chopin played in his last Paris years. And as you walk today, look out for low black stone benches. That same year the city set fifteen of these Chopin benches along the places of his life. Press the button on top, and the bench plays you half a minute of his music, right there on the pavement. Across Okólnik street stands the Chopin University of Music, whose roots go back to the conservatory where he studied. Below the palace, Tamka street runs steeply down to the river, the old road Varsovians took to the water. We go the other way, uphill. Walk west to Nowy Świat, then turn right toward the bronze astronomer sitting on his pedestal at the top of the street.