The Chopin Monument & the Summer Piano Concerts

Why is it significant?

Walk to the edge of the pool and look up at the bronze figure above the water: a young man sitting, his head turned as if he had just heard something, while over him a willow tree bends and streams in an invisible wind.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk to the edge of the pool and look up at the bronze figure above the water: a young man sitting, his head turned as if he had just heard something, while over him a willow tree bends and streams in an invisible wind. This is Fryderyk Chopin, the most famous Varsovian who ever lived, and he is not playing... he is listening.

The sculptor Wacław Szymanowski won the competition for it before the First World War, and his design shocked some people. No piano, no noble pose, but a twisting Art Nouveau tree shaped like the Mazovian willows Chopin grew up among, the trees of the flat river country around Warsaw. Arguments and the war delayed it for years, and the monument was finally unveiled in 1926.

It stood for less than fourteen years. On 31 May 1940 the German occupiers blew it up, and the bronze was taken away as scrap. They understood perfectly well what Chopin meant to Poles: his music had been banned from public performance under the occupation. A copy of Szymanowski's design survived, and in 1958 a new cast returned to exactly this spot.

Since 1959, on Sunday afternoons from late spring to the end of summer, a grand piano is wheeled out beside the pool and a pianist plays Chopin in the open air. Thousands of people sit on the benches, on the grass, on blankets, and the birds join in whenever they please. It is never solemn, nobody minds a child or a dog, and it is one of the loveliest things Warsaw does.

Look at the face once more: the sculptor gave him the expression of someone catching a melody before it disappears. The park now opens up in every direction. Follow the main path east, into the trees, towards a long low building where the king kept his orange trees and his theatre.