#it has lots of cowardly musicologists quoted as waving this away as just how polish people were at the time

[officiallanxichen]

waiiiiit tell me more about my man Chopin 🧐🧐

oh absolutely i will!! in this article from 2010, the author talks about how scholars have frequently erased and covered up evidence for chopin being queer, including homoerotic letters. the article is in spanish but I can write a translation if you're interested in reading it and don't read spanish! the abstract is in english and contains some really interesting thoughts. this is a super common story in music history - in the late 90s a SUPER controversial article came out suggesting that schubert might be queer and (straight) musicologists lost their Shit. i can talk about the nuances of that if interested (it would turn into a long infodump about queer scholarship that i would be super happy to go on <3). i'm having a hard time finding potentially accessible and scholarly sources, but if you want more info i can go on an academic journals deep dive and collect some pdfs :)) in conclusion i will present this little selection from the chopin wikipedia page without comment :)

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Chopin was friendly with members of Warsaw's young artistic and intellectual world, including Fontana, Józef Bohdan Zaleski, and Stefan Witwicki. Chopin's final Conservatory report (July 1829) read: "Chopin F., third-year student, exceptional talent, musical genius."[21] In 1829 the artist Ambroży Mieroszewski executed a set of portraits of Chopin family members, including the first known portrait of the composer.

Letters from Chopin to Woyciechowski in the period 1829–30 (when Chopin was about twenty) contain apparent homoerotic references to dreams and to offered embraces.

Now I am going to wash myself. Please do not embrace me as I have not washed yet. And you? Even if I were to anoint myself with fragrant oils from Byzantium, you would not embrace me – not unless forced to by magnetism. But there are forces in Nature! Today you will dream that you are embracing me! You have to pay for the nightmare you caused me last night.

— Frédéric Chopin to Tytus Woyciechowski (4.9.1830)

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