Frédéric Chopin died in Paris on October 17, 1849, aged 39. He had been in failing health for years. His body is buried in France. His heart is in Warsaw, and the way it got there is one of the strangest journeys in music history.
The Horror
Chopin was afraid of being buried alive. He asked his sister, Ludwika Jędrzejewicz, to take his heart to Warsaw and bury it in a church. His physician, Jean Cruveilhier, performed an autopsy at his request and removed the heart, which was submerged in alcohol, probably cognac. The strength of the preservative is not documented, and “probably cognac” is as far as the sources go.
His body was buried at Père Lachaise after a funeral at the Madeleine on October 30, delayed from the date of death. Mozart’s Requiem was sung, and his own Funeral March was played at the graveside.
In early 1850 Ludwika carried the heart back to Poland by rail. Poland was then divided between empires, and she is said to have hidden the container under her cloak or skirt to get it past customs at the Austrian border and past Russian agents. One account says it travelled in a small oak trunk. The details of the concealment come from later accounts and vary.
The heart stayed first at the family home in Warsaw. It may have been moved to Holy Cross Church before Ludwika died in 1855, which is uncertain. Clergy opposed placing it in the upper church, and it lay unlabelled in the catacombs for more than twenty years until a journalist, Adam Pług, found it in 1878. On March 1, 1879 it was moved in secret and immured in a pillar in the nave. A marble tablet by Leonard Marconi was installed a week after its consecration, bearing the verse from Matthew 6:21: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
The Modern Relic
During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 the church was damaged and taken by German forces. The heart was removed by SS officers and later handed to Archbishop Antoni Szlagowski in a ceremony that was filmed as Nazi propaganda. It was kept at Milanówek, and on October 17, 1945 it was returned to Warsaw and to its pillar. A historian cited by one source argues the gesture was meant to reduce the blame of the SS commander involved.
On April 14, 2014 church officials, scientists and representatives of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute removed the jar from the pillar. They carried out a visual inspection only. They did not open the jar. They took photographs, resealed it with wax and returned it. The inspection was not made public for five months. A 2017 article in the American Journal of Medicine described the heart as enlarged and floppy, with a frosted coating, and suggested pericarditis caused by tuberculosis. A letter to the journal questioned that diagnosis, and requests for DNA testing in 2008 were refused. The death certificate gives tuberculosis, and cystic fibrosis, cirrhosis and alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency have also been proposed. The cause of death remains disputed.
The pillar can be visited, but the heart cannot be seen. Another inspection is not expected until 2064.
