Edition: U.S. / Global

Where the Polonaise Plays On

Published: August 17, 2003

THE sleepy village west of Warsaw, Zelazowa Wola, where Frédéric Chopin was born in 1810, is a natural destination for music lovers. It also makes an ideal day trip for anyone eager to explore the older face of Poland that lies just outside the country's fast-changing capital.

Past the massive new shopping malls with their Pizza Huts and Lacoste outlets, past the gargantuan new supermarkets with their stands of French foie gras and Italian ciabatta, the old Poland starts to appear.

Here chickens still scratch in front yards, and family cows graze on grassy patches near the odd apple orchard. Field after field on the endlessly flat Mazovian plain surrounding Warsaw remains planted in cabbage or leek. Many of the squat brick farmhouses and occasional older wooden farmhouses retain their traditional front gardens, a riot of dahlias, daisies, chrysanthemums and hollyhocks swaying in the breeze.

Despite a McMansion going up here and there, the road to Zelazowa Wola, pronounced ZHEH-lah-ZO-vah VO-lah, begins to turn back time. By the time I arrived late last September at the solid country manor where Chopin was born, 34 miles from Warsaw, I had already downshifted mentally and was eager to listen to one of the charmed piano recitals that take place there each Sunday from May through September.

Since Chopin was recognized as a prodigy (he wrote his first two polonaises at the age of 7, a year after he began studying the piano), listening to compositions played in his house is particularly fitting. It is poignant as well, since Chopin left Poland at age 20 and lived mainly in France until his death at 39.

It is a short walk from the main entrance through the formal garden to the house. A low-slung, two-story white structure, the manor has a great expanse of roof, two stout pillars at its gabled entrance and oversized chimneys. The house had become derelict by the late 1800's, but has been restored several times over the last century, from its wide-planked wooden floors to its painted ceiling beams. The latest renovation, in 1994, which included a paint job and new roof, has left the manor house shining.

The rooms are spacious, with large paned windows, high ceilings and sizable white porcelain heating stoves. The furnishings are mainly period pieces -- a grandfather clock, a chest of drawers, Biedermeier chairs and table, bookcases -- all meant to provide the mood of the era rather than an actual representation of the house in Chopin's time.

My favorite item was a peculiar 19th-century instrument known as a giraffe piano, so called because its sounding board is mounted upright instead of horizontally. On the walls are copies of portraits of Chopin and his family, the real canvases lost to invading Germans in 1939. Visitors can read facsimiles of Chopin's childhood writings, including congratulatory messages to his parents in perfect, smudge-free penmanship. In the alcove where Chopin is believed to have been born, an enormous arrangement of fresh flowers is always displayed.

In its heyday, at the end of the 18th century, the manor was the annex of a large estate belonging to Count Kacper Skarbek. When a young Frenchman, Nicolas Chopin, arrived here in 1802 to tutor two Skarbek children, he met a distant cousin of the Skarbek family, Justyna Krzyzanowska, who was living at the manor. They married in 1806 and spent the rest of their lives in Poland. Their son, Fryderyk, was born in 1810 and though the family moved to Warsaw later that year, the young Chopin regularly spent his holidays at Zelazowa Wola.

On the chilly, clear morning I visited, late September sunlight streamed through the ruffled white sheer curtains at the windows, illuminating the only modern piano in the house, a gleaming black Kawai with a bowl of cream-colored roses set on it. Moments before the recital was to begin, staff members set up 22 folding chairs for visitors who had paid the extra $7.70 to listen to the music inside. Perhaps 100 more people sat on benches in the terraced garden outside.

The pianist Jerzy Maciejewski, a teacher at the Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw and founder of the Paderewski Piano Trio, played a 45-minute all-Chopin program: polonaises, mazurkas and preludes as well as a scherzo. With the large casement windows and French doors wide open, hearing the music from the garden is almost more evocative than listening within.

The spirit of the place captures the romanticism that is associated with Chopin. ''The intimate, sensitive and Apollonian beauty of his music, combined with his fragile and delicate appearance, have suggested to many the quintessence of 19th-century Romanticism,'' said James Conlon, principal conductor of the Paris Opera and an admirer of the composer, during a recent interview.

Children are welcome and can easily listen from the benches outside, slipping away to explore the large garden when they begin to fidget. My 5-year-old daughter sat happily on the garden benches with her father through the first polonaise, then bolted with a Polish friend to explore the gardens and search for fallen horse chestnuts during the rest of the concert.