Szpilman played piano at an expensive café which pandered to the ghetto ’ s upper class, made up largely of smugglers and other war profiteers, and their wives or mistresses.

Szpilman describes the scene :< p > I played Chopin ’ s Nocturne in C sharp minor.

Szpilman later played in a cafe on Sienna Street and also the Sztuka Cafe on Leszno Street.

When Szpilman resumed his job at Polish Radio in 1945, he did so by carrying on where he left off six years before: poignantly, he opened the first transmission by once again playing Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp minor ( Lento con gran espressione ), the piece he was playing as the German bombs hit the studios of Polish Radio, interrupting its broadcast on 23 September 1939.

In The Pianist, Henryk Szpilman quotes a passage from Shylock's ' Hath a Jew No Eyes?

* 1911 – Władysław Szpilman, Polish pianist ( d. 2000 )

* December 5 – Władysław Szpilman, Polish pianist and memoirist ( d. 2000 )

' speech to his brother Władysław Szpilman in a Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, during the Nazi occupation in World War II.

The Pianist is a memoir of the Polish composer of Jewish origin Władysław Szpilman, written and elaborated by the Polish author Jerzy Waldorff, who met Szpilman in 1938 in Krynica and became a friend of his.

The book is written in the first person as the memoir of Szpilman.

It tells how Szpilman survived the German deportations of Jews to extermination camps, the 1943 destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising during World War II.

In the introduction to its first edition Jerzy Waldorff informed that he wrote " as closely as he could " the story told to him by Szpilman, and that he used his brief notes in the process.

Because of Stalinist cultural policy, and the ostensibly " grey areas " in which Szpilman ( Waldorff ) asserted that not all Germans were bad and not all of the oppressed were good, the actual book remained sidelined for more than 50 years.

Szpilman was not a writer, according to his own son Andrzej.

The latest edition was slightly expanded by Andrzej Szpilman himself and printed under a different title, The Pianist.

In 1998, Szpilman ’ s son Andrzej Szpilman republished the memoir of his father ’ s, first in German as Das wunderbare Überleben (" The Miraculous Survival ") and then in English as The Pianist.

In 2002, Roman Polanski directed a screen version, also called The Pianist, but Szpilman died before the film was completed.

Władysław Szpilman studied the piano in the early 1930s in Warsaw and Berlin.

Upon his return to Warsaw, Szpilman worked as a pianist for Polish Radio until the German invasion of Poland in 1939.

Szpilman ’ s family ( he was living with his parents, his brother Henryk and his sisters Regina and Halina ) were amongst those who did not.

They hid their money in the window frame, an expensive gold watch under their cupboard and the watch ’ s chain beneath the fingerboard of Szpilman ’ s father ’ s violin.

To avoid the concentration camps, rich, intellectual Jews like Szpilman ’ s family and many of his acquaintances could pay to have poorer Jews deported in their place.

In The Pianist, Szpilman describes a newspaper article that appeared in October 1940: A little while later the only Warsaw newspaper published in Polish by the Germans provided an official comment on this subject: not only were the Jews social parasites, they also spread infection.

Szpilman ’ s family was lucky to already be living in the ghetto area when the plans were announced.

On his way to or from work, Szpilman would sometimes pass by the wall during smuggling hours.

In addition to the methods of smuggling mentioned previously, Szpilman observed many child smugglers at work.

In his memoir, Szpilman describes one of these forays: One day when I was walking along beside the wall I saw a childish smuggling operation that seemed to have reached a successful conclusion.

The opera was immediately stopped, and the orchestra played Chopin's Funeral March for the stunned audience.

On his early American tours, he programmed works such as the Chopin Preludes and Schumann's Fantasie in C. Among other works that he played, as recalled by those such as Claudio Arrau and Vladimir Horowitz, who had heard Schnabel in the 1920s, were Chopin's E minor Piano Concerto and the Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, and Weber's Konzertstück in F minor, Piano Sonata No. 2, and Invitation to the Dance.

The appearance of George Sand, played by Merle Oberon, alters Chopin's life.

It was the Peresson cello that du Pré played for the remainder of her career until 1973, using it for a second, live, recording of the Elgar Concerto, and her last studio recording, of Frédéric Chopin's Cello Sonata in G minor and César Franck's Violin Sonata in A arranged for cello, in December 1971.

The piano piece played in the film is Chopin's Prelude No. 2 in A minor.

* The Preludes, Opus 28 consists of Frédéric Chopin's 24 preludes for piano, ordinarily but not necessarily played together in concert.

Kissin's talents were revealed on the international scene in 1984, at the age of twelve, when he played and recorded both of Chopin's piano concertos with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire.

A colleague once played Rosenthal's arrangement of Chopin's Minute Waltz in thirds at a recital, after which Rosenthal thanked the pianist " for the most enjoyable quarter of an hour of my life ".

If the player dies, a rendition of Frédéric Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat Minor ( also known as The Funeral March ) is played, accompanied with a picture of a RIP gravestone.

He published an edition of Chopin's works, and played Chopin's music at recitals in Paris and in Scandinavia.

It was played at the graveside during Chopin's own burial at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

He played all twelve of Frédéric Chopin's Op.

In 1950 critic and musicologist Irving Kolodin said about the Ballade in F minor of Chopin played by Moiseiwitsch: " A featherweight touch in the opening section of this work, an apt feeling for its " once upon a time " narrative quality give Moiseiwitsch pre-eminence among present day interpreters ...", thus summing up the sensitivity of the playing by Benno Moiseiwitsch.

During Luis ' incarceration, Rinaldi wrote " Ballade à Luis Rego, Prisonnier Politique " (" Ballad to Luis Rego, Political Prisoner "), a popular song that the group often played on stage.