¹ Chopin’s Letters, ed. Henryk Opienski, trans. E.L. Voynich (New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1931; repr. ed. New York: Dover Publications, 1988); Selected Correspondence of Fryderyk Chopin, abridged from Bronisław Edward Sydow, ed. and trans. Arthur Hedley (London: Heinemann, 1962).

² The Chopin correspondence – letters to, from and about the composer – totals some 800 entries. In addition to roughly 300 Polish letters, another 150 or so written by Chopin in French survive, and an additional 350 items in the form of letters either to or about Chopin complete the epistolary record concerning the composer’s life and work. For a detailed history of the Chopin correspondence, see Helman-Bednarczyk, Zofia, ‘The New Edition of Chopin’s Correspondence’, Musicology Today 13 (2016): 1–20 Google Scholar, accessed 12 July 2017 https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/muso.2016.13.issue-1/muso-2016–0009/muso-2016–0009.pdf. This essay serves as an introduction to a new three-volume critical source edition begun in 2001 by a team of Polish scholars in Warsaw. The first volume has already appeared in print: Korespondencja Fryderyka Chopin, ed. Zofia Helman, Zbigniew Skowron and Hanna Wróblewska-Straus, vol. I (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2009). The second is in press, and the third is in preparation. Letters about Chopin, from the period of his life until the death of the composer’s last remaining family member in 1881, are to be published in a separate volume.

³ Hedley, Selected Correspondence of Fryderyk Chopin, viii.