Chopin's grave in Paris remains a place of pilgrimage and his music continues to sell out concert halls worldwide – but who exactly was this astonishing man? He was terrified of public performance; he fled his Polish homeland for Paris never to return; took up with the most notorious transvestite in France and, despite a life of ill-health, wrote some of the deepest and most powerful music ever written? How exactly did this young Polish boy rise to such heights?

Chopin's grave in Paris remains a place of pilgrimage and his music continues to sell out concert halls worldwide – but who exactly was this astonishing man? He was terrified of public performance; he fled his Polish homeland for Paris never to return; took up with the most notorious transvestite in France and, despite a life of ill-health, wrote some of the deepest and most powerful music ever written? How exactly did this young Polish boy rise to such heights?