Ignacy Jan Paderewski

Ignacy Jan Paderewski
He was born to Jan Paderewski, a land agent of modest means but noble extraction, and Poliksena Nowicka, who died shortly after he was born.

His earliest years were spent with his father and sister in a small manor house near Zhitomir in Podolia, but following the arrest of his father (suspected of participation in the 1863 uprising) he moved to the home of an aunt and from there to Sudyłkow near Szepetowska (now Shepetovka), where his father, now released and remarried, had secured employment. At an early age he took lessons with Piotr Sowiński, but in most essentials he was self-taught, and he quickly gained a reputation as a gifted pianist and outstanding improviser. In the summer of 1872, in his 12th year, he was taken to Warsaw where he was admitted to the Music Institute (Conservatory). He graduated in 1878. For some years Paderewski earned a meagre income in Warsaw from teaching and composing. They were difficult years. He married in 1880, but his wife died in childbirth and their son Alfred was born disabled. Moreover his career showed little sign of taking off, until, in Berlin, he made the acquaintance of Richard Strauss and Anton Rubinstein among others. Rubinstein gave him badly needed encouragement to pursue a career as a pianist and composer, and by the mid-1880s Paderewski was beginning to net a tolerable income from the sale of published salon pieces of admittedly mediocre quality.