Although Chopin’s best-known muse was his long term mistress, the French writer George Sand (nom de plume of Amantine Lucile Dupin), he dedicated his Second Piano Concerto and his charming Minute Waltz to a lover he first encountered in his twenties.
Delfina Potocka was a Polish countess, was a friend and muse to Polish expatriate artists Frédéric Chopin. She was noted for her beauty, intellect and artistic gifts.[1] In her youth she was a piano student of Chopin's.
Unhappy in her married life, she eventually divorced. After parting with her husband, Potocka went abroad, where she maintained close contacts with Chopin. Chopin wrote to a friend in Paris in November 1831 "Yesterday I had dinner at the home of Mrs Potocka, that pretty wife of Mieczysław"; she studied piano with him and the friendship continued throughout Chopin's life; two days before his death in 1849 she sang to him at his request an aria from the Dettingen Te Deum of Handel.
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| Chopin-Delfina Potocka singing for the dying Chopin, 1885 |
Chopin created in her honor Waltz in D-flat major, Op. 64—the so-called "Minute Waltz."
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