New Warsaw museum gives high-tech tour of Chopin's world

WARSAW — Violet fragrance and birdsong accompany the music of Frederic Chopin in a new high-tech museum designed to transport visitors' every sense into the world of Poland's cherished 19th-century composer.Located in the 17th-century Ostrogski Palace on a hill in central Warsaw, the "Frederic Chopin Museum" was inaugurated on March 1 to mark the bicentennial of his birth, though pending final touches will not open to the public until April ."This museum is brilliant. It allows us to taste Chopin using all our senses," musicologist Daniel Cichy, one of the first to visit the ultra-modern venue, told AFP.Monitors, projectors, headphones and loud speakers take visitors on a journey through the country villa where Chopin was born in Zelazowa Wola, some 60 kilometres (37 miles) outside the capital, and through the Warsaw streets where the composer lived his first 20 years.Written and recorded narratives let guests travel with Chopin across Europe, to Austria, Germany and Mallorca. One room with one of Chopin's cherished pianos recreates a 19th-century Parisian salon, with the sound of glasses clinking and the buzz of friends and artists who came to hear him perform."In this place he becomes a human being just as he was 200 years ago when he walked in the streets, when he studied and came to know his first loves," said Andrzej Sulek, director of Poland's Fryderyk Chopin Institute.Another room is devoted to the women of Chopin's life. Of his many muses he spent the longest, more than a decade, with French writer and feminist Georges Sand, both in Paris and at her country villa in Nohant, central France.As the virtual journey ends, silence, shadows and sobriety fill a room with paintings of the musician on his death bed, his death mask and a lock of his hair.All is designed to "allow each visitor to choose their own route through the exhibition, according to their needs and capacities of perception," museum curator Alicja Knast told AFP.A cozy room with cushions and touch-screens was set up for children."But pro

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