CHOPIN WAS GAY? CLAIM RATTLES POLAND, WHICH OPPOSES LGBTQ RIGHTS

New suggestions about Frederic Chopin's private life collide awkwardly with Poland's staunchly conservative traditions and its right-wing leadership -- and have caused some to question whether the story of Chopin that Poles are told from a young age is true and that he was gay, Rob Picheta reported for CNN.

According to a Swiss radio documentary that has been discussed at length in Poland in recent days, the composer had relationships with men, and those relationships were left out of history by successive historians and biographers; a potentially thorny charge in one of Europe's worst countries for LGBTQ rights.

Music journalist Moritz Weber, whose program aired on Swiss network SRF, said he reviewed letters from Chopin, sent to male friends, which feature explicit and romantic passages. Weber also found that subsequent biographies and re-tellings of some letters swap male pronouns to female ones and downplay, whether intentionally or not, any evidence of Chopin's relationships with men. "He's talking about love so directly with men," Weber told CNN. "Why wasn't that questioned by all these scholars and famous biographers?"

The most traditional story of Chopin's love life is that he had romantic relationships with women -- most notably the writer Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, who was known by her pen name, George Sand. But the archive of letters that Weber trawled told a different story, he found. "He didn't write letters to them at all. And he doesn't write about them in a way that you could conclude there was love," Weber said. "What is obvious in his letters that there is love written to his male friends -- most passionately to Titus Woyciechowski," Weber said, referring to the Polish activist and longtime friend of Chopin's. Later, he wrote in such a way to "many other" men, he added. Suggestions that Chopin had male lovers are not new, and the sexuality of a Romantic-era artist would be of little importance in many parts of the world. In Poland, however -- where Chopin's music is omnipresent, and where the artist commands a reverence rivaled only by compatriots Pope John Paul II and Marie Curie -- Weber's documentary has attracted notice.