Many people have noted the connection between the tango La melodia del corazón, well known in the 1940 recording of Edgardo Donato, and Chopin’s piano étude Op. 10, No. 3.
When the same thing happened to me, many years ago, I asked my dad (who never danced tango) about it because I could remember him humming this tune when I was a small child. He told me that the lyrics began “How deep is the night”, and so I knew immediately that the connection between Chopin’s melody and popular music was not confined to tango. But which came first – the tango version, or another?
The most well known version in English, bizarrely, is one by the comedian Ken Dodd. The melody is said to have been used in the 1938 Bette Davis Movie “Jezebel”, and there is also a version with German lyrics recorded the same year by the Viennese Singing Sisters for the film “Memories of Chopin”

Jens-Ingo traced the tango versions to a 1939 arrangement made in Paris by Mario Melfi with the title “Reviens mon amour”, which was a big hit for Bruno Clair, but take a look at the sheet music: as a sub-title, it gives another name – Tristesse – Sadness. That’s also the title used by Tino Rossi, singing in French, in his 1939 recording:

Chopin considered this his most beautiful melody. He published it in Paris in 1833, having left Warsaw for Vienna in 1830. Less than a month later, his native Poland was thrown into war by the November uprising, an armed rebellion against the Russian Empire which ruled part of the nation (which was partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and did not exist as a separate country). It is easy to hear in the melody Chopin’s heartbreak at the fate of his country; one of his pupils reported that during a class, while he was demonstrating this piece, Chopin broke down in tears crying, “Oh my homeland!”