A Chopin waltz is unearthed after nearly 200 years
DEEP in the vault of the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan on a late spring day, curator Robinson McClellan was sorting through a collection of cultural memorabilia. There were postcards signed by Picasso, a vintage photograph of a French actress and letters from Brahms and Tchaikovsky.
When McClellan came across Item No 147, he froze: It was a pockmarked musical scrap the size of an index card with tiny notation. The piece was marked “Valse”, or waltz in French. And a conspicuous name was written in cursive across the top: Chopin. “I thought, ‘What’s going on here? What could this be?’” McClellan said. “I didn’t recognise the music.”
McClellan, who is also a composer, snapped a photo of the manuscript and played it at home on a digital piano. Could it really be Chopin? He had his doubts. The work was unusually volcanic, opening with quiet, dissonant notes that erupt into crashing chords. He sent a photograph to Jeffrey Kallberg, a leading Chopin scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. “My jaw dropped,” Kallberg said. “I knew I had never seen this before.”
After testing the manuscript’s paper and ink, analysing its handwriting and musical style, and consulting outside experts, the Morgan has come to a momentous conclusion: The work is likely an unknown waltz by Frederic Chopin, the great fantasist of the Romantic era, the first such discovery in more than half a century.
The finding may prompt debate in the classical music field, where reports of unearthed masterpieces are sometimes greeted sceptically, and where there is a history of fakes and forgeries. But there have also been significant discoveries in recent years: A library in Leipzig, Germany, announced in September that it had found a copy of a 12-minute Mozart string trio.
Newly discovered works by Chopin, who died in 1849 at 39, probably of tuberculosis, are rare. While he is one of music’s most beloved figures – his heart, pickled in a jar of alcohol, is encased in a church in Warsaw – he was less prolific than other composers, writing about 250 pieces, almost entirely for solo piano.
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The manuscript at the Morgan, which it says is from between 1830 and 1835, when Chopin was in his early 20s, has several peculiarities. Though believed to be complete, the work is shorter than Chopin’s other waltzes – only 48 measures long with a repeat, or about 80 seconds. The piece, in the key of A minor, has unusual dynamic markings, including a triple forte, signifying maximum volume, near the start.
But the Morgan says it is confident the waltz is authentic, pointing to several Chopin hallmarks.
The paper and ink are consistent with what Chopin used at the time, the museum notes. The penmanship matches the composer’s, down to the unusual rendering of the bass clef symbol. Another Chopin manuscript in the Morgan’s holdings shows a similar bass clef symbol. The manuscript is also embellished with a doodle by Chopin, who liked to draw.
“We have total confidence in our conclusion,” McClellan said. “Now it’s time to put it out there for the world to take a look and form its own opinions.”
Star pianist Lang Lang, who recently recorded the waltz for The New York Times at Steinway Hall in Manhattan, said the work felt like Chopin to him. The jarring opening, he said, evokes the harsh winters of the Polish countryside.
“This is not the most complicated music by Chopin,” he added, “but it is one of the most authentic Chopin styles that you can imagine.”
Poet at the keyboard
Born to a French father and a Polish mother in a village outside Warsaw in 1810, Chopin left Poland in 1830, when he was 20. He settled in Paris, quickly establishing himself as a poet at the keyboard whose music conjured new realms of emotion.
Chopin’s separation from his family and his fears for the future of Poland might have contributed to the pained quality of his music from this time. In the early 1830s, Poland was in armed rebellion against the Russian Empire, which had occupied parts of the country. Chopin never returned to his homeland.
“Father despairs – he doesn’t know what to do, and he has no one to help raise up mother,” he wrote in a diary, while travelling in Germany in 1831. “And here I stand by idly – and here I stand with empty hands. I only moan, expressing my pain from time to time at the piano.”
Once asked by an aristocrat in Paris to explain the melancholy of his music, Chopin invoked the Polish word “zal”, meaning nostalgia or regret.
Alan Walker, a noted Chopin biographer, said zal was palpable in shorter pieces like the waltzes, which Chopin infused with a depth of emotion that had previously been reserved for far grander works.
Waltzes had been a cheery staple of ballrooms. But Chopin’s were never meant for dancing.
Chopin, who did not write symphonies, operas or oratorios, was not always seen as a serious composer. “It never occurred to our forefathers that there could be more musical substance in a short waltz or mazurka by Chopin than in an entire symphony by Boccherini,” Walker added.
While experts believe Chopin wrote as many as 28 waltzes, only eight were published in his lifetime, and nine after his death. The rest were lost or destroyed.
The Morgan’s team of experts examined the manuscript under infrared and ultraviolet light to check for damage and alterations. They determined the piece was written on machine-made wove paper with iron gall ink that dated to the 19th century.
The musical style was consistent with Chopin’s writings in the early 1830s. And the notation matched his distinctly small penmanship, as did the writing of the word “Valse” atop the score.
The researchers considered other possibilities. Had Chopin copied someone else’s waltz? Could it be a pupil’s work? Both seemed unlikely.
The peculiarity of the Morgan’s waltz is likely to inspire debate about its origins.
“There are enough highly unusual elements that you have to say, ‘Is this really Chopin’s music?’” observed John Rink, a music professor at the University of Cambridge who reviewed a photograph of the manuscript but was not involved in the Morgan’s research.
Still, Rink said it was hard to dispute the analysis of the penmanship, paper and ink, calling it the “critical, decisive factor”.
He added that the manuscript might reflect “Chopin’s imagination in full flight, a sort of creative outburst before any ideas have been worked through”.
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