Impromptu No.1 in A flat major, Op.29

Chopin’s first impromptu was not the Impromptu No.1 in A flat, Op.29, but the one published six years after his death as Fantaisie-Impromptu in C sharp minor, Op.66. Why he did not himself offer the earlier work for publication no one really knows - perhaps the dedicatee, one Mme d’Esté, had some kind of right in it - but it is quite certain that he did not intend to waste it. The Impromptu in A flat major, written in Paris three years later, is clearly a replacement for it. It is not only that both works are in ternary form, with quicker outer sections based on a distinctive figuration and a song-like episode between them, but also that the theme of the middle section of the Impromptu in A flat major has more than a little in common with that of the earlier piece.

As the two later works of the same kind confirm, while replacing the C sharp minor Impromptu, Chopin was consciously consolidating the impromptu form as he had inherited it from Schubert and Moscheles and had so successfully reshaped in his own style.