Introduction and Rondo in E flat major, Op.16

The commercial strategy of Chopin’s London publisher in awarding the misleadingly fictitious title Adieu à Varsovie (“Farewell to Warsaw”) to the Rondo in C minor, Op.1, was innocent in comparison with the deception he had applied to the Introduction and Rondo in E flat, Op.16, putting it on sale in 1834 as “Rondeletto sur la Cavatina de L’Italiana in Algeri .” Customers of Messrs Wessel in Regent Street would have looked in vain for familiar traces of Rossini in the latest Chopin novelty. What they would have found - in a stylistically variable score started, presumably, in Warsaw and completed, certainly, in Paris - was an intriguingly eccentric, initially simple but increasingly obsessive Andante in C minor and an engagingly tuneful Allegro vivace in E flat major. The Allegro vivace, which seems to be inexhaustible in its decorative exuberance, was presumably written first.

Three years after he had published the alleged “Rondeletto sur la Cavatin de L’Italiana in Algeri,” incidentally, Wessel issued a piano duet arrangement under the almost authentic and actually rather apt title of “Rondo élégante.”