Op. 41

Four Mazurkas, Op.41

No.1 in E minor

No.2 in B major

No.3 in A flat major

No.4 in C sharp minor

Chopin’s seventh set of mazurkas was completed during his first summer in George Sand’s country house at Nohant, not long after their return to France from Majorca in 1839. Sand’s assertion that Chopin could never tolerate life at Nohant, even though he always looked forward to going there, seems to be borne out by the oppressive atmosphere of the Mazurka in C sharp minor which, as the last and longest of the four, is decisive in determining the character of the whole set. It is surely not insignificant that the Mazurka in E minor, which was written when Chopin and Sand were still languishing unhappily in Majorca, has much in common with the C sharp minor. If the earlier work is inspired by a more poetic, not so restive kind of melancholy - which is scarcely relieved by the plaintive middle section in B major - it displays similarly bleak modal features and reacts to the heavily assertive return of its opening theme in much the same way.

The two mazurkas in the middle of the set are more at ease with themselves. Although No.2 in B major cannot easily escape the strumming motif with which it begins, it is much more cheerful about it, above all in its witty treatment of the characteristic shift of the rhythmic emphasis to the second beat of the bar. Another indigenous mazurka characteristic that appealed to Chopin is that it often has no proper ending. He nowhere makes more effective use of it than in No.3 in A flat major, which is one of the most beautiful and, in its metrically disorientated D flat major episodes, one of the most subtle works of its kind. Its second half begins as though to repeat the first half, modulates as before to reintroduce the D flat major material, touches on a chord of A flat major and pauses…

The last of these mazurkas is dominated by its opening theme. Introduced in modal C sharp minor by the right hand alone and presented four or five times in different harmonies, it does eventually make way for more tuneful and more decorative material in C sharp major. But it is always there in the background, ready to resurface in its original form in the middle of the piece or, after a particularly determined escape effort, to assert itself in angry fortissimo octaves. As the coda suggests, there is no alternative but quiet acceptance of the situation.