Op. 7 No. 1

Five Mazurkas, Op.7

No.1 in B flat minor

No.2 in A minor

No.3 in F minor

No.4 in A flat major

No.5 in C major

The authentic Chopin mazurka was developed long before the authentic Chopin polonaise. Although the four Mazurkas, Op.6, and the five Mazurkas, Op.7 - most of which were written in Vienna towards the end of 1830 - were the first works of their kind that the composer himself chose to publish, he had written several characteristic examples before he left Warsaw. Those published posthumously as Op.68, the first three of which date from between 1827 and 1830, offer proof enough of that. The difference is that, while there clearly was a patriotic element in Chopin’s life-long relationship with mazurka, his works in that form are not public statements like the polonaises. They are private expressions of his fascination, as a musician, with the rhythmic, harmonic and structural peculiarities of a dance still quite close to its peasant origins.

There is no better example of Chopin’s delight in the mazurka than Op.7, No.1, where he exaggerates the characteristic rhythmic emphasis on the second beat of the bar in a variety of ways but most wittily of all by a teasing drop of a seventh in the melodic line and a consequent clash with the harmonies in the left hand - a dissonance suggested, no doubt, by the sharpened fourth note of the scale frequently found in the folk mazurka. The harmonic effect of the modal melodic line brought into contact with the open fifths in the brief middle section is positively exotic.

Op.7, No.2 - an early version of which, with a bagpipe introduction, was written in Warsaw in 1829 - is in a comparatively straightforward A minor and, until the A major middle section, is far less consistent in displacing the triple-time metrical accent. In the F minor, Op.7, No.3, Chopin lets his imagination run free - from a peculiarly grumbling introduction to a characteristic mazurka melody with second-beat emphases and tireless repetitions of a two-bar phrase, to an artiful variant on it, to a new theme in D flat major, to an eloquently expressive development in the left hand and, by way of an extraordinary modulation, to a reprise of the introduction and the first theme in F minor.

The A flat major Mazurka is a revision of one written, according to some authories, as long as six years earlier. Its comparatively quick tempo leaves the two hands without the time to agree on all matters of phrasing and rhythm. The last in the set is an intriguing example of another primitive mazurka characteristic, which is that it has no real ending and could, in theory, go on repeating itself for ever.