Polonaise in C sharp minor Op.26 No.1 (1835)

The earliest surviving Chopin composition is a little Polonaise in G minor, which was published in Warsaw when he was no more than seven years old. Before he left Poland in 1830 he wrote at least eight more polonaises for piano and one, the Polonaise brillante, Op.3, for cello and piano. None of these, however, and not even the    Grande Polonaise in E flat major for piano and orchestra completed in Vienna in 1830 can compare in style and character with the proud series of six polonaises he produced in Paris between 1835 and 1842, let alone the Polonaise-Fantasie of 1846. The difference between the last of the Warsaw polonaises and the first of those he wrote in Paris is a matter not so much of maturity, although that is obviously a significant consideration, as of attitude.

By 1834, when Chopin started on the first of the two Polonaises, Op.26, he had been exiled from Poland for four years. Nostalgic for a country to which he felt he could not safely return and fervently resentful of the cruel setback to its aspirations with the suppression of the Warsaw uprising in 1831, he discovered in the strutting rhythms of his national dance a heroic potential which had never been developed before. In his childhood he had treated the polonaise, like his contemporaries in Warsaw, as a comparatively tame salon piece; in his teens, aware of what German composers like Weber and Hummel were doing to it, he had exploited it for its virtuoso potential: as he somewhat unkindly said of his Polonaise brillante, “It is nothing but glitter, for the drawing room, for the ladies.” Now, however, it was beginning to adopt a defiant, even aggressive attitude and an ambitious expansion of the traditional ternary construction.

With the C sharp minor Polonaise, Op.26 No.1, the transformation is not quite complete. It is allied neither to the salon nor to empty virtuosity nor yet to the heroism of the E flat minor, Op.26 No.2. Half-formed in style, it is apparently also half-formed in shape. It has two authentically stirring bars of introduction, a first section with the characteristic rhythm prominent in the left hand under an urgent but not inelegant melody in the right, and then a long and lyrical second section in D flat major. Chopin’s intentions are not entirely clear but the pieces seems to end here in D flat, with no instruction that the first section should be repeated. The autograph actually suggests the opposite.