Polonaise in E flat minor Op.26 No.2 (1835)

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. 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. The construction of the Polonaise in E flat minor, on the other hand, is so well developed that, with a well defined secondary theme in D flat major as well as a trio section in B major, it approaches something like rondo form. It has a dangerously rumbling rather than merely dramatic introduction and a main theme which, launched on a rapid upward scale marked con forza, has something almost angry about it. The contained energy of the sotto voce trio section effectively offsets the spectacular dynamic profile of the main theme.