Rondo in C minor, Op.1 — Frédéric Chopin | The Gerald Larner Programme Note Archive

chopin piano works, recital I

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

Rondo in C minor, Op.1

“Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!” - Robert Schumann’s astonishingly perspicacious recognition of Chopin’s potential when he knew him only by his Variations on Là ci darem la mano, Op.2 - would have come as no surprise in the musical salons of Warsaw. He had been known as a prodigy since he was seven or eight and he was admired not only as a pianist but also as a composer. He wrote polonaises (one of which appeared in print as early as 1817), mazurkas, variations and a comparatively ambitious Rondo in C minor which was published in Warsaw a couple of months after he completed it in 1825.

The Rondo in C minor acquired its Op.1 status only when it was republished in Berlin in 1835. On its publication in this country a year later, it bore the title Adieu à Varsovie - “Farewell to Warsaw” - which was a nice little fiction designed to conceal the fact that it had been written as long as eleven years earlier by a composer who was no more than a schoolboy at the time with several years of study at the Warsaw Conservatoire still ahead of him.

It is an entertaining piece even so. Naively impish in the characterization of its main theme perhaps and modishly conventional in its piano writing, it displays fresh ideas in figuration as well as derivative ones and it is harmonically most enterprising. The modulation from the C minor of the rondo theme to the E major of the più lento first episode is actually one of the least extravagant. The harmonies pass through keys as unlikely as G sharp, D sharp and A flat major before the first recall of the rondo theme and then hit on a proud D flat in the second episode before they, somehow, get back to C minor again.

Four Mazurkas, Op.6

No.1 in F sharp minor

No.2 in C sharp minor

No.3 in E major

No.4 in E flat minor

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 Chopin himself chose to publish. It could be that he turned to one of his two favourite Polish dances at this time - delighting in what is rhythmically and harmonically distinctive about it in clear defiance of conventional good taste - because of patriotic feelings aroused in him by reports of the heroic (but ill-fated) Warsaw uprising. It is a fact, however, that he had abandoned the fashionable salon mazurka for something more like the rustic real thing even before he left Warsaw. The Mazurkas published posthumously as Op.68, the first three of which were written between 1827 and 1830, offer proof enough of that in their modality, their drone harmonies and their displaced rhythmic accents, to mention only the most obvious of their characteristics.

The Mazurka in F sharp minor, Op.6, No.1, is based on the mazurek folk model in the rhythmic shape of the much repeated first phrase of its main theme and in the clear contradiction of the triple-time metre by a consistent stamp of the foot on the third beat in the bar. No.2 in C sharp minor consistently transfers the rhythmic emphasis to the second beat, not least clearly in the opening bars where drone harmonies trap the melodic line in the wrong key. G sharp major remains a surly threat to melodic freedom until the middle section (marked gajo in the score) where Chopin abandons C sharp minor for E major and then, delightfully and without warning, C sharp major - but only to fall back into the G sharp drone.

No.3 in E major also begins with a drone of open fifths. But this time, emphasising the third beat in the bar, it is to encourage heavy-footed peasant steps in the left hand in a curious competition with a more sophisticated dance harmonised in salon-style thirds in the right hand with the rhythmic accent now transferred to the second beat. One of the shortest of all Chopin’s mazurkas, No.4 in E flat minor is based on fluid and hypnotic repetitions of two short phrases of contradictory rhythmic shapes.

Bolero, Op.19

In 1833, when he wrote his Bolero, Chopin had never been to Spain. To judge by the main A minor section of the piece, which is approached by way of a virtuoso C minor introduction, he seems to have imagined the bolero being danced to much the same rhythm and, presumably, to much the same steps as the polonaise. But few composers in France at this time had much idea, apart from a few stylised dance rhythms, of what was special about Spanish music.

If Chopin had written a work actually appropriate to the spurious Souvenir d’Andalousie title imposed on the Bolero by his British publisher Wessel (who had clearly never been to Spain either) he would have given the Parisian salons quite a shock. Clearly, Chopin’s intention was not shock but to impress, to charm and, in the dance itself, to intrigue with the occasional mild exoticism in the harmonies and the melodic line carried by the right hand over the rhythmic pattern so rarely absent from the left.

An incomplete sketch for Bolero, incidentally, was published in Paris in 1876 as Chanson de Zingara: Souvenir du voyage en Espagne, which outdoes even Wessel in commercial deception.

Twelve Studies, Op.10

No.1 in C major: allegro

No.2 in A minor: allegro

No.3 in E major: lento ma non troppo

No.4 in C sharp minor: presto con fuoco

No.5 in G flat major: vivace

No.6 in E flat minor: andante

No.7 in C major: vivace

No.8 in F major: allegro

No.9 in F minor: allegro molto agitato

No.10 in A flat major: vivace assai

No.11 in E flat major: allegretto

No.12 in C minor: allegro con fuoco

Chopin apparently did not consider his Etudes to be so very different from the general run of technical studies available at the time. Far from protecting his pupils from the more or less mechanical Gradus ad Parnassum or School of Velocity kind of thing, he put them to work on Clementi, Cramer and Czerny even after he had completed his first set of twelve Etudes, Op.10. In 1839, three years after he had completed the second set, Op.25, he happily supplied three more examples for the frankly pedagogical Méthode des Méthodes of Fétis and Moscheles. Even so, and although he did derive some of his ideas from the pedagogues, Chopin must have intended his studies for concert use as well as exercise: the structure of the Op.10 set, which includes several complementary pairs and which ends with the most sensational of them as an obvious finale, is surely an indication of something of the kind.

Chopin’s more enlightened contemporaries were very well aware of the uniquely imaginative quality of his achievement in these pieces. Liszt, to whom the Op.10 set was dedicated in 1833, definitively declared that “they spring, like all his works, from the nature of his poetic genius.” As a connoisseur of piano studies, Robert Schumann too was quick to see their very special virtues. Inspired in the first place by a Paganini performance in Warsaw in 1829 (when the earliest of them were written) but also much influenced by the keyboard style of J.S.Bach, they corresponded closely with what he was looking for among the mechanical compilations proliferating at the time. They “offer nourishment for both hand and spirit,” Schumann said, declaring them “all true poetic images.”

There is nothing mechanical or merely muscular in a Chopin study, however useful an exercise it might be. The right hand part of the first Study in C major consists exclusively of broken chords which not only exercise the fingers but which also pour cascades of interesting harmonies on the melody in the left hand below. The A minor Study is an exercise in finger-crossing for the right hand - with a witty parody in the left. Many of the Op.10 studies have, in fact, appealed to the popular imagination as successfully as any other category of Chopin’s work. No.3 in E major, one of the composer’s own favourites, is such a well prepared exercise in legato expression that, at half the original tempo, it was once adopted as pop tune. No.4 in C sharp minor, a study in what used to be known as velocity, has earned itself the nickname of “The Torrent” and No.5 in G flat major, which is a very characteristic example of figuration designed to fit the shape of the hand on the keyboard, has earned a special encore status as the “Black keys” study.

Study No.6 in E flat minor has achieved less familiarity but is a remarkably beautiful exercise in polyphony with a middle voice undulating in semi-quavers between melodic lines in treble and bass. That kind of writing is scarcely baroque counterpoint, of course, but there is more than a hint of the pre-classical toccata in the delightful seventh Study in C major. The eighth in F major is perhaps the most brilliant in the set, calling for a flexible left hand which retains its good humour in spite of all the difficulties experienced by the right. In the ninth in F minor the roles are reversed, the left hand sustaining an unbroken accompaniment of the smoothest legato arpeggios while the right picks out the semi-staccato melody set against it.

The technical problem of the tenth in A flat major, which is the contradictory rhythmic accents of right hand and left, creates its own physical exhilaration. Perhaps it was this which moved Rellstab to make his famous remark that any one who attempts these studies “should have a surgeon at hand.” Or perhaps he feared that the spread chords of the eleventh in E flat would dislocate his fingers (although the secret of playing them, according to best Chopin practice, is in the wrist). But even Rellstab, who was poet enough to invent the “Moonlight” title for Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C sharp minor, would have recognised the passionately “revolutionary” quality of the last piece in the set - a study so emotional that it gave rise to the idea that it was inspired by the fall of Warsaw to the Russian army in 1831. In fact, there is no evidence as to precisely when it was written.

Variations brillantes sur le rondeau favori “Je vends des scapulaires” de Hérold et Halévy, Op.12

In spite of the fact that it was in the Variations on Là ci darem la mano, Op.2, that Schumann recognised Chopin’s youthful genius, the theme-and-variations form was not one in which he excelled. Chopin was clearly aware of that himself since he wrote his last work of this kind, based on a theme from Hérold’s opera Ludovic, as early as 1833 - and even then, one imagines, under commercial pressure from his publisher. The opera, which was left unfinished when Hérold died and was completed by Halévy, was first performed in Paris in May 1833. It was such a success and the rondeau (“Je vends des scapulaires et de pieux rosaires”) was such a favourite that Chopin, Herz, Hünten and Pixis all hastened to write fantasias or variations on it. Chopin’s bid, the Variations brillantes, was announced in Paris as early as July 1833 but, although the score was published in Leipzig in November, it was not issued in France until the beginning of the following year.

The stylishly brilliant introduction was obviously written on the assumption that every one knows the tune. Today’s audience will be less likely to recognize the veiled allusions to “Je vends des scapulaires” than to welcome the characteristic Chopin figurations which occur here and there. The theme itself is a 6/8 melody of ternary shape, disarmingly simple in the outer sections and more complicated in the middle. Chopin preserves the same basic shape in his first variation, with the melody conventionally “concealed” in the right hand in even semiquavers. The vague echo of Schumann in the descending figure inserted between the theme and the first variation sounds, when it is repeated before the next variation, like a deliberate allusion to Carnaval. And the second variation itself could almost be parody of the serious German kind, with the same rhythmic pattern repeated in every one of the twenty-two bars. The third variation, in the minor, touchingly begins and ends like a Chopin nocturne, finally dissolving incongruously but wittily into a capricious scherzo finale.

Waltz in A flat, Op.42

The so-called “Grande Valse” in A flat major, Op.42 - which was written in 1840 and published not in a set but with an opus number all to itself - has attracted a rather more useful nickname. It is known as the “Two-Four Waltz,” which is a reflection of the rhythmic interest created by sustaining the first and fourth of the six quavers in every bar of the main theme to give an impression of duple time within a triple-time metre. A brilliantly frothy refrain links the six main sections (the last two of which recall the first and third respectively) and reappears in extended form as a coda.

Fantasia in F minor, Op.49

Written in 1841, between the Third and Fourth Ballades, the Fantasia in F minor could almost be taken for another work in the same series. It is of much the same structural stature as the ballades, though a little longer than the longest of them, and it too seems to have some kind of dramatic rather than purely musical inspiration behind it - so much so, in fact, that a variety of stories have been spuriously attached to it, ranging from the heroically patriotic to the trivially domestic. The two opening bars, with their beckoning fourths, are clearly not George Sand knocking ominously on Chopin’s door at Nohant, just as the wistfully harmonised reply is not the composer’s reluctantly given permission to enter. The early transformation of the latter phrase into a poignant funeral march carries emotional implications of a quite different kind.

The fact is that the Fantasia is just what it claims to be. Including several conventionally fantasia-style cadenzas as a clear indication of its historical associations, it is an improvisation even more spontaneous than any of the Ballades. Its main theme, introduced in F minor directly after the first of the cadenzas and opening with another falling fourth, is a melody so agitated by its syncopated rhythms that it seems to be falling over itself in panic. But that same theme emerges not much later as a brisk march in E flat major and - after another appearance in its minor mode between two more cadenzas - as a peaceful chorale in B major. Once more it appears in the minor but it takes only an assertive re-entry of the march in the relative major and just a hint of the choral in the same key to bring the work to an end, unexpectedly but quite logically, not in F minor or F major but in A flat major.

Two Nocturnes, Op .27

No.1 in C sharp minor

No.2 in D flat major

Of the two Nocturnes written in 1835 for the Countess d’Apponyi, pianists tend to prefer the second in D flat major. The first in C sharp minor is particularly interesting, however, for the peculiarly personal use Chopin makes of a common harmonic device - left-hand C sharp arpeggios omitting the third of the triad and a right-hand melody equivocating poignantly between the notes E and E sharp. Any of Chopin’s contemporaries could have done it but only a composer inspired by the sound of the piano - by the contrast in colour between the dark shadow of the left-hand arpeggios and the bright line of the melodic voice - could have made anything as beautiful of it. In the end, incidentally the decision is made in favour of C sharp major, but only after and long and agitated middle section.

The attraction of the D flat major Nocturne is, above all, its highly decorative passages of purely pianistic figuration. It is also a masterful example of continuous melodic development, uninterrupted by a contrasting middle section, effortlessly sustained in the right hand over a regular arpeggio in the left.

Scherzo No.3 in C sharp minor, Op.39

Chopin’s work in scherzo form was complementary and parallel to his work in ballade form. The first Ballade and the first Scherzo were both written in about 1835 and - after what seems like far more than a seven years of development in style and temperament - the fourth and last of each set was completed in 1842. It is true that, whereas the ballade was something he more or less invented, the scherzo had a long history and had already developed something of the macabre element which is such a prominent feature of Chopin’s treatment of the form. Even so, the demonic character of his First Scherzo in B minor was still so unconventional that Schumann was moved by it to make his classic remark that if this is a joke he would like to know what serious music sounds like. When it first came onto the market in this country the indefatigable Wessel thought it expedient to ignore Chopin’s title and call it “The Infernal Banquet.”

The scherzos became gradually less infernal, however. Although to begin with, the Third Scherzo in C sharp minor is recognisably related in temperament to the First in B minor, it later achieves a radiance not so very far from the happy mood of the Fourth in E major, which he was to write three years later. After the passionate first section in C sharp minor, in anticipation of the conventional ternary form the ear easily accepts the D flat chorale (with its quiet cascades of quavers at the end of each line) as the contrasting major-key middle section. In fact, the opening section is only briefly recalled and the chorale makes a long reappearance in E major before the final acceleration into the coda and the by now inevitable C sharp major ending.