Rondo in F major, Op.5

It could well be that we owe the Rondo in F major - or “Rondo à la Mazur” as it is more familiarly known - to the encouragement, or at least to the example, of Chopin’s teacher at the Warsaw Conservatoire, Jozef Elsner. Certainly, it was written at much the same time as Chopin enrolled at the Conservatoire in 1826 and, if he did not have Elsner’s “Rondos à la Mazourek”actually presented to him as models for a composition of his own, he can hardly have been unaware of them.

It is an indication of Chopin’s satisfaction with the piece that, although it had been published in Warsaw in 1828, he co-operated in having it published again in Paris eight years later. By then, of course, he had his own very personal way with the mazurka, preferring to create thoroughly distinctive individual examples rather than compilations like the Rondo in F. However, while there is little here of the poetry inspired in him by the mazurka in his maturity, there are several characteristic features - not least the delight he takes in the sharpened fourth of the first two themes in Lydian mode, emphasising the dissonance by placing it on the idiomatically displaced second- beat stress. He is fertile in entertaining keyboard colouring, virtuoso passage work, witty modulations, expressive chromaticisms and in generally ensuring that there is no dull moment.