Waltz in E flat major, Op.18 (Grande Valse brillante)

“I haven’t got what it takes for the Viennese waltz,” Chopin once confessed. Certainly, there is no danger of mistaking any of Chopin’s twenty or so surviving waltzes with any of those he might have heard -by Joseph Lanner perhaps or the elder Johann Strauss - on the two visits he made to Vienna before he found that Paris was so much more congenial a city. Although he regularly adopted the medley form much favoured by the Viennese, the Chopin waltz has a quite different character. For one thing, it was not intended for dancing, which immediately liberated it from the accepted tempo constraints. It is distinguished also by Chopin’s romantic temperament, his voluptuous harmonies, his inexhaustible keyboard invention and, above all, by a triple-time rhythmic sense more at home with the Polish mazurka than with the Austrian Ländler.

Even in the introduction to the first waltz the composer himself chose to publish - it appeared in 1834, two years after it was written - Chopin takes an otherwise conventional fanfare motif and deliberately shifts the rhythmic stress away from the first beat of the bar. The brilliant first theme, with its busy repeated notes, is quite unexceptional in this respect. The second theme, on the other hand, incorporates a rhythmically contradictory element from the fanfare motif and, although its demonic crush notes are a more prominent feature, the third also has its third-beat stresses. Order is apparently restored by a recall of the fanfare with its accents no longer displaced and a straight recapitulation of the first theme. But a vertiginous coda, beginning after a couple of pauses with quiet but unmetrical accompaniment figures in the left hand, wittily loses touch with waltz-time reality.