A Chopin waltz unearthed after nearly 200 years
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Sometimes, they will discover a lost piece by some known composer, and the media will pick it up. But imo, when you have a listen, it often turns out that the piece had been lost for a reason.
What makes this waltz remarkable as a new discovery, in my opinion, is that it is more or less a finished work; the composition is so distinctively a work by Chopin; and the work brings something novel to the oeuvre.
——
As for the debut, I think someone involved could have been more thoughtful. It feels as if some people in NYC saw a chance to be the first to debut, and they ran with it. It was published in the NYTimes, with a New York-based pianist, with New York’s “Steinway Hall,” which reads like a product placement. Chopin wrote these intimate pieces for the acoustics of small, intimate settings, and for nothing like a modern Steinway concert grand piano.
Maybe they could have instead worked with some local cultural organization in Poland, which could have made the debut a significant local cultural thing? Maybe taking the chance to promote an early-career pianist from Chopin’s homeland, rather than the career of a world-famous New Yorker?
I thought that waltzes in classical music were meant to be danced to. Listening to the performance from the Times article, I'm not sure how one would dance to this. I'm not hearing anything that tells me which notes I should be syncing movement to.
What makes it a waltz instead of some other form that happens to be in 3/4 time?
A mazurka will emphasize either its measures’ second beats or third beats. This might be kind of difficult to identify in Lang Lang’s interpretation, but a waltz differs from a mazurka by having a more steady tempo and by placing the emphasis on the first beat of each measure, usually matching what you were probably expecting.
I’m not sure how many of Chopin’s dance-form pieces were meant for actual dancing, but it is fairly common for composers to write according to stylistic elements of a dance form without intending the work for an actual dance.
Simple example: tango is a dance. A DJ playing tango music at a tango dance event will only use certain recordings that maintain tempo and don’t confuse the dancers.
You can also listen to tango music records that cannot be danced to.
Chopins dances usually fall into the “reminiscent of the dance” category.
Another classical music example is the minuet. When people danced minuets it was the time of the sun king Louis XIV. When Bach composed minuets they were just a song in 3/4 meter adhering to form.
Now that I have established another dance in 3/4, it should be clear that it’s not enough for music to be in 3/4 to qualify as a Waltz. There are various things involved that make a Waltz a Waltz. And in one of the Chopin Waltzes, enough is “fulfilled” in the sense that if you ask a pianist listening to the piece whether they here a Minuet, a Waltz or something else in 3/4 they will probably identify it as a waltz.
Pianist here uses a lot of Rubato (slowing down of the tempo), which kind of is assumed to be an innovation from the romantic period. In any case it got popular during that time. But that would be definitely appropriate for a Chopin piece. One could say it’s a historically accurate practice to use rubato here. It would be used a lot less when the musicians played music for a dance in the local village.
In any case, classical dances of European music are really interesting and there is a lot to discover throughout the centuries. We tend to assume music got more complex by the century, but if you dive into romantic dances, baroque dances, a lot of interesting rhythms are present, a lot of rhythmic playfulness is there.
I would like to hear an interpretation of it by someone who won International Chopin Competition in Warsaw in the recent years (like Blechacz or Liu for instance).
> Maybe they could have instead worked with some local cultural organization in Poland, which could have made the debut a significant local cultural thing?
I suppose the NYTimes could not be bothered to look for someone to work with in Poland or Europe generally (France would be another option), which is, indeed, a shame. In my home town Kraków we have a wonderful chamber music collective which performs music from this very period on historical piano fortes, so very much the kind of instruments Chopin would play on himself. I contacted them immediately after reading this article and before your comment appeared. I am hopeful we will hear the piece performed by them very soon!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyp4ljKR8_E
Here it is performed on a square piano from 1835, so just right within the time range which this very waltz is being dated to.
Not sure why a critique of the NYT is needed; they wrote a great article and had a great performer perform it. Other "cultural organizations" can do what they wish and will not be harmed by this article (and indeed, may be helped, due to the word getting out).
However, the article notes that it's unusually short, while still claiming it's complete. But beyond being short, to my ear it is simply thematically incomplete. It ends exactly at the moment that my ear expects the second theme, the B of an ABA form, to be introduced, possibly, though not necessarily in a new key. Here, we just have A twice. Where's the rest of it? Even the famously brief "Minute" waltz has room for an ABA form. It's essential for closure that we at least travel somewhere and probably come back again. This new one doesn't go anywhere, but simply ends. It ends lamely as such, but its ending would be perfectly appropriate as a transitional moment, leading to the next part.
Anyone else disagree with the experts and think this waltz is incomplete?
https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/chopin_waltz_posthumo...
Very, very obviously a Chopin Waltz. The chord choices, usage of triplets/mordants, and the suspended pedal tones is characteristic. It's a mix of [Prelude Op 28 no 11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si5aT6FDPZ0)'s ephemeral brilliance and [Waltz Op 34 no. 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGdpRmL2XUc)'s lilting, moody style.
My "edition" is definitely not an [urtext](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtext_edition). I made minor simplifications to the descending line at measure 8, following Lang-Lang's performance (which I believe is the correct decision - the arpeggiated diminished chord F-D-B-G#-F-D sounds better without any gaps, compared to what's in the scan, B-F-B-G#-F-D.), and added some phrasing where I thought it was obvious and perhaps went missing over the ages from the raw scan. The ornamentation in measure 20 was probably modified by Lang-Lang, but I think it fits the piece better than a plain mordant, so I notated it as played.
If I were to judge based purely on the music - minus all of the contextual clues like paper, ink, backstory - the probability of it being fake is ~10%. I say this only because it is shockingly similar to 34-2 in harmonic and stylistic elements, which is exactly the kind of thing an AI trained on a not-big-enough dataset would do. While AI utterly fails at longer pieces, it could plausibly render a coherent 24-measure piece in the style of Chopin, and DeepMind could plausibly be working in stealth on a really good music-composition AI. But in the end, the piece is too tightly composed, and I trust NYT's decision to trust the historians who are familiar with evaluating such artifacts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:19th-century_classica...
See for example Nahre Sol [1] who plays the same piece in the style of different composers. In order to do that, you need to have a deep understanding of each composer's "quirks".
Related to her, perhaps see her video "Is Chopin JAZZ?!":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcfRqsjQA-4
> [1] https://youtu.be/SAtZawkqBG8?si=ZObBERSyYD29w4y4
Meta: The "si=ZObBERSyYD29w4y4" parameter is tracking. When cutting-pasting you may wish to remove it.
https://www.thepianofiles.com/the-valse-melancolique/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Mayer_(composer)
There was another (attributed) Chopin Waltz that was discovered about a century ago, and "professors of music" argued whether it really sounded like Chopin or not. I think they reached a consensus that it wasn't Chopin, but an unrelated contemporary called Charles Mayer.
- "In an email exchange we had relating to this discovery, Stephen Hough wrote (and gave me permission to publish) the following comments:"
- "It was not so much the structure which made me think from the first time I saw the piece (1936 edition) that it couldn’t be by Chopin but the compositional mistakes. Chopin was fastidious about such things and there is false note-leading, inaccurate spelling of accidentals and rough harmony (too many thirds, bad spacing). I also never thought it sounded Chopin-esque but much more Russian. I only put it on as a curiosity and insisted that the notes explain its doubtful attribution."
A fun game I like to play myself is "guess the composer". I think I shocked my friend the most when I watched West World with him and after seeing the intro only once I guessed correctly that it was the same composer as the Game of Thrones intro.
Sometimes I second guess myself too much between late Mozart and early Beethoven but I think most the composers have their own hallmarks.
Chopin in particular was quite idiosyncratic because his piano writing was fairly innovative. He came up with a lot of new ways to play the piano and his polish influences and focus on salon music is very distinct
“Bruce Adolphe re-writes a familiar tune in the style of a classical composer … [someone calls in and] listens to Bruce play his Piano Puzzler™. They then try to do two things: name the hidden tune, and name the composer whose style Bruce is mimicking.”
Of course, you can play along at home as you listen.
[0] https://www.npr.org/podcasts/381443927/performance-today-s-p...
Reminded me that nowadays I listen to less classical music than I did so a modification of the game I enjoy playing with myself is "guess the influencing composer". For example I hear so much Prokofiev influence via harmonic language in the early Harry Potter movies and I was listening to Rachmaninoff the other day and thought "oh gosh that reminds me a lot of Kingdom Hearts" and did a quick check and lo and behold Yoko Shimomura cites Rach as a major inspiration. Similarly I often hear shimmers of Ravel in Masashi Hamauzu
(Am pianist, too.)
I bow to your superior knowledge, just want to add for the poor shlubs who are even dumber than me:
Chopin was not simply a composer, but a virtuoso piano player, and i guess because of that he wrote what he wrote for the piano; in contrast to say Mozart who performed at the piano but mostly composed for orchestras, etc.
And the periods of time were different wrt, when Chopin was active, Mozart, Beethoven et al's music innovations already existed, along with larger audiences to play for, which created Chopin's niche
or something like that, i'm not a music guy
Chopin is unusual in that he wrote almost exclusively for the piano.
> As practice gradually moved away from this insular model, and standing, virtuoso quartets replaced ad hoc groups as the chief vehicles of chamber music performance, Beethoven’s compositions became increasingly experimental (and daunting). Legend has it that when Ignaz Schuppanzigh—a well-known Viennese violinist and Beethoven supporter—complained about a particularly difficult passage in one of the Op. 59 quartets, the master retorted, “Do you suppose I am thinking about your wretched fiddle when the spirit moves me?”
If you write a piece that a player struggles to play, that will sometimes come through via a muddled and strained performance. There are famous exceptions that prove the rule on this, such as the extremely high register opening bassoon passage from Rite of Spring through which Stravinsky intended to convey strain, or the trumpet squeals of Ray Nance at the end of many Ellington arrangements.
Generally, though, you want the players to be able to play your piece well. And "err on the easy side" is an effective way to do that, especially when writing for instruments you aren't personally an expert with.
Wiki entry on his teacher:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojciech_%C5%BBywny#:~:text=....
So, in a sense, these composers weren't writing for the same instrument.
Makes me think that a way for a popular artist to do something "new" would be to take a year off and just play music from artists with a totally different style to theirs. After the year they could attempt composing again and maybe their internal style would have been updated.
They'd have guessed correctly. But you already know ahead of time that this newly discovered piece is not, say, juvenilia written by Scriabin specifically to imitate a Chopin waltz. And in that case, 100 professors would have guessed wrong because it would not have been the obvious answer.
Guessing composers based on sound/musical content alone is problematic for many reasons:
1. Common practice vs. composer's idiosyncrasies. Even separating Mozart's oeuvre from Michael Haydn's (Joseph's brother) has been non-trivial-- scholars have gotten it wrong over the centuries. Also-- IIRC there is a research paper about stylistic analyses leading to circular dependencies in the attribution of works of Josquin. E.g., A is Josquin because it sounds like Josquin's B, and B is Josquin because it sounds like Josquin's A...
2. Cross-contamination. Mozart knew Michael and his music, and was highly influenced by it. Compare the initial fugue at the beginning of Haydn's Requiem in C minor to Mozart's, plus the upward cascade of vocal entrances. Additionally, Schumann was influenced by Chopin, who was influenced by Liszt/Schumann/Mozart/Bach/etc. The problem gets worse as you go forward in history-- the next generation can take a composer's entire output and use it as their bible, which leads to...
3. Experts are also composers, and the most highly trained ones can write in the style of any composer whose works they have access to. E.g., Scriabin's set of Preludes was obviously written to be the sequel to Chopin's Op. 24 Preludes, (e.g., Chopin's no. 1 has a few fleeting quintuplets at the end, Scriabin's no. 1 is OMG all quintuplets phrased across barlines till the very end [engine_revving.wav]!). He understood Chopin's formal and textural affinities, could match his virtuosity at the keyboard, and fully immersed himself in Chopin's harmonic language.
I have no doubt if Scriabin had wanted to do a prank (or, more likely, an exercise) by writing a piece to fall convincingly into Chopin's oeuvre, he could have done so at any point in his career.
Plus...
4. Confirmation bias. I really want this to be a newly discovered waltz by Chopin![1]
These are the reasons an article like this mentions things like paper, ink and handwriting analysis.
1: Digression-- scholars also like to omit things that they feel don't reflect well on their favorite composer. For a fun example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_scatology
It was mostly a prank on the music industry, but nonetheless, mimicry of style was involved, and was enough to fool many people for years.
Prokofiev Symphony No. 1 is one of the more famous. It mimics Mozart and Haydn (obvious choices!)
Stravinsky’s Octet is another.
There are plenty of other examples. Those are just two of the more obvious ones. Bach did it. Beethoven did it. Mozart did it.
But if some unpublished work mimics a certain style, I would assume that it is an exercise to gain a better understanding of that style.
If you listen to Haydn's sonatas, do you feel the resemblance of Mozart's? Well, because Haydn taught both Mozart and Beethoven.
Nothing is new under the sun, my friend.
Chopin has a unique style and it is a waltz.
This would have been a trivial question for any piano music lover.
The only reason I might not have have guessed Chopin first is it seems too obvious and easy if I had been asked. A new Beatles song might be harder to guess than this.
I think it sounds pretty good too but I would want to hear it performed by a pianist who I like the way they play Chopin to judge it better. It sounds quite good considering I don't really like the sound of the piano that is being used.
Scriabin's op. 11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Preludes%2C_Op._11_%28Scria... particularly shows Chopin's influence. I have to admit I like these Scriabin preludes more than Chopin's work.
https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/10/15/127974_1_chopin-find-353... (.mp4)
A great execution too from Lang Lang.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/arts/music/chopin-waltz-d...
I can't recommend more Alan Walker's "Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times", which I happen to be reading now.
That was my reaction, too. I play piano, but Chopin has always been too hard for me, so I can’t offer any insights into how the notes on the page are or are not typical of Chopin. But I have listened to many recordings of Chopin by various pianists, and this short piece does indeed sound like Chopin to me.
I believe luck with timing is the biggest determination.
Vonnegut comes to mind in literature. In one of his novels, he even grades his other works A-F based on how good he thinks they were. His grades seem remarkably accurate, too, given my subjectivity as a reader, and his bias as the author.
Seems like the passage of time has a role in accentuating the genius of artists
That makes sense, I think genius is time evolving process.
One pattern, I have seen in high performers, is that they are competing only with themselves, using introspective feedback to continuously improve in an ego free way.
The etudes are timeless
If you do mean something like the 4th Prelude in E Minor for instance, should it be prefaced with a trigger warning that ‘you're about to hear music that is - effusively sad or full of self-pity; extremely sentimental or 'tearful; easily moved to tears; exciting to tears; excessively sentimental; weak and silly? (American Heritage Dictionary definition of maudlin).
Written much later, would you regard Rachmaninov's Vocalise (1915) or Barber's Adagio (1936) as 'maudlin' not to mention a vast number of other compositions that explore the kind of intensity of feeling that is expressed in the 4th Chopin Prelude. Given that the pianist Alfred Brendel considers ‘Chopin’s Preludes as the most glorious achievement in piano music after Beethoven and Schubert’ you might wonder why he takes a somewhat view from you. Could you be missing something?
2) You're really looking at this in terms of modern music industry, which is nonsense, Chopin created music for his friends too and would send them the scripts.
The original is not paywalled for me!?
> While compiling the Köchel catalogue's newest edition – an authoritative list of all of Mozart's documented musical works – classical music researchers rediscovered the manuscript of the previously unknown piece from the Carl Ferdinand Becker collection in Leipzig's music library.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganz_kleine_Nachtmusik#Redisco... (Sept 2024)
On the other hand there is another piece of music "recovered" this year not by rediscovery but by recomposition/restoration, and it's quite a substantial piece that should provide quite a useful new perspective on the composer[1][2].
[1] https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA68460 [2] https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caad055
How do they know they aren’t?
https://imslp.org/wiki/Broude_Brothers
In addition to all the publishing activities they also acted as verification service. Apparently it was common for Conductors to modify compositions which over time drifted from the original.
My understanding was that the family collection of sheet music stretched back in time so they could verify the modifications.
The building had about 12,0000 square feet stacked floor to ceiling sheet music.
Much of the sheet music ended up at the library of congress. I can believe things could be both archived and lost.