NEWS
Experts in Waltz
In 2024, a manuscript of a Waltz in A minor for piano, comprising only 24 bars and apparently notated by Chopin, was found in the music collection of The Morgan Library & Museum in New York. The discovery gained worldwide attention and generated considerable controversy about its authenticity.
JEFFREY KALLBERG: I first saw a photo of the Morgan Waltz while in Strasbourg in June 2024. My initial impressions combined astonishment and confusion. Here was a tiny manuscript clearly in Chopin’s musical hand. Yet, priding myself on knowing every extant Chopin manuscript, I was bewildered to be confronted with one I had never seen. And this ‘Valse’: could Chopin really have composed it? What on earth was I looking at?
JOHN RINK: My own reaction – ‘How intriguing!’ – was similar. It certainly looked like a Chopin manuscript, but so much was unusual that I had to question its authenticity. The angry introduction, reaching fff after just seven bars (in a waltz to boot!), seemed especially odd. So did other aspects of both the music and the notation. But over time I became convinced that Chopin had not only prepared the manuscript but composed the music therein.
J.K.: When I eventually examined it at the Morgan Library, I determined that Chopin wrote everything on the page, except – ironically – the name ‘Chopin’. Considering just physical evidence (handwriting, paper type), I initially estimated its date to between 1830 and 1835. But, astonishingly, last spring an autograph manuscript of Chopin’s song ‘Poseł’ that is written on identical paper to that of the Waltz came to light. And even more remarkably, the ‘Poseł’ manuscript includes a note in which Chopin mentioned ‘the waltz that I promised Linosh [Józef Linowski] so long ago’! This new evidence allowed me to date the origins of the Waltz more precisely to Vienna around Christmas, 1830, and to conclude that Chopin presented the Morgan Waltz as a gift to his sister Ludwika in Warsaw.
J.R.: The combined evidence is indeed compelling; moreover, the musical features are consistent with Chopin’s style, at least for the most part. However unusual it sounds at first, the bellicose introduction chimes with the contemporaneous E minor Waltz, and the melodic profile and ornamentation in the main section, likewise the mix of waltz and mazurka elements, have parallels in the F sharp minor Mazurka, Op. 6 No. 1, among other pieces. To my ear, the elegant counterpoint and subtly playful phrasing in the Waltz are no less characteristic of Chopin.
Admittedly, the squeezed-in upbeat on ‘A’ does jar with Chopin’s typical use of the fifth scale-degree as a springboard in such contexts, and the thick C major chord in bar 21 sounds ungainly after the refined counterpoint – to the point that I’m tempted to leaven the texture when playing the passage. Sceptics on social media have also highlighted the incorrect notation of the triplets in bars 10 and 18, which should be quavers, not semiquavers, if indeed Chopin wanted triplets at all, rather than quicker turns like the one in bar 12. Nevertheless, such mistakes are by no means uncommon in his manuscripts.
J.K.: Even the pugnacious fff jibes with other contemporaneous works by him. Not only did Chopin deploy this dynamic more often than one might suppose, but at certain moments – a phrase shortly before the entrance of the second theme in the first movement of the E minor Concerto, and a passage just before the entrance of the ‘scherzando’ section of the G minor Ballade – he did so in ways that closely correspond to the fff in the Waltz.
At a larger scale, I did ask myself whether Chopin might simply have been copying a piece by someone else, but I quickly rejected this possibility: not only does the musical evidence overwhelmingly point to Chopin’s authorship, the relatively careful and complete notation of the Morgan autograph differs sharply from Chopin’s practices in the few known manuscripts in which he wrote out the music of another composer.
Once we accept the Morgan Waltz as authentic, we can properly place it within the context of 19th-century sociable gift-giving. Chopin often favoured acquaintances with small, precious gifts that offered synopses of the genres to which they belonged. The Morgan autograph contains a compellingly complete précis of a waltz, combining sophisticated play (including the descending three-note motive that permeates the piece) and expressive melancholy.
J.R.: This little waltz serves to remind us of the astonishing maturity of Chopin’s artistry at a relatively early stage – also that his expressive range encompassed the explosive as well as the exquisite, here juxtaposed within mere seconds. Yet for all the discussion elicited by the newly discovered manuscript, some nagging questions remain unanswered. Among others: what ‘message’, if any, did Chopin intend to convey in this arresting but elusive music? As always, we can only wonder what he might have had in mind: we will never know for sure.
Jeffrey Kallberg is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, and John Rink is Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge. Both have published extensively on Chopin and are members of the Chopin Institute’s Programme Board.
