A doubtful Chopin autograph waltz seems on the Morgan Library and Museum in New York | Culture | EUROtoday

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Fryderyk Chopin’s autograph manuscripts of piano waltzes have sparked paranormal tales. One of essentially the most well-known might be learn within the ebook Chopin and past: my extraordinary life in music and the paranormalprinted in 2010 by Byron Janis together with his second spouse, Maria Cooper Janis, daughter of actor Gary Cooper. The nice American pianist, who died seven months in the past on the age of 95, mysteriously situated in 1967 (he claimed by telepathy) two unknown autograph copies of the waltzes. opus 18 and 70/1 by Chopin, in Thoiry Castle, France. Six years later, this expertise was repeated in synchronicity when Janis discovered two different completely different autographs of the identical Chopin waltzes at Yale University. The story was the topic of a documentary in France and even Martin Scorsese introduced his intention to movie a movie.

Both findings had an important media influence. The diary The New York Times It reproduced on the duvet one of many autographs present in France together with an intensive report by critic Harold Schoenberg. Last Monday, October 28, one other autograph waltz by Chopin returned to the entrance web page of the American newspaper beneath the headline: “A Chopin waltz unearthed.” The information studies the invention by a curator on the Morgan Library and Museum in New York of a totally unknown waltz by the Polish composer. It is a really transient composition not exempt from uncertainty for Artur Szklener, director of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, the establishment devoted since 2001 to researching and selling the life and work of the composer, who has maybe thought-about it a hint of his pedagogical exercise. a musical joke or a medley for a residing. However, on the web site of The New York Times can now be seen and heard carried out by the media star Lang Lang.

This inflow of autographs of Chopin’s waltzes is said to the composer’s behavior of giving them to his circle of disciples and associates. Being brief and musically accessible compositions, they might be copied on an album sheet. The numbers that Krystyna Kobylanska manages in her exhaustive catalog of Chopinian manuscripts, printed in 1977, affirm this inflow: 564 autograph manuscripts and 616 copies annotated by the composer have been preserved in a catalog of 338 works. Without a doubt, essentially the most paradigmatic case is discovered within the melancholic Waltz in F minor opus 70/2. Chopin by no means printed it whereas he was alive, however he insisted on giving it away. Proof of that is that as much as fourteen autograph copies have been preserved with completely different dedications to college students and girls of excessive society reminiscent of Élise Gavard, Maria Krudner and Charlotte de Rothschild.

Portrait of Frederick Chopin, found in the Collection of the Muzeum Narodowe, Warsaw.
Portrait of Frederick Chopin, discovered within the Collection of the Muzeum Narodowe, Warsaw.Heritage Images (Getty Images)

The new waltz has no dedication. It additionally doesn’t have a traditional construction, because it solely has one part and ends with the indication of a attainable repetition. Furthermore, it’s the shortest Polish waltz, with 24 measures, but in addition the strangest. The dissonances of the start rise via a crescendo in direction of a very sturdy (fff), a dynamic indication that we don’t discover in any of the composer’s waltzes, though the melody outlined beneath has the attribute Chopinian ornamentation and accompaniment. However, the work as an entire lacks the slightest musical curiosity. In the article of The New York Times, musicologist John Rink politely calls it a “creative outburst” and pianist Stephen Hough speaks immediately of “trifle.”

The manuscript was a part of the autograph assortment of A. Sherrill Whiton Jr., director of the New York School of Interior Design and an beginner pianist. The Morgan Library and Museum acquired it in 2019, as a part of its legacy that was within the cataloging course of. The staff of consultants at this analysis middle, which has round twenty Chopin autographs, has confirmed a attainable courting to the 1830s, though it has additionally acknowledged that the composer’s identify was added later. However, they’ve assumed that the musical calligraphy coincides with that of Chopin, because it consists of his private approach of drawing the bass clef. The director of the Chopin Institute doesn’t rule it out, though he acknowledges his doubts. In truth, his notation is normally extra stylized and this manner of drawing the bass clef was additionally practiced by his pal and composer Julian Fontana, whose musical handwriting has usually been confused with that of Chopin.

Fontana had been one among his classmates in Warsaw and likewise went into exile in Paris within the 1830s on account of the November rebellion in opposition to Russian rule. In the French capital he acted as a detailed collaborator of the composer and ended up being his musical executor. He was answerable for many of the posthumous publications of the compositions of Chopin, who had died in 1849, on the younger age of 39, as was the case of the waltzes. opus 69 and 70, printed in 1855. Fontana added to those editions variants that some specialists think about unrelated to Chopin, after evaluating them with the composer’s autographs.

Chopin’s piano waltzes weren’t dance items, however ballroom music. However, the Pole gave them such brilliance, magnificence, lyricism and spontaneity that he elevated them above the common and turned them into outstanding works. We know that he wrote thirty, though we protect 19. Of six of the final waltzes, solely the incipit has survived, copied by the composer’s sister, Ludwika Jedrzejewicz, who took the autographs to Warsaw, which perished within the fireplace of the Zamoyski Palace. in 1863.

Chopin printed eight waltzes throughout his lifetime (opus 18, 34, 42 and 64), amongst them the extremely popular Waltz of the minutewhich Barbra Streisand used on her album Color Me, Barbra and appeared in The Muppets together with a number of tv commercials. The aforementioned 5 waltzes printed posthumously by Fontana comply with (opus 69 and 70) and two extra: the one referred to as opus posthumous together with one other in E main, printed in 1861, with out catalog quantity.

The 4 remaining waltzes had been printed lengthy after the composer’s demise and are normally cited with the catalog numbering of Maurice Brown (B.) or Krystyna Kobylanska (KK). These are two waltzes despatched to his instructor Józef Elsner and printed in 1902 by his spouse Emilia (B. 21 and 46), though their manuscripts had been destroyed through the Second World War; one other dated July 1848 and devoted to his pal and disciple Émile Gaillard that was printed in 1955 (B. 133); and the attractive and late Waltz in A minor (B. 150) written for Charlotte de Rothschild and printed in 1955 in The Musical Review.

Any of those 19 waltzes can’t examine in high quality and workmanship with the one “unearthed” now within the Morgan Library and Museum. For the director of the Chopin Institute, it’s nonetheless a hint of his exercise as a pianist, maybe written in his first years in Paris, though he doesn’t think about that we face the 20 th waltz in his catalogue. Perhaps at some point it can even be proven that this sketch was not even de Chopin, as occurred, in 2012, with the Valse melancolique in F sharp minorwhich had been printed in 1861 and turned out to be a composition titled Regretby the Prussian pianist Charles Mayer.

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