No. 14 in E minor, KKIVa/15 (1830)
No. 4 in F major, Op. 34/3 (1838)
No. 6 in D flat major, Op. 64/1, ‘Minute Waltz’ (1847)
No. 9 in A flat major, Op. 69/1, ‘Farewell’ (1835)
No. 7 in C sharp minor, Op. 64/2 (1847)
No. 11 in G flat major, Op. 70/1 (1832)
No. 10 in B minor, Op. 69/2 (1829)
No. 3 in A minor, Op. 34/2 (c1834)
No. 8 in A flat major, Op. 64/3 (1847)
No. 12 in F minor, Op. 70/2 (1842)
No. 13 in D flat major, Op. 70/3 (1829)
N0. 5 in A flat major, Op. 42 (1840)
No. 2 in A flat major, Op. 34/1 (1835)
No. 1 in E flat major, Op. 18, ‘Grande valse brilliante’ (1831–2)
Chopin was raised on the so-called ‘brilliant style’ of pianism heard in the salons and dance halls of his hometown, Warsaw. Here the waltz reigned supreme as the dance à la mode. It was foreign, exciting, flirtatious even, demanding sustained eye contact and a tight embrace. For the teenage Chopin it encompassed all that was lighthearted and playful in music-making, which goes some way to explaining his skepticism of the genre. ‘Waltzes are regarded as works here!,’ he wrote to his teacher, Józef Elsner, during a brief stint in Vienna. Indeed, of the 26 or so Chopin waltzes that we know of, over half he withheld from publication, often gifting them instead (hence, for example, the five known autograph manuscripts of No. 12). All of which suggests that Chopin saw the waltz as a largely social, rather than ‘artistic’, undertaking.
And yet, far from sitting separately within his output, the waltzes offer a neat case study for Chopin’s overall style. His bel-canto approach to melody, for example, in which phrasing, fingering, pedaling and techniques such as rubato, portamento and fioriture combine to create a top line evocative of the Italian opera he so loved. We can hear this right from the first surviving waltz, No. 10, inspired – appropriately – by his youthful passion for the soprano Konstancja Gładkowska. Then there are the folkish inflections of his homeland, as in the ‘Farewell’ waltz (No. 9), whose final section is punctuated with tenuto stresses on the second beat of the bar in the style of a Polish mazurka.
But perhaps the most Chopin-esque quality is the way he transforms the genre itself, accentuating and intellectualising its ‘popular’ traits. We see hints of this in the first waltz he published, the much-loved ‘Grade valse brilliant’ (No. 1). Here, all the traditional waltz hallmarks are present: a call-to-dance introduction, a chordal accompaniment and a glut of memorable themes, all wrapped up in a contrasting A–B–A structure. But the care with which these elements are treated is unprecedented. The opening melody, for example, has an elegant, undulating shape that captures the whirling motion of dancers. Chopin pits this against a B-section punctuated by syncopations and stutters (one theme is so stuffed with grace notes that the whole passage seems to lollop along like a dancer with two left feet). Then, just before the vivacious main theme returns, he hams up the contrast with a sentimental passage marked ‘dolce’. It’s a process he repeats to even greater effect in Nos. 2 and 4, or in the minor-key No. 3, though here he reverses the polarity, contrasting a haunting, melancholy bulk with serene reprieves.
Chopin also exploits the idea of play – so central to the genre’s appeal – by stuffing his waltzes with musical witticisms. Examples can be found in all, though more often in those works he himself published, suggesting a correlation in his mind between sophistication and artistic merit. See the opening theme of No. 5, a chromatic whirligig whose right-hand emphasis on the first and fourth quavers of the bar creates the feeling of duple time, so that when we move on to the next passage it takes several moments for the brain to re-adjust to 3/4. Or the opening theme of No. 8, in which Chopin gleefully undermines tonal stability by cycling through as many keys as possible.
That waltz is one of the late Op. 64 set, considered the pinnacle of his achievement in the genre, in which he perfected a surface-level restraint (less ornamentation, tighter structures) that masks a remarkable internal craft. The second piece in the trio, No. 7, is the most famous. With its yearning melodies and myriad subtleties, it has a depth and profundity than no ‘dance’ should, by rights, possess, proving Schumann’s claim that these are waltzes ‘for souls much more than waltzes for bodies’.