Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 12/31/1969, uploaded on 11/07/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Recorded in 1937.  Transferred from a 78 rpm record.

Mazurka in A minor, op. posth.     Frédéric Chopin

Nearly all of Chopin’s mazurkas were arranged and published in sets of four. Even following his death, his musical executor, Julian Fontana, maintained this order when he published eight of Chopin’s mazurkas that had previously only existed in manuscript. Two mazurkas, however, both in A minor, were published in separate anthologies. Each dating from 1840 and published the following year, the first of these mazurkas, No. 50, appeared in Six morceaux de salon and the second, No. 51, in Album de pianistes polonais.

The latter mazurka, distinguished from its companion by the name of its dedicatee, Émile Gaillard, begins with an exotic sounding melody rife with anxiety and tension—a melodic fourth scale degree clashes against a harmonic augmented fourth; the melody, in general, exhibits a tendency towards the dominant but each time the harmony pulls it undeniably back into the tonic. The whole melody is then repeated in the relative major, in which the minor third of the scale in the melody is set against its major counterpart in the harmony. Closing in A minor, the opening section leads into a more straightforward central episode in A major. Here, the harmonies are simpler and the melody rises and falls in waves. The opening section is reprised to round out the mazurka’s ternary form and brief coda, with a surprisingly new melodic idea under a prolonged trill on the tonic, closes the piece.      Joseph DuBose