Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 09/01/2009, uploaded on 09/01/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Traveling back from Carlsbad in 1835 where he met his parents for the last time, Chopin’s return route took him through Saxony. There he met old friends from Warsaw, the Wodzińskis, and fell in love with their daughter Maria, a talented and artistically-inclined young woman. Returning to Dresden after vacationing with the Wodzińskis in Marienbad in 1836, Chopin proposed to Maria. Initially, Maria’s parents approved of the engagement. However, Chopin’s fragile health and Maria’s still relatively young age led to an indefinite postponement of the wedding. Shortly thereafter, the engagement was called off and Chopin departed Dresden in September of that year and returned to Paris. It is against the backdrop of these events in the composer’s life that the four mazurkas of opus 30 were composed. Quite possibly their somber and sorrowful tone was Chopin’s only means of expressing the impending doom that he sensed his relationship with Maria would inevitably reach.

The first mazurka of the set, in C minor, is melancholy with an almost icy demeanor to it. Its principal melody seems strangely detached and at times seems to wince at a disturbing repressed thought. The following mazurka in B minor, perhaps reacting to the suppressed emotions of the first mazurka, becomes restless and agitated despite its tentative beginning. The driving figure of its middle strain closes the piece in a dramatic fashion. Following this dramatic ending, the third mazurka in D-flat major sounds like a defiant stance against the melancholic mood and the gloomy clouds that hang over the mind of the composer. However, the dance seems inevitably pulled toward the parallel minor mode as if the earlier sorrowful thoughts cannot be fully dispelled. The final strain nearly succeeds in its attempt to conclude the piece in the minor but in the final chord the minor third is, without warning or intervening harmony, supplanted by its major counterpart.

Longest of the set, the final mazurka in C-sharp minor opens with dissonant augmented second harmonies building into the first theme of the piece. Over an accompaniment of rolled chords, the theme is florid but with the same sort of odd detachment as the opening mazurka. The melody of the central episode is more lyrical but is placed over an agitated accompaniment in the left hand. As the piece progresses, the passions of the artist seem to overcome his wavering detachment and the music begins to reveal his inner struggles. Unlike the other mazurkas in this set, the last ends with a prolonged coda. Taking its cue from the motif of the introduction, the coda progresses eerily through a series of seventh chords on a chromatically descending bass, which results in deceptive resolutions of each seventh and haunting parallel fifths. In essence, Chopin sums up the turmoil of the entire set in this disconcerting ending.      Joseph DuBose