In spring 2024, a new work by Frédéric Chopin was discovered in the Morgan Library & Museum, though shared with the world only in the fall – quite a little sensation for the music world! In a unique collaboration with the Morgan Library and its curator Robinson McClellan, the Chopin specialist Jeffrey Kallberg and the world-renowned pianist Lang Lang (who acoustically brought the piece to life), this a-minor waltz has now been published for the first time by the G. Henle Verlag in Urtext, including a facsimile of the autograph. Jeffrey Kallberg was involved from the start in the exciting discovery story, and so I conducted the following interview with him.
Norbert Müllemann (NM): That, dear Jeff – that must have been an historic moment! What was it like? How did you find out about the discovery? Did you realize, straightaway, that it is a genuine Chopin autograph?
left: Robinson McClellan, right: Jeffrey Kallberg, © The Morgan Library and Museum
Jeffrey Kallberg (JK): While on a research trip to Basel to study some Chopin sketches, I took a short trip to Strasbourg, and it was there that I received an unexpected email from Robinson McClellan, Associate Curator of Musical Manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, telling me about the manuscript that he found, and sending me photographs of it. Looking at these photographs, I was astonished: it is my business to know all Chopin autograph musical manuscripts, including those in libraries, private collections, and those sold by auction houses, but here was a manuscript – and a musical work – that I had never seen before! Looking at the manuscript on my laptop screen, I was initially puzzled: although the musical handwriting looked like Chopin’s, it also seemed somehow distorted. Then I read more carefully the information that Robin sent me, and realized how small the manuscript is (about the size of a postcard): once I reduced the size of the photograph on my laptop screen to the size of the manuscript, I could see clearly that the manuscript was in Chopin’s hand.
NM: At the time of the first press reports, people were not yet certain. There was the possibility that here Chopin had notated another composer’s waltz. What evidence is there that this really is absolutely “genuine” Chopin?
JK: Good scholarship requires scepticism. Because very little was known about the origins of the manuscript, and because when it was discovered, we knew of no other Chopin manuscripts that were written on the exact same kind of music paper as that of the Waltz, I thought it is important to emphasise that there were still aspects of the discovery that could point away from Chopin’s authorship. This was true also of the music itself: While the second and third phrases of the Waltz sound like they could only have come from Chopin, the first phrase seemed strange.
But after further research, I realized that the opening phrase, and especially the fff “outburst”, was not as unusual for Chopin as I initially supposed. I have found over 40 instances in his music, concentrated in works written in Warsaw and in his first years in Paris. Most relevant to the Waltz are pieces in which the fff dynamics markings fall on a dissonance, and with the treble sounding in a high register. For their similarity with the fff in the Valse, two of the most intriguing similar moments occur in the first movement of the e-minor Concerto, measure 210 (shortly before the entrance of the second theme) and measure 124 of the g-minor Ballade (shortly before the entrance of the “scherzando” passage). These examples suggest that a certain keyboard position – a treble chord or octave that exploits the area around two-and-a-half octaves above middle C, with the bass accompaniment two octaves below middle C, producing a dissonance – could have led Chopin to use this relatively rare dynamic marking.
NM: After you had written your highly readable and informative preface for our edition and the music had already been printed, you gained new insights into its creation – can you briefly tell us what is new about all this?
JK: Remarkably, we have learned more about the Waltz from the recent sale by the prominent Berlin auction house J.A. Stargardt of a Chopin manuscript of the song “Poseł” (The Messenger).
What is the connection to the Waltz? First, Chopin wrote the Poseł on exactly the same paper he used for the Waltz. The first exact match for the manuscript of the Waltz removes any concerns that the lack of other like manuscripts could have been a sign of forgery.
Second, while we’ve known of the Poseł manuscript since 1956, when it was last auctioned, all we had to consult was a rather poor photograph of its front page. But it turns out the back page of this manuscript contains a note in Chopin’s hand, which reads in Polish: “Żal mi że dziś drugiej strony zapisać nie mogę. – Gdyby był czas napisałbym żołnierza, pierwszą pieśń. – dostaniecie go a walca co Linosiowi tak dawno obiecałem” (“I regret that I cannot write the second page today. – If there were time, I would write ‘the soldier,’ the first song. – you will get it and the waltz that I promised Linosh so long ago.”)
Stefan Witwicki (1801–1847)
This note tells us much! 1) Chopin had written “a second page” of Poseł (a strophic poem); 2) he contemplated writing a song on the first poem from Stefan Witwicki’s Piosnki Sielski, which is called “Żolnierz” (the soldier); 3) he would send the “second page” and “the waltz” – surely the Morgan Waltz!; and 4) “the Waltz” was promised to “Linosh,” the affectionate diminutive for “Linowski,” or Józef Linowski, Chopin’s composition classmate from Joseph Elsner’s class in the Conservatory. When we add the information we can derive from the recto, and the fact that we know Chopin received his copy of Witwicki’s collection of poetry on 5 September 1830 (we have a photograph of the copy that Witwicki gave to Chopin on that day), we can begin to identify a more precise time period for the Waltz manuscript: no earlier than September 1830.
Ludwika Jędrzejewicz, née Chopin (1807–1855)
Further studying the song manuscript and its contexts, I found that there are two later manuscripts of it, neither in Chopin’s hand, but both clearly derived from the autograph manuscript that was just sold. Chopin notated the song in a kind of “schematic” way – not writing it out in full, but using instructions (in Polish) through which the recipient could “reconstruct” and play (and/or sing) the whole song. Both copies reproduce almost exactly the same “schematic” structure. And both manuscripts are associated with Chopin’s sister, Ludwika. In fact, Ludwika herself made the first copy, for an album of Chopin’s music that she copied and sent to Maria Wodzińska (Chopin’s near fiancée). The second manuscript (which somewhat nonsensically copies even Chopin’s annotations about where to find the poetic text in the first edition of the Witwicki poetry publication) was related somehow to the posthumous publication of Chopin’s songs, and Ludwika was deeply involved with their publication. So, was Ludwika the person to whom Chopin sent “Poseł” – and by implication (because of the identity of the paper) – the Morgan Waltz?
We get the answer from a letter from Vienna that Chopin wrote to his family that (research has shown) should be dated 22 December 1830: “I wanted to send you a waltz I’ve composed, but it’s already late; you will still get it.” This sentence reads very much like the sentence on the back of the “Poseł” manuscript.
It’s almost certainly the case, therefore, that Chopin wrote “Poseł” and the Morgan Waltz on the same paper that he purchased in Vienna. The manuscripts date from around Christmas, 1830, give or take roughly a month. They were both folded vertically, which suggests being put in an envelope and mailed. And the recipients were the members of Chopin’s family, with his sister Ludwika (the most musical of his family) being the main target. That members of his family were the recipients explains why these manuscripts are not signed and dated, as was customarily the case for presentation manuscripts – signing and dating was something you did for highborn acquaintances or compositional colleagues, but not for your own family.
It is truly unprecedented to have another manuscript both emerge so soon after the discovery of a completely unknown manuscript and then explain so much about it.
NM: As already mentioned, the autograph has a very unusual format (at least to our modern eyes): it is barely the size of a postcard, and in our facsimile we have taken great care to reproduce precisely this original size. Do you have an explanation for the format?
JK: The very small format of the manuscript (roughly one-fifth the size of Chopin’s normal musical manuscripts) tells us that it was meant as a “presentation manuscript” that Chopin would have given as a gift. Presentation manuscripts (and autograph albums more generally) were a popular social phenomenon throughout the nineteenth century, and, meant to be viewed by only an intimate few, they often featured music written on small sheets of paper like that containing the Waltz. While Chopin did use normal-sized paper when giving a musical manuscript as a gift (and especially so from the mid 1830s on), he seldom used small-format paper for anything but gifts.
NM: It is a very short, almost succinct piece. Is there something that nevertheless organises, structures and holds this composition together, making it artistic as a miniature?
JK: The Waltz is certainly a “complete” work, despite its brevity. The descending three-note chromatic motive that unobtrusively inhabits its first bars permeates, in both its original form and its inversion, all phrases of the piece. It figures into the “turn” of the melody of the second phrase, into the high octave motive that precedes the third phrase, and (in a gesture of decisive closure) into the penultimate measure of the Waltz.
G. Henle Urtext
NM: Were there any problems or points in the actual edition that could not be clearly resolved?
JK: Chopin’s notation of the triplet figure in the second and third phrases is puzzling. It is obviously incorrect from a metrical point of view. Did he intend to write triplet eighth notes, or did the notated triplet sixteenth note imply a non-notated tied eighth note (similar, perhaps, to the grace note figure in measure 12)? Or do the sixteenth-note triplets also tell us something about an intended rapid tempo of the Waltz? Chopin’s ambiguous notation allows for some interpretative freedom on the part of the pianist. And so we have decided to use the autograph notation, with an explanatory footnote.
left: Chopin’s autograph, right and below: G. Henle Urtext
NM: And finally, a very personal question: How do you like the waltz? Have you grown fond of it? Do you already have a “story” with this piece of music?
JK: Thank you for this question! I think this new Waltz is a little gem, one that both expands our sense of how Chopin conceived of this genre early in his career, and that reinforces our understanding of the importance of “small forms” to the composer who would go on to excel in musical miniatures (most famously, perhaps, in his Preludes, op 28).
NM: Many thanks, dear Jeff, for this interview!