Nineteenth-Century Piano Music by Todd R. Larry

Author:Todd, R. Larry.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

The Mazurkas

The mazurkas provide a marvelous index of Chopin’s career. He wrote more of them than any other genre (we know of at least fifty-eight separate works entitled “Mazurka,” and mazurkas also appear embedded within pieces like the F-minor Concerto op. 21, the Andante spianato from op. 22, and the F#-minor Polonaise op. 44). What is more, they span his entire career, from 1826 to 1849. Of these, plainly the most important and influential were the forty-one mazurkas he released in eleven published sets throughout the 1830s and 1840s. The Mazurkas opp. 6 and 7 counted in the first group of publications Chopin sold to a Parisian publisher shortly after his arrival in the city; the Mazurkas op. 63 were among the last works he put before the public prior to his death in 1849.

That Chopin issued his mazurkas in sets of three or four works partly reflects a convention of the publishing industry: shorter compositions sold better when grouped together with other like kinds. But the sets also gave Chopin the opportunity to experiment with principles of musical structure of a higher order. In particular, he often attempted to articulate musical connections between the numbers of the set. In his more arcane moments, he explored different sorts of tonal relationships. The four numbers of the Mazurkas op. 41, for example, exhibit a kind of “logical” succession of tonic keys: E minor, B major, A-flat major, C-sharp minor.3 In the Mazurkas op. 59 he tried the idea of tonal recall, where an unusual key featured in one work is brought back in another. Here, the most striking moment of the A-minor Mazurka (op. 59 no. 1), the shift to G-sharp minor at the moment of reprise (Example 7.1, Illustration 7.1), is recalled in the parallel major by the tonic key of the A-flat major Mazurka (op. 59 no. 2).

EXAMPLE 7.1. Chopin, Mazurka in A minor, Op. 59 no. 1 (mm. 79–82)

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