Lesson 3 · AMEB List C · Romantic
Numbered last, written early, and the only Chopin waltz with no opus number at all — a glittering, brilliant farewell from a 20-year-old about to leave home forever.
See the whole waltz, line by line, with the questions an examiner asks about it: Score Questions: Chopin. Answer out loud, then check.
Frédéric Chopin is sometimes called "the poet of the piano". Unlike Bach or Haydn, he wrote almost nothing except piano music — no big symphonies, almost no songs. He made the piano sing, weep and sparkle in a way nobody had before.
1810 born near Warsaw (Polish mother, French father) → studies in Warsaw with Józef Elsner → November 1830 leaves Poland at age 20, never to return → settles in Paris from 1831 → relationship with the writer George Sand → dies of tuberculosis in 1849, aged 39.
① He wrote almost entirely for piano — mazurkas (~59), nocturnes (21), études (27), preludes (24), waltzes (~19), ballades, scherzos, sonatas.
② His school-leaving report (20 July 1829) recorded the third-year student ("Trzecioletni Szopen Fryderyk") with what one published translation renders "an extraordinary talent — a musical genius" (Polish: "Szczególna zdatność, geniusz muzyczny").
③ He worshipped Bach — and practised the Well-Tempered Clavier all his life (a lovely link to your Lesson 1!).
Liszt, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Berlioz. Influences: the opera composer Bellini (for his singing melodies) and John Field (the nocturne).
If you remember only one sentence about this waltz, make it this one:
"This waltz is numbered last and was written nearly forty years before it was printed."
Lots of programme notes say this waltz was "written first and published last." The second half is fair; the first half is not true, and an examiner who knows the repertoire may well catch it. Chopin had already written several waltzes before this one — the A♭ major B. 21 dates from 1827, three years earlier, and the B minor Op. 69 No. 2 from 1829. So this is one of the early Warsaw waltzes, not the earliest.
And the irony runs deeper than the myth does: that 1827 A♭ waltz wasn't printed until 1902 — thirty-four years after this one. So "published last" is only true of the traditional set of fourteen. The accurate, and better, sentence is: "It's numbered fourteenth and last because it was the last of the canonical fourteen to reach print, in 1868 — but he wrote it around 1830, as a very young man in Warsaw."
Chopin didn't want his unfinished late sketches printed. The claim traces to Liszt's 1852 biography: Chopin wished "these sketches" — the pages he was still revising in his last years — destroyed rather than issued as posthumous works; modern scholars disagree about the request's scope and reliability. After he died, his friend Julian Fontana published a pile of them anyway (that's why so much Chopin says "Op. posth."). Fontana grouped 23 pieces as Opp. 66–73 (1855) — including five waltzes — but this waltz was not among them. It surfaced separately and was first printed in 1868 — twice over, as one coordinated release: Warsaw (Joseph Kaufmann, inside the collection Oeuvres posthumes pour le Piano) and Mainz (B. Schott's Söhne, July 1868, plate 19551). Schott's own title page names Kaufmann as its Warsaw agent — two halves of a joint release across two jurisdictions, not rival editions, and no priority can be established between them. So it got no opus number at all — the first posthumous Chopin waltz to be numbered that way.
The single most important scholarly fact: Chopin's handwritten copy no longer exists, and no authentic copies are known. Every modern edition is built from the 1868 first print — an "edition of an edition". That's why different urtext editions of this waltz disagree on little details. Knowing this shows you understand what an urtext is actually for.
Because Chopin gave no opus number, scholars each made their own list: B. 56 (Maurice Brown), KK IVa/15 (Kobylańska), WN 29 (Polish National Edition), P. 1/15 (Chomiński) — and the number AMEB's own syllabus prints: CT 222. Naming any one is fine — as long as you know why they exist.
In 1830 Chopin was twenty, famous in Warsaw, and about to leave for Vienna. He never came back.
Surprise — no. It's in E minor, but it's brilliant and extrovert, not gloomy. The Chopin Institute itself calls it the virtuosic one among the early Warsaw waltzes. Compare it with his Op. 34 No. 2 in A minor, which is slow and sorrowful — the two side by side prove that for Chopin, "minor" is a colour, not a mood.
A waltz in 3/4 with the classic oom-pah-pah left hand — but built like a mini concert piece, not a ballroom dance.
No. Chopin's waltzes are stylised concert pieces — music to listen to, not to dance to. G. Henle Verlag's introduction to its Urtext waltz volume (HN 131): Chopin "revolutionized the étude but he ennobled the waltz… one cannot and should not dance to them." Chopin himself was sarcastic about real dance music — writing from Vienna in January 1831 (26th per Voynich; Hedley prints 29th): "here waltzes are called works!" And Schumann, reviewing the A flat major waltz Op. 42 in 1841, called it "a salon piece of the noblest kind… aristocratic through and through" — a remark about a different, lifetime-published waltz, but it tells you how the genre was heard.
| Section | Bars (Henle) | Key | What happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Introduction | 1–8 | E minor | Arpeggiated tonic throughout — no dominant preparation |
| A (grazioso) | 9–24 | E minor | The refrain |
| B (dolce e legato) | 25–40 | still E minor | Opens a repeat; heavily chromatic — the famous descent is here |
| A | 41–56 | E minor | 1st/2nd time bars; the repeat sends you back to 25 |
| C | 57–96 | E major | Four sharps arrive at bar 57; two repeated strains; the ff at bar 73 tips into G♯ minor |
| A′ | 97–108 | E minor | 8-bar theme + 4-bar link — 12 bars, not 16 |
| Coda | 109–131 | E minor | Chromatic bass rising; ends E minor, no Picardy third |
131 bars written; about 203 bars sounding once you take the repeat. That gap is the whole answer to "is it a rondo or a ternary?": the second B–A pair exists only because of a repeat sign. On paper the piece is Intro–A–B–A–C–A′–Coda; in the air it is Intro–A–B–A–B–A–C–A′–Coda. Both descriptions are true of different things, which is exactly why both labels circulate.
⚠️ And now the trap. The Polish National Edition numbers the bars differently from Henle — it writes one repeat out in full, so from the ff passage onwards its numbers run 16 ahead: NE bar 89 is Henle bar 73; NE 113 is Henle 97. If an examiner points at a bar and you quote a number from a different edition, you will contradict the page in front of you. Always say which edition you are counting from. The numbers in this table are Henle's (and match Paderewski and Könemann).
Many notes put "the chromatic descent" in the coda. It is in the B section, bars 25–30, and it is beautiful: E – D♯ – D♮ – C♯ – C♮ – B, walking from tonic down to dominant. That is your chromatic descent, and it is the reason B feels restless even though it never actually changes key.
The coda does the opposite: its chromatic bass rises — A – A♯ – B – C♮ across bars 109–112 — and the closing 8va flourish at bars 124–126 is diatonic, not chromatic. There is also no dominant pedal there. Getting this the right way round is a small thing that signals you have looked rather than repeated.
Eight bars of arpeggiated E minor chords (not block chords), quiet at first, swelling to a dramatic forte. The harmony never leaves the tonic: bars 1–2 are a bare open fifth E–B, bars 3–7 a full rolled E minor triad. If you have read that this is a "dominant pedal" or a B7 preparation — it isn't. Eight bars of standing still is the curtain-raiser: it makes the waltz proper feel like an arrival. (There's also a single left-hand crotchet B before bar 1 — an unnumbered upbeat.)
The middle section (C, bars 57–96) is in E major — the parallel major, not the relative major (G). A Romantic minor-key dance "should" go to G; going to E major keeps the same tonic note while transforming the colour — that is the sudden radiance. Then at the ff in bar 73 the left hand plays F𝄪 and A♯ over a D♯ bass — a D♯ dominant seventh, which is the dominant of G♯ minor, and it holds for about eight bars. Those double sharps are in the sources, not an editor's guess, so you can name G♯ minor with confidence.
Driving arpeggios and full chords over a rising chromatic bass, closing in E minor — the last four bars simply alternate V–i–V–i, and there is no tierce de Picardie. The piece is built to arrive here: each return of the refrain carries a more forceful accompaniment than the last, so the texture thickens across the whole waltz. And a detail worth knowing: the sustained chords over that rising bass are not the diminished sevenths they are often called. Over A♯ the chord is F♯–A♯–C♯–E — a dominant seventh on F♯ (V7/V), which duly resolves to B. It misses being a diminished seventh by exactly one note. The real diminished seventh arrives a bar later, on the ff, over C♯: A♯–C♯–E–G.
Rubato means "robbed time" — but Chopin meant something very specific, and most people get it wrong.
Chopin's own pupil, Carl Mikuli, wrote that in Chopin's rubato "one hand — the accompanying hand — always played in strict time, while the other, singing… freed the truth of the musical expression from all rhythmic bonds" (Mikuli's preface, 1879; wording follows the standard English translation). And another pupil, Wilhelm von Lenz, recorded the maxim that goes with it: "'The left hand,' I often heard him say, 'is the conductor; it must not waver, or lose ground; do with the right hand what you will and can.'" So: steady oom-pah-pah left hand, flexible right hand.
Use the pedal to hold the bass note of each oom-pah-pah group, not to wash the texture. The place that most needs clean, frequent changes is the B section, bars 25–30 — that is where the chromatic line lives (see below), and blurring it costs you the best harmonic detail in the piece.
Chopin preferred Pleyel pianos — light, singing, transparent, with fast precise dampers. On a modern grand, literal pedal marks blur the bass and the coda, so use lighter voicing and shallower pedalling. (He used Érard when he felt off-form — the "ready-made tone" remark, a spoken aside preserved by Niecks.)
Set the metronome to your waltz tempo and keep the left hand exactly on the click while the right hand hesitates slightly and then catches up. If your left hand ever rushes or slows with the right, you've lost Chopin's rubato. Remember: this is an early Warsaw waltz, still close to strict Viennese rhythm — not the elastic rubato of his late mazurkas.
You may have been told the question is "Vivace or Allegro vivace?" It isn't. Ten editions were compared, including the 1868 first edition — and neither "Allegro" nor "Allegro vivace" appears in any of them.
| Prints no tempo marking at all | Prints Vivace |
|---|---|
| The 1868 first edition(s) | Kullak (Schirmer, 1880) |
| Breitkopf & Härtel, 1880 | Joseffy (Schirmer, 1915) |
| Scholtz / Peters | Debussy / Durand, 1915 |
| Henle Urtext | Paderewski / PWM, 1949 |
| Könemann Urtext |
Vivace is an editorial tradition, not a reading from the source. It enters with Kullak in 1880, passes to Joseffy and Debussy in 1915 and to Paderewski in 1949 — and the urtexts, going back to the 1868 print itself, leave the head of the piece bare. Remember the autograph is lost, so the 1868 print is as close to Chopin as anyone can get, and it says nothing.
Which puts the tempo where it always really was: on you. There is no metronome mark either — Chopin never gave one in any waltz. (Kullak added one, and it is dotted minim = 88 — one beat per bar, not one per crotchet; you will see it misquoted.)
The answer to give: "The urtexts print no tempo marking at all — Vivace is an editorial addition that entered through Kullak. Vivace is Chopin's commonest waltz marking, so it's a reasonable guess at his intention, but he didn't write one here and he never gave a metronome mark in any waltz. So I chose my tempo from the character of the grazioso refrain and from what the coda needs to stay clean — and here's what that is." That is a far better answer than naming a word.
"This waltz is numbered last but was written early — around 1830 in Warsaw, while Chopin was still a student there, though it wasn't printed until 1868, which is why older editions call it No. 14. It isn't his earliest waltz — the A flat B. 21 is from 1827 — but it is one of the Warsaw group, and it's the only waltz that ended up with no opus number at all. The middle section is in E major, the parallel major rather than the expected relative major, G — that's what produces the sudden radiance, since the tonic note stays while the colour transforms. And the climax is the coda: each return of the refrain thickens the texture, so the whole piece builds towards that final dash. In performance I keep the left hand's oom-pah-pah strictly in tempo and let the right hand breathe around it — Chopin's own rubato, as Mikuli described it."
Why does this waltz have no opus number?
Chopin didn't authorise publication (Liszt records he wanted his late unfinished sketches destroyed). It wasn't in Fontana's posthumous set (Opp. 66–73); it surfaced separately and was first printed in 1868 by Kaufmann (Warsaw) and Schott (Mainz) as a coordinated release — so it never got an opus number.
What key is the middle section in, and why is that interesting?
E major — the parallel (tonic) major, not the relative major G. Keeping the same tonic note while the colour changes is what creates the sudden radiance.
What is the tempo marking?
Trick question — the urtexts, and the 1868 first edition they descend from, print no tempo marking at all. Vivace is an editorial tradition entering with Kullak in 1880. Chopin also never gave a metronome mark in any waltz. So the tempo is an interpretive decision I have to justify, not a word I can look up.
Where is the chromatic descent — and what does the coda's bass do?
The descent is in the B section, bars 25–30: E–D♯–D♮–C♯–C♮–B, tonic down to dominant. The coda's chromatic bass does the opposite — it rises, A–A♯–B–C♮ across bars 109–112 — and the closing flourish is diatonic. (Henle numbering.)
Describe Chopin's rubato as his pupil Mikuli documented it.
The left (accompanying) hand plays in strict time while the right (singing) hand moves freely around it — borrowing here, giving back there. (Lenz heard Chopin himself call the left hand "the conductor".)