We’ve outgrown our WordPress site! The Chopin Project has now moved to its own domain: www.chopinproject.com, with a whole set of new features and applications. Click here to go to our new site!

Chopinmusic.net calls this Grand Valse “one of Chopin’s most popular and glittering works.” We’re hard pressed to disagree.

Click on the piano to hear Chopin Project pianist Jei-Yern Ryu perform Chopin’s effervescent Waltz in E-flat, Op. 18.

Want to try playing it yourself? Download the sheet music here.

Smack-dab in the middle of Chopin’s Op. 25 Etudes lies this unique and memorable piece that is unlike any other Chopin creation. And one that has generated a considerable amount of ink over the decades.

Sometimes it’s called the “‘cello Etude,” due to the fact that the prominent melody is in the left hand, approximating the range of a cello. Others have called it “A Duet between a He and a She.” Or perhaps you prefer “Morbidly Elegaic?” Ballade-like? A Missing Nocturne?

Another school of thought says plainly: It’s an Etude. It’s supposed to help you with perfecting you piano technique. And the technique here is an exquisitely difficult phrasing and balance question – making the left hand carry the melody without being overpowered by the right — when the natural tendency is to go the other way.

Oh, and just to mess you up a little further, the left and right hand are playing quite independent musical lines that need to coincide at key moments.

So, for the final word, let’s transport you back to G.C. Ashton Jonson, author of the 1905 tome A Handbook to Chopin’s Works: (For the Use of Concert-Goers, Pianists, and Pianola Players):

Click on the piano to hear Chopin Project Artistic Director Arthur Greene perform Chopin’s unique Etude in C-sharp Minor, Op. 25, No. 7.

Read the Wikipedia entry here.

Read the Chopinmusic.net entry here.

“Magnificent in its breadth, it profound expression, and its tremendous sonority.”   Dr. Frank Cooper’s summation of this Chopin Nocturne, composed in 1841, just about says it all. But if you want to know more, click here. Or else check out the marvelous collection of Chopin early editions at the University of Chicago library.

Click on the piano to hear pianist Polina Khatsko play this magnificent Nocturne in C minor, Op. 48, No. 1 in a Chopin Project live performance at the University of Michigan’s Britton Recital Hall.

Want to play it yourself? Get the music here at the Sheet Music Archive.

The third of Chopin’s four Ballades for the piano has been called “probably the only 19th century ballade with a happy ending (as well as being the only ballade of Chopin’s that ends on a major chord).”

But there’s quite a journey it takes before that happy resolution, both in the literary allusion to a tragic short story by Adam Mickiewicz, and in the technical challenge outlined by pianist Paul Cantrell in his excellent blog and podcast In The Hands:

In everything Chopin writes, no matter how complex and virtuosic, that powerful simplicity is there at the core. Although he wrote some very difficult and impressive stuff, the ultimate effect of his music, I feel, should never really be to impress. But that’s exactly what the pianists we usually hear are striving to do: impress the contest judges, the critics, the public. The world we classical performers live in gives us very little room not to play big show pieces, or make everything we play into one.

Chopin’s third ballade suffers particularly from this problem. The ballades are all difficult, but it’s the easiest of them (sort of like the shortest Himalaya). It seems as though all the star performers I’ve heard end up trying to make it as hard as the others by plowing through it with virtuosic flare, and thus trivializing it.

What wonderful music it is that gets plowed under when that happens! I could spend the whole next month talking about this piece, about how Chopin plays with the sense of return, about his use of dissonance as an architectural device, about all those wonderful melodies … but for now, I’ll just leave you with this one thought to perhaps open a mental door: The melody that opens the piece is the stepping-off point for all that follows in the next two and a half minutes, but then it disappears, and the music goes somewhere else entirely. Listen for it. The experience of wanting that melody to return, and it not returning and not returning and then — that’s the force that shapes the piece.

Click on the piano to hear Chopin Project pianist Kay Zavislak perform Chopin’s Ballade No. 3 in A-flat, Op. 47.

Find the sheet music here.

Read the Wikipedia entry on the Ballade No. 3 here.

Dmitri Vorobiev of the Chopin Project performs the Nocturne in B, Op. 62, No. 1. To hear it, Click on the piano!

Here’s how it’s described in the 1905 book A Handbook to Chopin’s Works, by George C. Ashton Johnson:

You can read the entire book on Google Docs here.

Chopinmusic calls it “the most ambitious and substantial of all Chopin’s waltzes.”

The Vancouver Chopin Society goes even further, quoting David Dubal in suggesting that this “Grand Valse” is the essence of Chopin:

A case may be made for the Op. 42 as Chopin’s most perfect valse. After the first measures of trill, a call to the dance, there is a melody with a rare lilt composed in double time, with the triple time of the waltz in the left hand. Schumann remarked that “like his earlier waltzes it is a salon piece of the noblest kind.” The composition, Schumann feels, should be danced to only by “countesses at least.” This waltz is the most demanding technically of the series.

Chopin’s official title for the piece is the Grande Valse Nouvelle pour le piano, Op. 42. There’s a fascinating detail of its publication history available at Chopin First Editions Online.

Click on the piano to hear it played live at a Chopin Project concert by Artistic Director Arthur Greene.

Want to play it yourself? Get the score at the Sheet Music Archive.

Chopin’s third waltz has been called a “piece full of melancholy, gloom and grief, expressed in mournful simplicity.”

Though, according to the Vancouver Chopin Society,

The composer Stephen Heller related that Chopin called this slow (Lento) waltz his favorite. When Heller told the Pole that he, too, loved it best, Chopin immediately invited him for lunch at a fashionable cafe. Frederick Niecks wrote of this piece, “The composer evidently found pleasure in giving way to this delicious languor, in indulging in these melancholy thoughts full of sweetest, tenderest loving and longing.”

Polina Khatsko of the Chopin Project performs the Waltz in A minor, Op. 34, No. 2. To hear it, Click on the piano!

For information on obtaining the sheet music to the Waltz from the Musicroom,

Click on the cover page!