Deep in the vault of the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan on a late-spring day, the curator Robinson McClellan was sorting through a collection of cultural memorabilia. There were postcards signed by Picasso, a vintage photograph of a French actress and letters from Brahms and Tchaikovsky.
When McClellan came across Item No. 147, he froze:
“I thought, ‘What’s going on here? What could this be?’” McClellan said. “I didn’t recognize the music.”
McClellan, who is also a composer, snapped a photo of the manuscript and played it at home on a digital piano. Could it really be Chopin? He had his doubts: The work was unusually volcanic, opening with quiet, dissonant notes that erupt into crashing chords. He sent a photograph to Jeffrey Kallberg, a leading Chopin scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.
“My jaw dropped,” Kallberg said. “I knew I had never seen this before.”
After testing the manuscript’s paper and ink, analyzing its handwriting and musical style, and consulting outside experts, the Morgan has come to a momentous conclusion: The work is likely an unknown waltz by Frédéric Chopin, the great fantasist of the Romantic era, the first such discovery in more than half a century.
The finding may prompt debate in the classical music field, where reports of unearthed masterpieces are sometimes greeted skeptically, and where there is a history of fakes and forgeries. But there have also been significant discoveries in recent years: A library in Leipzig, Germany, announced in September that it had found a copy of a 12-minute Mozart string trio.
Newly discovered works by Chopin, who died in 1849 at 39, probably of tuberculosis, are rare. While he is one of music’s most beloved figures — his heart, pickled in a jar of alcohol, is encased in a church in Warsaw — he was less prolific than other composers, writing about 250 pieces, almost entirely for solo piano.
The manuscript at the Morgan, which it says is from between 1830 and 1835, when Chopin was in his early 20s, has several peculiarities. Though believed to be complete, the work is shorter than Chopin’s other waltzes — only 48 measures long with a repeat, or about 80 seconds. The piece, in the key of A minor, has unusual dynamic markings, including a triple forte, signifying maximum volume, near the start.
But the Morgan says it is confident the waltz is authentic, pointing to several Chopin hallmarks.
“We have total confidence in our conclusion,” McClellan said. “Now it’s time to put it out there for the world to take a look and form its own opinions.”
The star pianist Lang Lang, who recently recorded the waltz for The New York Times at Steinway Hall in Manhattan, said the work felt like Chopin to him. The jarring opening, he said, evokes the harsh winters of the Polish countryside.
“This is not the most complicated music by Chopin,” he added, “but it is one of the most authentic Chopin styles that you can imagine.”
Born to a French father and a Polish mother in a village outside Warsaw in 1810, Chopin left Poland in 1830, when he was 20. He settled in Paris, quickly establishing himself as a poet at the keyboard whose music conjured new realms of emotion.
Chopin’s separation from his family and his fears for the future of Poland might have contributed to the pained quality of his music from this time. In the early 1830s, Poland was in armed rebellion against the Russian Empire, which had occupied parts of the country. Chopin never returned to his homeland.
“Father despairs — he doesn’t know what to do, and he has no one to help raise up mother,” he wrote in a diary while traveling in Germany in 1831. “And here I stand by idly — and here I stand with empty hands. I only moan, expressing my pain from time to time at the piano.”
Once asked by an aristocrat in Paris to explain the melancholy of his music, Chopin invoked the Polish word “zal,” meaning nostalgia or regret.
Alan Walker, a noted Chopin biographer, said zal was palpable in shorter pieces like the waltzes, which Chopin infused with a depth of emotion that had previously been reserved for far grander works. Waltzes had been a cheery staple of ballrooms. But Chopin’s were never meant for dancing.
Chopin, who did not write symphonies, operas or oratorios, was not always seen as a serious composer.
“It never occurred to our forefathers that there could be more musical substance in a short waltz or mazurka by Chopin than in an entire symphony by Boccherini,” Walker said.
While experts believe Chopin wrote as many as 28 waltzes, only eight were published in his lifetime, and nine after his death. The rest were lost or destroyed.
Some of his waltzes sparkle with energy and sophistication, like this “Grande Valse Brillante.”
Others are playful romps, like the Minute Waltz, which has endured in popular culture, performed by both Bugs Bunny and Barbra Streisand.
Still others are morose meditations, like the Waltz in B Minor.
Many pianists of the era delighted in dazzling displays of virtuosity before large audiences. But Chopin detested what he called the “flying trapeze school” of pianism.
He preferred the intimacy of salons, performing his works before audiences of royalty, bankers, artists and musicians — the “church of Chopin,” as the composer Franz Liszt called the gatherings. In these settings, fans sometimes asked for small compositions, like waltzes, as gifts.
Chopin obliged, occasionally presenting the same waltz to several people. He gave away manuscripts of the Waltz in F Minor on at least five occasions, each time to women. “Please keep it for yourself,” he wrote to a recipient. “I should not like it to be made public.”
The Morgan’s waltz might have been written in this context. It was put down on a small sheet of paper, about 4 inches by 5 inches, of a kind commonly used for gifts. The score contains fingerings and dynamic markings, suggesting that Chopin thought the piece might be performed someday.
But Chopin, a fastidious composer — it was not unusual for him to spend weeks on a single page — seemed to have doubts about this waltz. He did not sign the score, as he typically would. The “Chopin” at the top of the manuscript was added by someone else, according to handwriting analysis. And there are a few uncorrected mistakes in rhythm and notation in the score.
Whatever Chopin’s intentions, the waltz was never published and remained out of view, possibly in the hands of collectors.
The manuscript was acquired at some point by A. Sherrill Whiton Jr., a director of the New York School of Interior Design. Whiton, who died in 1972, was an ardent collector of autographs. He obtained much of his collection from the famed Walter R. Benjamin Autographs shop on Madison Avenue, his children said.
Whiton, an amateur pianist and composer who had studied with the renowned teachers Roger Sessions and Nadia Boulanger, had a passion for classical music. As a Navy lieutenant in the South Pacific during World War II, he brought along one book: a miniature score of Beethoven’s late string quartets. He wrote three operas, finishing the final one on the day he died.
“He would play Chopin all the time,” said his son Paul Whiton. “It was his escape.” Whiton recalled seeing the waltz on display at the family home in Wilton, Conn., adding that the family was not aware of its importance.
Whiton’s materials came to the Morgan in 2019 as a bequest from Arthur Satz, a close friend who had bought them from Whiton’s wife, Jean. For five years, the collection sat uncataloged, in part because of the coronavirus pandemic.
A description accompanying the items did not offer many clues about the waltz, saying only:
CHOPIN, FRÉDÉRIC
Musical manuscript. Four systems of two staves of an unidentified piano piece, apparently in Chopin’s hand, but unsigned.
The Morgan’s team of experts examined the manuscript under infrared and ultraviolet light to check for damage and alterations. They determined the piece was written on machine-made wove paper with iron gall ink that dated to the 19th century. The musical style was consistent with Chopin’s writings in the early 1830s. And the notation matched his famously small penmanship, as did the writing of the word “Valse” atop the score.
The researchers considered other possibilities. Had Chopin copied someone else’s waltz? Could it be a pupil’s work? Both seemed unlikely.
The volatile opening remains a puzzle. Kallberg, who helped authenticate the score, said the waltz’s key — A minor — might offer a clue. Some of Chopin’s most turbulent music is in that key, including the so-called “Winter Wind” étude; the Prelude No. 2; and segments of the Ballade No. 2.
“This was a key,” Kallberg said, “that brought out unusual pieces for him.”
Chopin wrote another stormy, dissonant waltz in 1831: the Waltz in E Minor. That piece also opens with an outburst.
The peculiarity of the Morgan’s waltz is likely to inspire debate about its origins.
“There are enough highly unusual elements that you have to say, Is this really Chopin’s music?” said John Rink, a music professor at the University of Cambridge who reviewed a photograph of the manuscript but was not involved in the Morgan’s research.
Still, Rink said it was hard to dispute the analysis of the penmanship, paper and ink, calling it the “critical, decisive factor.” He said the manuscript might reflect “Chopin’s imagination in full flight, a sort of creative outburst before any ideas have been worked through.”
What might Chopin make of the release of the waltz? He often covered up missteps with furious scribbles and blotches of black ink, and he told friends he wanted his unpublished works to be destroyed after his death.
Still, he might be delighted that his music was still adored, said Stephen Hough, a prominent pianist and composer. He said the waltz “may be very much a trifle, but it has a charm and preciousness.”
“As long as Chopin knew that his legacy was strong and his pieces were well collected and well researched and well recorded,” he added, “I can’t imagine he’d be cross.”
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