https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/arts/music/chopin-waltz-discovery.html

 

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Listen to the full performance below.Credit...Video by Mohamed Sadek
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Hear a Chopin Waltz Unearthed After Nearly 200 Years

An unknown work in the composer's hand has emerged in a New York
museum, the first such find in more than a half century. The pianist
Lang Lang plays it here.

Listen to the full performance below.Credit...Video by Mohamed Sadek
for The New York Times

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Javier C. Hernandez

By Javier C. Hernandez

  * Oct. 27, 2024Updated 9:49 a.m. ET

Leer en espanol

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:

photophotophotophoto

The Morgan Library & Museum

It was a pockmarked musical scrap the size of an index card...

... with tiny notation and a conspicuous name.

The piece was marked "Valse," or waltz.

And a name was written in cursive across the top: Chopin.

"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 Frederic Chopin, the great fantasist of the Romantic
era, the first such discovery in more than half a century.

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Hear the full Chopin waltz, performed by Lang Lang at Steinway Hall
in Manhattan.

    [PIANO]

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Hear the full Chopin waltz, performed by Lang Lang at Steinway Hall
in Manhattan.CreditCredit...Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times

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