Tonal architecture in the early music

Abstract

Chopin's early music has attracted surprisingly little attention in the scholarly literature on the composer, notwithstanding its vital role in the evolution of his mature style. This comparative neglect can be attributed to certain fundamental problems surrounding the works composed in Warsaw before November 1830 (when Chopin left Poland to embark on his career as a composer-pianist) and in Vienna and Paris in 1830–2. Only a small number of autograph manuscripts from before 1830 survive, making it difficult to ensure the accuracy of modern editions, to determine the music's exact chronology, and to draw firm conclusions as to how Chopin's style gradually took shape. Furthermore, an underlying critical bias in many assessments of the early works inhibits objective evaluation of their significant contribution to Chopin's stylistic development. Most commentators tend to stress the early repertoire's inferior status in comparison with the composer's mature works and thus fail to view music from his ‘apprenticeship’ on its own terms, implicitly succumbing to notions of artistic ‘progress’ which are untenable from both analytical and historiological points of view. This is not to say that the early pieces are altogether without weaknesses. Many works from the Warsaw period suffer from a somewhat rigid ‘formal’ conception, whereby more or less independent, closed sections were simply juxtaposed to form the whole, rather like separate beads on a string. Imperfect proportions between sections, imbalanced periodic structures, endless sequential passagework and overabundant ornamentation in the large-scale virtuosic compositions further inhibit musical flow, while exact recapitulation in the smaller genres, most of which follow a ternary formal plan, has a similarly stultifying effect, particularly in the early solo polonaises, where section A of the typical ABA CDC ABA form is heard six times in all (taking repeat signs into account).