Frédéric Chopin / Mazurka in A Minor

A nostalgia-laced dance of defiance that transports us to a place of love and belonging where we ache to go again.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (American, 1834–1903). Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Chelsea Snow, 1876. Oil on canvas. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum

At most colleges and conservatories, every undergraduate music major who sings or plays an orchestral instrument is required to take two years of group piano classes. When I was a student at the Eastman School of Music in the late '90s, these would take place in a cavernous classroom with a dozen electric keyboards. Students showed up twice a week, put on the headphones attached to their keyboard, and spent an hour grimacing as they tied their fingers in knots working through grueling scales and technical exercises.

Thankfully I was able to test out of these group classes after one semester. Because I had spent my teenage years teaching myself intermediate piano skills, I could take private lessons to fulfill this academic requirement. I loved these weekly meetings, primarily because they gave me the opportunity to dive into music by composers I loved but who hadn't written solo works for my instrument — the clarinet — including J.S. Bach, Claude Debussy, and Dmitri Shostakovich. (Of course I could only handle intermediate pieces, but still — I got to spend a whole semester practicing Debussy's Sunken Cathedral prelude!)

Out of the mountain of music I learned in those years, it was a quiet, introverted composition by Frédéric Chopin that enchanted me most: A Mazurka in A Minor, which, as I learned from my teacher, was one of dozens of such dances the composer penned in his short life.

Since Chopin wrote almost exclusively for solo piano, I didn't know his music very well when I was handed the two photocopied pages of sheet music. My only interaction with his work had been flipping through a book of waltzes I had picked up at a secondhand shop in high school, and the experience hadn't sparked my interest in hearing more. The flowing technique these grand dances required was far beyond my reach, and their elegant, buttoned-up character didn't speak to my angsty teenage soul.

This shadowy mazurka, however, was different — a mystery in miniature that seemed to contain a universe of emotion. The melodies conveyed a deep well of sadness as they slowly danced across the keyboard, feverish one moment and resigned the next, the music hardly ever rising above a whisper. And then there was the strangeness of the passage that both opens and closes the work. Its nebulous harmonies sounded more like something you'd hear in a Harlem jazz club than in a European concert hall.

I had to know: What was the story behind Chopin's mazurka, which to me sounded like the saddest dance ever written? And what could have pained the composer's heart so much that he had no choice but to craft this moment of profound lyricism?

Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798–1863). Frédéric Chopin, 1838. Oil on canvas. Louvre Museum

Today the name Frédéric François Chopin is synonymous with the candlelit salons of 19th-century Paris. But the heart and soul of the pianist-composer's music were, in fact, inspired by the artistic traditions of Poland, where he was born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin in 1810.

Christened "the second Mozart" as a child, Chopin was immersed in Warsaw's artistic world, where he received a first-rate musical education — first from his mother, a piano teacher, then later at the Warsaw Lyceum — and gave his first public concerts at the age of seven. As his career began to take off in his teenage years, two things set Chopin apart from other pianists trying to make a name for themselves on the concert stage. 

First was his performance style: Unlike most pianists of the day, who wrote and performed supersized, muscular music teeming with thunderous chords and rapid-fire runs that displayed the full extent of their virtuosity, Chopin offered listeners intimate moments of pianistic poetry. His works serve as brief meditations, sounds born of mysticism that beckon you into their orbit. The French composer Hector Berlioz marveled at Chopin's singular style, describing it as:

"... piano in the extreme, the hammers merely brushing the strings, so much so that one is tempted to go close to the instrument and put one's ear to it as if to a concert of sylphs or elves."

The second way Chopin stood apart from his colleagues was his extensive knowledge of Polish folk music, which had begun to captivate audiences in major musical capitals across Europe. Alongside the masterworks of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, Chopin's summers spent in the countryside introduced him to the folk dances of his native land, which ultimately formed the foundation for many of his compositions. 

During his concert debut in Vienna at age 19 — Chopin's first performances outside Poland — audiences were astounded as much by the pianist's emotive, featherlight touch as the treasure trove of Polish dance tunes he improvised on stage. Even the pair of concertos he had written for solo piano and orchestra, composed as calling cards for his first European tour in 1830, featured a number of these rollicking dances.

But there was another reason Chopin threaded folk traditions into his work: He used these cherished musical forms to communicate the strength and vitality of Polish culture at a time of oppression and white-hot political upheaval for his homeland.

In 1829, nearly 15 years after Imperial Russia began its rule over the Kingdom of Poland, Tsar Nicholas I crowned himself king and minimized the role of the country's semi-autonomous government. Festering resentment toward Russia and the tsar erupted in the Warsaw Uprising of November 1830, when students in Poland's military academy rebelled against the Russian authorities, launching a year of brutal conflict. Although the Polish cadets were joined by sympathetic soldiers from Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, the Russian army overwhelmed the rebel forces and solidified the tsar's ruling status. 

Just weeks into his European tour when the uprising began, Chopin's first inclination was to return home and enlist in the army. However, a friend who accompanied the composer during his travels convinced Chopin that he would better serve the revolution not as a soldier on the front lines, but as a cultural ambassador who could advocate for Polish independence throughout Europe.

The weaponry Chopin was to take up in Poland's resistance against Russia wasn't a rifle, but music — a contribution that received praise in the musical press from composer-pianist Robert Schumann, who wrote:

"If the mighty autocratic monarch in the north could know that in Chopin lurks a dangerous enemy, he would place a ban on music. Chopin's works are cannons buried under flowers!"

Chopin heeded his friend's advice and continued with his concert tour. In 1831, after a stint in Vienna that left him isolated and depressed, Chopin settled in Paris, where he joined a growing number of Polish expatriates and quickly became a fixture in the city's fashionable music salons. Within a year, Chopin's meteoric rise as both teacher and composer afforded him enough income that he was able to retire from the concert stage at just 22 years old.

Among the first works Chopin composed in Paris was a set of mazurkas, a dance that originated with the Mazovian people in northeastern Poland. Although a longstanding folk tradition, the mazurka of the 19th century was actually a blending of three different styles: the lively oberek; the emotionally volatile kujawiak; and the melancholy mazur — a dance suffused with the sentiment of zal, a captivating word Poles use to portray a deep nostalgia verging on despair.

An intense longing to return to his life and loved ones in Warsaw certainly consumed Chopin's mind during his first months in Paris. He shared with family his feelings of alienation as a refugee among the waltzing hordes who frequented the ballrooms of Vienna and Paris, writing:

"I don't even know how to dance a waltz properly ... my piano hears only mazurs."

That sentiment — the bittersweet pull of melancholy and nostalgia — was exactly what I heard in the A Minor Mazurka I learned in college. Each piece of its poetic puzzle speaks of an unbridled sadness: The expressive mazur melody that appears throughout the work, so steeped in sentimentality as the pianist's fingers fly across the keys in balletic flourishes. The jolt of turbulent energy the kujawiak unleashes, fueling the fire of longing. And in a breathtaking moment of minor transforming to major, an oberek tune emerges to lure us into blissful reverie, calling to mind the echoes of a far-away barrel organ floating through a sun-drenched meadow.

Then there's that enigmatic fragment of a phrase that bookends the mazurka, the strangeness of its untethered harmonies illuminated only by the expression markings Chopin adds to the score. In the first appearance, he indicates the phrase should be played sotto voce — "under the breath" — as if delivering a whispered confession. And when this bluesy figure returns at the end, already feeling like a distant memory, Chopin affixes a new, heartbreaking description: perdendosi — "dying away." 

Chopin's dreams of returning to Poland never became reality, and he remained a refugee until his death at the age of 39. But in the 17 years he spent in Paris, he never lost touch with his roots. He served as a beacon of his country's culture, performing benefit concerts to raise funds for Polish orphans and helping fellow expatriates secure safe lodging in town. And although he maintained a high standard for the students he accepted into his private studio, Chopin gave immediate priority to any Polish citizen who wished to study with him.

He also continued to compose more of his beloved mazurkas. Taken together, these lyric poems of love, loss, and memory form a musical diary that guides us through 15 years of the artist's life, reaching beyond the veil of space and time to give each listener direct access to what Chopin called his "heart's sanctuary."

Nearly a quarter century after I first sat at the piano to learn the Mazurka in A Minor, I've come to regard this music not only as a portal to a very special chamber in that sanctuary, but also a divine summoning — a slow dance of defiance, suffused with zal, through which Chopin could return to the homeland he loved, to the open arms of those who loved him in return.

Polish students paying tribute to Chopin at the composer's tomb at the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, 1949. Photo: Roger Viollet / Getty Images

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Take a listen …

Eric Lu, piano

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What was your experience listening to Chopin's melancholy dance? Did this mysterious mazurka return you to a place you long to go? I'd love to know! Be sure to leave a comment here or reply to this email. 

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