Sources and editions.

During his final years Chopin reached a new plateau of creative achievement, marked by an eloquent simplicity which severely excludes the extraneous and the gratuitously ornamental. Even his late songs, Nie ma czego trzeba (‘There is no Need’) and Melodya (‘Melody’), come within sight of a lied aesthetic, unlike those of his earlier years, which remain closer to late 18th-century popular traditions. A new-found simplicity is also discernible in the mazurkas composed during these final years, the three of op.63 (the last published during his lifetime), the second and fourth of the posthumously published op.67, and the sketched mazurka which was reconstructed and published as op.68 no.4 (this latter, for many years considered Chopin's last work, was almost certainly drafted in 1846 and abandoned in favour of op.63 no.2). The late waltzes, a single piece of relatively traditional cast (the A minor, CT 224), and a complete set, op.64, composed in 1847, continue the theme of inspired simplicity, with op.64 in particular drawing the familiar gestures of the earlier waltzes into a miniature compendium of all the grace, elegance and spontaneity we associate with the Chopin waltz. With such pieces Chopin redefined the category ‘salon music’.

Like the waltzes, the late nocturnes consist of a posthumously published piece (the C minor, CT 128) and a set, the Two Nocturnes op.62. These latter, composed in 1846, represent the pinnacle of Chopin's achievement in the genre. In the B major he finds once more an inspired simplicity of utterance, where a melody of exquisite restraint conceals subtleties of phrase structure (a kind of musical prose, with metrical dislocations of the melodic repetitions) and of counterpoint (an accompaniment whose motivic fragments interact delicately with the principal melodic layer). Throughout the opening and middle sections, Chopin exercises the greatest possible restraint in the ornamentation of his basic material, so that the reprise, presented in trilled notes which open out into magnificent fioriture, can make its effect – truly one of the supreme achievements of Chopin's ornamental melody. In the E major Nocturne, he approaches a kind of unendliche Melodie, where exact repetition is kept to a minimum, in favour of a process of discreet variation. The middle section here employs a form of differentiated counterpoint of a kind commonly found in the later music, where tension–release patterns arise as much from dissonance–consonance relationships within a contrapuntal texture as from underlying harmonic progressions. It is striking that in these very late works Chopin arrived – within the constraints of his own highly individual stylistic world – at something akin to both the ‘developing variation’ of Brahms and Schoenberg and the ‘dissonant counterpoint’ of Mahler.

Three major extended works were composed during these final years, the Barcarolle op.60, Polonaise-Fantasy op.61 and Cello Sonata op.65. All three are strikingly original, departing significantly from Chopin's own ‘tradition’ to tackle novel problems of form, genre and even (in the case of op.65) medium. This is entirely symptomatic of the renovative approach to composition he adopted in his final years, and it is perhaps not surprising that the late works caused him endless difficulties. This is shown not only by his correspondence but by the manuscript sources. What few sketches we have tend to be for the later music, including illuminating worksheets for the Berceuse, the Polonaise-Fantasy and the Cello Sonata. Chopin's more usual practice was to bypass this sketching process and to proceed directly from the piano to an engraver's manuscript (Stichvorlage). In numerous cases, however, these would have to be abandoned, and such ‘rejected public manuscripts’ often form a valuable category of source. (We learn much, for instance, from abandoned manuscripts of the C minor Polonaise op.40 no.2, the F Impromptu op.36, the fourth Ballade and the op.59 Mazurkas.) Even those fair copies which were sent to the publisher often contain evidence of several ‘layers’ of compositional process, something Saint-Saë ns pointed out long ago in a path-breaking study of the autograph of the second Ballade. If we add the presentation autographs (some of them written many years after the piece had been composed), scribal copies, often with autograph glosses, and first editions with autograph corrections, we begin to sense something of the complexity of the manuscript tradition in Chopin.

Nor are things much easier when we come to the early printed sources. Most of Chopin's music was published simultaneously in France, Germany and England. While Schlesinger in Paris characteristically worked from an autograph, the German and English publishers followed several options (autograph, scribal copy or proof sheets). This, combined with the fact that Chopin could exercise little control over the publishing process outside Paris, resulted in numerous discrepancies of text between the three first editions. Moreover the print runs were usually small, and it was common for later ‘impressions’ (tirages) to appear with the same plate numbers, but with changes to the text; in the case of the French edition, this evolution of text may, at least in some cases, have been condoned or even instigated by Chopin himself. It is hardly surprising, given the multiplicity of sources and the textual discrepancies between them, that the subsequent publication history of Chopin's music has been fraught with problems. Following the posthumous publications of 1855 and 1859 (opp.66–74, prepared by Julian Fontana for Meissonier and A.M. Schlesinger), the earliest collected editions were French, the Schonenberger, edited by Fé tis (1860), and the Richault, edited by Chopin's Norwegian pupil Tellefsen (also 1860). Both were permissive with the text by present-day standards, but for entirely different reasons. The first assumed an editorial licence, an implicit belief that the editor knows best, while the second attempted to recover a living Chopin performance tradition, even if this involved departing from the sources.

These two opposed philosophies continued to inform later 19th- and early 20th-century editions. Tending towards the former approach were the Stellovsky and Jü rgenson (later Augener) editions, as also the Litolff and Biehl. Among those which tried to maintain a living link with Chopin were the Gebethner & Wolff, Heugel and Kistner editions, the latter produced by Chopin's pupil Karol Mikuli, based on annotated French and German first editions supplemented by copious notes made from Chopin's lessons. This approach was adopted too in the second Gebethner & Wolff edition (1882), which referred to ‘variants supplied both by the author himself and as passed on by his most celebrated pupils’, and it reached its culmination in Edouard Ganche's Oxford Original Edition, based almost entirely on the seven-volume annotated collection of Jane Stirling. Of the ‘source’ or ‘Urtext’ editions produced following World War II, the most popular today is the Polish Complete Edition (‘Paderewski Edition’), based mainly on the work of Ludwik Bronarski. Yet whatever its pioneering significance, this is a deeply flawed text, selecting permissively from different sources, mistaking copies for autographs and basing orthography and phrasing not on legitimate sources but on unidentified recent editions and even personal judgments made in the light of particular harmonic theories.

The jury is still out on more recent collected editions. At the end of the 20th century, the Wiener Urtext had been at a standstill for several years; moreover the volumes which have been produced have no clear or consistent editorial policy. Closer to completion is the Henle Urtext, edited mainly by Ewald Zimmerman; and after many years of gestation the Polish National Edition, under Jan Ekier, also seems to be making some headway (albeit only by sacrificing for subsequent volumes the remarkably detailed commentary which accompanied the first volume, the ballades; Ekier has subsequently replaced this volume by a new edition of the ballades). Of these two, the Polish National is by far the more satisfactory, but despite its declared intention to present an edition of a single (‘best’) source, it continues to import from other versions, resulting in the kind of conflation (though to a lesser degree) which has marred Chopin editions in the past. It is easy to see why this has occurred; it requires a particular kind of editorial courage to relegate a preferred reading of a passage to the status of a variant. Nevertheless, a Chopin edition which did remain faithful to a single source, presenting us with a text which did actually once exist, would be as valuable as it would be unique; that is the objective of the latest in the field, Peters Edition's The Complete Chopin: a New Critical Edition.

Chopin, Fryderyk Franciszek