The Form of Chopin's Polonaise-Fantasy

William Rothstein

I

Chopin's Polonaise-Fantasy, op. 61, is a work that has challenged commentators from the beginning. Franz Liszt found the piece repellent—ironically, because nowhere does Chopin's style seem closer to Liszt's.1 Hugo Leichtentritt's pioneering analysis (1921) is not very illuminating.2 The 1960s saw a few studies of op. 61, notably a motivic analysis by Paul Hamburger.3 Since 1984 there has been a seeming explosion of interest in the work: studies have appeared by Eero Tarasti, Jeffrey Kallberg, Jim Samson, Nicholas Cook, John Rink, and Anthony Newcomb.4 Tarasti's article explores questions of semiosis and narrativity. Kallberg and Samson focus on the work's tangled compositional history. Cook examines Chopin's use of motivic transformation, adding important insights to those of Hamburger; he also offers an idiosyncratic voice-leading analysis. Rink

1 Liszt's judgments are expressed in his biography of Chopin (Frédéric Chopin; Paris, 1852). Liszt later changed his mind about op. 61 and other of Chopin's late works, as Anthony Newcomb notes in ''The Polonaise-Fantasy and Issues of Musical Narrative," in John Rink and Jim Samson, eds., Chopin Studies 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 84–101. See p. 86n.

2 Hugo Leichtentritt, Analyse der Chopin'schen Klavierwerke, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1921–22), 1:110–21.

3 Paul Hamburger, "Mazurkas, Waltzes, Polonaises," in Alan Walker, ed., Frédéric Chopin: Profiles of the Man and the Musician (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1966), 105–13. For a list of other studies (with a brief comment on each), see Jeffrey Kallberg, "Chopin's Last Style," Journal of the American Musicological Society 38 (1985): 264–315.

4 Eero Tarasti, "Pour une narratologie de Chopin," International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music15 (1984): 53–75; Kallberg, "Chopin's Last Style"; Jim Samson, The Music of Chopin (London: Routledge, 1985; reprint., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 200–211; Samson, "The Composition-Draft of the Polonaise-Fantasy: the Issue of Tonality," in Samson, ed., Chopin Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 41–58; Nicholas Cook, A Guide to Musical Analysis (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1987), 335–43; John Rink, "Schenker and Improvisation," Journal of Music Theory 37/2 (1993): 1–55; Newcomb, "Issues of Musical Narrative."

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