Chopin was 19 years old when he traveled for the first time to Vienna, in August 1829, to give his first recital as a concert pianist abroad. The success was apotheosis, although some critics resented the interpreter's low volume and weak sonority, more appropriate for salons than for a concert hall. A year later, after leaving Warsaw for good on a trip to Paris, he spent eight months in the capital of the Austrian Empire, with opposite results. Music impresarios and other artists received him with indifference. During that extended stay, he gave only two recitals. With his delicate touch, it was not easy to conquer the boisterous Viennese public, an audience that, according to him: "...only wants to listen to the waltzes of Lanner and Strauss".
Chopin, of course, was completely alien to the Viennese waltzes. Sometime later, already installed in Paris, he commented to a friend: "I have not acquired anything of that which is particularly Viennese, so I am still unable to play waltzes". Perhaps precisely for this reason, Chopin would reinvent the form in his own particular terms, with an exquisite production of short pieces with 3/4 meter, deeply personal.
According to scholars, his production of waltzes basically follows two lines: on the one hand, there are the grandiose, brilliant, and ornamental, almost elaborated for the ballroom; and on the other, there are the miniatures, abstract, charming, at the antipodes of the fashionable Viennese waltz of the time.
The three waltzes of Opus 34
Composed between the years 1834 and 1838, they were published by the editor with the title of Three Brilliant Waltzes, although the denomination is only adequate for the first of them, the waltz Opus 34 No 1, in A flat, the only grandiose and brilliant, thus placing it in the first category established by the scholars, and the two remaining ones, in the second (and it could not be otherwise if the waltz Op 34 No 3 is popularly known as "the Waltz for a Kitten").
The year 1838 is the year of Chopin's departure to Majorca, the ill-fated trip he will make with George Sand and her children, in October of that year. Before setting out on the voyage, Chopin sent for publication the four mazurkas of Opus 33 and the three waltzes of Opus 34. By that stage of his life, at the age of 28, Chopin had written, but not published, eight of his fourteen waltzes.
Waltz Opus 34 No 2
Written in A minor, it was Chopin's favorite, as well as others (the movie The Pianist incorporated it into its soundtrack). Although it bears the No. 2, it was the first to be written.
It is a slow, somewhat sad, melancholy waltz. A "waltz for the souls", as Robert Schumann once remarked of Chopin's waltzes. Never better said, precisely, of this waltz.
Full of languor and longing, at minute 0:56 the change to major mode gives way to a melody of surprising beauty that will be repeated in minor mode a few bars later. Everything resumes again, to give way to a new section, at 4:10. At the end, the opening bars will return, this time to serve as a stifled conclusion.
The performance is by the superb Ukrainian pianist Valentina Lisitsa.
