Chopin builds this waltz from two ideas, one episode and a great deal of exact repetition. It is a good piece to hear as an argument about endings.
There are three kinds of music here: a waltz tune in the unhurried tempo of the opening, a faster refrain marked più mosso, and a single slower episode, più lento, in a new key. They appear in the order tune, refrain, episode, refrain, tune, refrain, which is why the piece is often described as rondo-like: a returning idea with a contrasting passage at its centre. Everything is written out in full. There are no repeat signs and no da capo, so what is on the page is exactly what is played.
What is unusual is how little changes when things come back. The refrain returns almost note for note, and the tune's second appearance differs from its first by a single added note. Chopin is not developing this material. He is placing it, and the placing does the work: the refrain is given the endings, the tune is denied them, and the episode is left with neither.
The waltz never really leaves C♯ minor. The one change of key signature, from four sharps to five flats, lands in the episode, which is in D♭ major, C♯ major spelled another way. The great contrast of the piece is therefore one of mode, minor to major, and not of tonal centre. Neither boundary is prepared. The move into D♭ comes straight after a firm close, and the way back is a single semitone step in one unaccompanied line.
Elsewhere Chopin barely travels. Brief visits to neighbouring chords are resolved at once, and the music never settles anywhere else for more than a couple of bars. The colour comes from small things: chords that lean toward a neighbour and resolve immediately, a darker chord on the flattened second degree (the Neapolitan) that turns out to be the doorway to the refrain's arrivals, and, in the episode, a habit of raising one inner note on the third beat of every other bar.
The waltz tune is the piece's calling card and its most restless music. It begins in the middle of a gesture: the first note is tied over from the upbeat, so the opening bar has no fresh attack. Its first phrase reaches home but leaves the melody stopped short of the home note, an imperfect close. Its answering phrase rises to the highest point the tune ever reaches, loses its harmony, then its accompaniment, and thins to a single unharmonised line that simply stops. The tune then starts again, re-registered, as if the last few bars had not happened.
Later the tune tries again and does no better. One close brings a bright major third on the tonic, which is at once turned into a chord pointing somewhere else. The last comes nearest of all: melody and bass both arrive home, but the dominant is approached in an inverted position, and that keeps it from counting as perfect. When the tune returns, a single added note moves even this nearest miss one step further off. Whatever else the waltz tune does, it never gets a perfect cadence of its own.
Where the tune hesitates, the refrain runs. The waltz pattern underneath does not change, but the melody becomes a continuous line of even movement that falls by sequence from a high starting point and then breaks the pattern. The first time round, it closes with an imperfect cadence. The second time it does something else: the line turns and climbs without a break through the upper register to the very top of the piano. The arrival there is the piece's highest note and its first perfect cadence, and the two are the same event.
Every perfect cadence in the waltz is made this way, and every one belongs to the refrain. The Neapolitan colour mentioned earlier is what leads into each of them, so what might pass for a passing touch of colour is in fact the approach to the cadence. The refrain also plays its phrases twice each time it appears, first with detailed dynamic shading and then with almost none, so the same music is heard once carefully articulated and once allowed to run. Its last appearance copies its first exactly, down to the markings, until the final bar: there the bass is held longer, so the tonic chord sounds complete for the only time in the piece, and the third beat is left empty. The waltz ends on the second beat of a bar it does not finish.
The D♭ section is the one real change of scene. It is slower and sparer: long melodic notes, an accompaniment that sounds only on alternate downbeats for a time, and harmony that changes about once in two bars. Unlike every other part of the piece, it never repeats itself. What holds it together is the bass, which climbs by step through the first half and gathers speed as it goes. Its one cadence falls midway and closes with the melody on the third of the chord, not the home note. The second half says the same thing again with more notes and no new ideas.
Then it simply stops being said. The harmony that once led to a dominant now leads nowhere, the left hand drops out, and the section ends as a single unaccompanied line falling by step and settling a semitone below the note on which the refrain begins. One small step upward puts the piece back in C♯ minor. This is the same device that ended the tune's second phrase, used over several bars instead of one, and here it does the work of a bridge rather than a full stop.
| Section | Bars | Key area | Character |
|---|---|---|---|
| Waltz theme | 0–32 | C♯ minor | Hesitant tune, tempo giusto. Imperfect closes only; one phrase dissolves into a single line. |
| Refrain | 33–64 | C♯ minor | Più mosso. Running line of even movement, played twice; the first perfect cadence arrives here. |
| Episode | 65–96 | D♭ major | Più lento. Slow and sparse, a climbing bass; ends without a cadence. |
| Refrain | 97–128 | C♯ minor | Almost literal return; first note an octave lower. |
| Waltz theme, return | 129–160 | C♯ minor | Tempo I. One added note; still no perfect close. |
| Refrain | 161–192 | C♯ minor | Copy of the first refrain; the final bar is left unfinished. |
Bar 0 is the opening upbeat; bar numbers follow the study guide.
A cadence is where a phrase comes to rest. This map shows what kind of rest each section offers, and its character, but not where each one falls.
Imperfect closes throughout. Some stop short of the home note in the melody. One sounds almost perfect and is disqualified only by the way the bass approaches it. Between them, two phrases end with no cadence at all.
Two kinds of close, in alternation. Imperfect closes end each falling phrase, approached through an inverted dominant. Perfect closes crown each ascent, and are always the same: a decisive arrival at the top of the keyboard.
One imperfect cadence, in D♭ major, midway through the section, with the melody on the third of the chord. Nothing else.
The tune's second phrase and the whole of the episode end in a single unaccompanied line instead of a cadence. The last bar of the waltz is a cadence of an unusual kind: the tonic chord sounds complete on the second beat, and the third beat is silent.
Every cadence in the waltz, with its exact location, approach and scale degrees, is set out in the study guide's appendix of confirmed cadence locations.
See the Preview page for what the guide contains.
Harmony moves at a nearly constant pace throughout, and what changes from section to section is the activity above it. The tune moves between long notes and quick ornament, the refrain is a steady stream, and the episode halves the surface speed. The refrain keeps three voices going and thins only at one point in each ascent, where the left hand drops out and the line climbs alone.
Register is rationed. The highest note in the piece is kept for the perfect cadences, and the lowest for a fixed bar in each refrain phrase, so the extremes are never scattered at random. The tune itself stays comparatively close to the middle of the keyboard, and the episode never rises above a modest ceiling of its own.
The dynamics are just as restrained. A handful of absolute levels are written, none of them louder than piano, and the rest are hairpins. Even the ascents to the top of the keyboard are marked to diminish. The waltz has a summit but no fortissimo: what marks it out is where it sits, not how loudly it is played.
Analysis and study materials published as they appear.