Polka in B♭ major, Op. 39 No. 10

Tchaikovsky composed the Children's Album in a single week in May 1878, writing 24 piano pieces for his nephew Vladimir Davydov, then aged eight. The Polka — No. 10 — is the collection's most extrovert dance, cast in B♭ major with a two-voice texture in the middle section that reveals more harmonic craft than its surface lightness suggests.

The Children's Album

Op. 39 was modelled on Schumann's Kinderszenen, though Tchaikovsky's collection is aimed at young performers rather than nostalgic adults. Each of the 24 pieces is a compressed emotional portrait — pedagogically accessible, artistically genuine. Tchaikovsky wrote the entire set in a single creative burst at Kamenka, the country estate of his sister Alexandra, completing it alongside the Violin Concerto. The Polka sits near the centre of the collection, between a Mazurka and a Russian Song.

The polka as form

The polka originated in Bohemia in the 1840s and swept across Europe as a ballroom dance. Its defining features are 2/4 metre, a lively tempo, and a characteristic strong–light rhythmic lilt. Tchaikovsky's setting is faithful to the idiom: the LH alternates bass note and chord in the two-unit-per-bar polka pattern, the RH carries a bright, staccato-inflected melody, and the overall character is one of playful forward momentum. What distinguishes this setting is the middle section — a fourteen-bar dominant prolongation built from tritone dyads and a registral bass descent — which gives the piece a harmonic seriousness well beyond its apparent simplicity.

"Thirty bars, one Perfect Authentic Cadence — everything before it is preparation."

Key and character

B♭ major carries two flats and sits in what pianists often describe as a bright, open register. The opening gesture — D5 rising to F5, touching E♭5 and returning — outlines scale degrees 3, 5, 4, 3 of B♭ major, immediately establishing both the key and the polka's dance energy. The brief shadow of vi (G minor) in mm. 3 and 7 adds a momentary wistfulness to each phrase before the cadential drive resumes. The key is confirmed only once with a Perfect Authentic Cadence — the final bar — making that single moment of resolution the structural and expressive goal of the entire piece.

Formal structure

Three key structural events

The half cadence at m. 4 (and m. 8). Section A ends on V every time. The cadential six-four at m. 4 (V⁶₄ → V) and the dramatic three-chord intensification at m. 8 (vii°7/V → V7/V → V) both drive into the dominant without resolving. The repeat of A doubles the effect: eight bars of propulsive polka with nothing yet settled.

The dominant prolongation of Section B. From m. 9 to m. 22, the harmony does not move — it prolongs V (F major) across fourteen bars. The tritone dyads (F+B, E+B♭) and the chromatic bass oscillations are inflections within this single dominant, not harmonic departures from it. The section ends at mm. 21–22 with an extended forte V⁷ — still on the dominant, still without tonic resolution.

The only PAC — mm. 29–30. The entire piece moves toward this single moment: soprano B♭4 (scale degree 1) over bass B♭2, piano, confirming B♭ major for the first and only time with a Perfect Authentic Cadence. It is immediately preceded by the A′ half cadence at m. 29 (IV→V), making the final two bars a compressed HC→PAC pair. The quiet landing after so much harmonic suspension is the expressive point of the whole design.

For the student

The Polka asks for two distinct technical skills: a light, bouncy LH polka pattern in Section A (bass note → chord, two units per bar, even and unhurried), and a two-voice sustained texture in Section B where the LH carries a chromatic oscillating figure while the RH drops to off-beat dyads. The hardest bar to navigate is the transition at m. 9 — the A→B seam — where character, texture, dynamic, and register all change at once. Practise that join explicitly: end of A into beginning of B, ten repetitions, until the shift is automatic. The interpretive key is understanding why Section B is unsettled: not because it is loud, but because it has left the tonic and not found its way back. The A′ return at m. 23 is the homecoming the whole middle section was building toward.