Chopin Waltz in A Minor

Thank you, Don. I will mark the KK IVb, #1 notation you provided on my printout of the music.

Do you know the mechanics of how Chopin's 'posthumous' pieces came to be?

Did someone come upon a collection of music on which he'd been working and simply reproduce it? Could this Waltz in A minor be a less refined version of what he ultimately envisioned?

It is very nice and seems quite manageable for someone of my skills (advanced

There's around a dozen unpublished pieces that were discovered after Chopin's death. Some of them have only come to light comparatively recently and are available inexpensively in published collections. A few seem rather sketchy and probably would have been more fleshed out and refined if they ever got to be published. One of my favourites is the Nocturne in C# m 'Lento con gran expressione', Br.49 .

There are reports though that some works were refined to become more genteel for publication.

The Waltz in Amin (as noted in the http://www.classicalmidiconnection.com/cmc/chopin.html link sent before) is numbered as Br.150 in the M.J.E. Brown index of Chopin's works.

Most of the posthumous works of Chopin were published by his student and friend Julius Fontana. Actually Chopin explicitly asked Fontana, on his deathbed, to see that his unpublished manuscripts were burned! It is fortunate for us that M. Fontana chose not to honor these wishes because, in my opinion, these are some of his most beautiful works. For this reason I think it is reasonable to assume that Chopin did not consider them 'refined'. Most of them were minor pieces like waltzes or mazurkas, but other masterpieces like the Fantasie-Impromptu were among them.

All of the Fontana-published pieces have opus numbers. Those without numbers have shown up over the years and have been catalogued by Ms. Kobylanska.

Actually there is another waltz in A minor. In addition to the waltzes published during Chopin's lifetime, There are five more that were published posthumously as opuses 69 and 70. Then seven more have been discovered since. One of these seven is in A minor and is actually quite famous now. There are many recordings of it and you'd probably recognize it if you heard it.

One of the seven 'extra' waltzes (KK IVb #10) is considered by many to be a mazurka, not a waltz. Another (KK IVa #14) is often considered a couterfeit work. There is one mysterious waltz that turned up in Brittain in 1952 and has never been published. I would give anything to hear/play that one!