Tonal and Formal Aspects of Selected Mazurkas of Chopin: A Schenkerian View.

Abstract

No genre was more central to Chopin’s music than his mazurkas, of which he wrote fifty-eight spanning his compositional career from 1826 to 1849. Owing to their modest scale and apparent simplicity, the mazurkas tend to be underestimated by music scholars and performers, often regarded as music that is less serious than Chopin’s works of a more ambitious scope. The dissertation argues that these mazurkas, with their unique synthesis of melodic, harmonic and rhythmic elements, as well as tonal complexities and contrapuntal intricacies, represent the heart of Chopin’s oeuvre, distilling the very best of Chopin’s style.

Following an opening chapter that provides an overview of Chopin’s relationship to folk and Polish national music, my discussion of the mazurkas is organized into six chapters, grouped into two main parts of three chapters each: Part One (Chapters 2 to 4) concerns tonal features of motivic organization, chromaticism, and the quality of incompleteness and tonal ambiguity; Part Two (Chapters 5 to 7) focuses on the formal domains, discussing the functions of the introductions, reprises and codas, and explaining Chopin’s subtle and ingenious integration of these formal sections.

I have taken a Schenkerian approach, an analytical method well suited to show the interaction among tonal and formal domains in Chopin’s music. Included are analyses of seventeen mazurkas (Opp. 6/2; 6/3; 7/3; 7/5; 24/2; 30/2; 30/4; 33/3; 33/4; 41/1; 41/4; 50/1; 50/3; 56/1; 56/3; 59/1; and 68/4), most of which are not extensively discussed in the Schenkerian literature; they were chosen for the ways they exemplify Chopin’s originality in his tonal and formal compositional techniques. Analyses of other Chopin mazurkas by Schenkerians are nonetheless considered, often as further illustrations of compositional techniques and the theoretical questions they raise.

Through my emphasis on the need for careful analysis of the individual characteristics of each mazurka as well as the common characteristics shared by the mazurkas, I hope this thesis will provide a comprehensive resource for the study of these outstanding works of the piano repertoire.