How Do You Authenticate a Long-Lost Chopin Waltz?

Jeffrey Kallberg was partway through a 10-day research trip in Europe last summer when he received an intriguing inquiry from the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City: Could he help them authenticate what they believed was a never-before-seen Chopin waltz?

“It’s my business to know what Chopin manuscripts are out there,” says Kallberg, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Music History, who has studied the composer’s works for five decades. “There are some in private collections that I haven’t seen, but for the most part, a handful keep popping up. I’m not accustomed to looking at a photo of one and not having a clue, so that was pretty exciting.”

The trouble was, being thousands of miles from his own piano, Kallberg had nowhere to play the piece.

“I had to listen to it in my mind, read the music, look at it. We’re trained to do that, but it’s not the same as playing it,” he says. “You want to feel it in your fingers.”

He considered trying it out on the Strasbourg train station’s public piano but opted to instead wait until he was home in Philadelphia. “When I sat down and played it,” says Kallberg, whose tenure as Interim Dean of Penn Arts & Sciences ended in May, “it confirmed in my mind, at least, what I thought was the case: Here was a piece by Chopin that we had not known of before.” 

It took weeks of detailed probing from Kallberg and Robinson McClellan, the associate curator of music at the Morgan, to verify what they thought they had. And, even still, doubters wondered why the 24-measure waltz was much shorter than others Chopin usually wrote, why it started with a loud dissonance when Chopin generally opted for quieter sounds, why the physical paper the manuscript appeared on was so small.

Then, this spring, additional details came to light. Another manuscript confirmed as Chopin’s reemerged at auction for the first time since the mid-1950s. At Kallberg’s request, the dimensions of the staves—the lines where the notes sit—were measured, and they were an exact match to the Morgan waltz. What’s more, on the back of that same song was a long-hidden note that referenced the waltz itself.

“Chopin never writes about his music this way,” Kallberg says. “It’s like a magical ending to a Baroque play.”

Finally, prompted by an inquisitive chemist named Philip Harrison who’d seen a recent interview he’d done, Kallberg reexamined a letter Chopin wrote to his family in December 1830. In language similar to what appeared on the back of the song, the letter explicitly described a waltz Chopin had composed but hadn’t yet shared. “It’s almost certainly the case,” Kallberg says, “that Chopin wrote both on the same paper, which he’d purchased in Vienna. They date from around the same time. They were both folded vertically, which suggests being put into an envelope and mailed, and the recipients were members of Chopin’s family. This ties up many of our loose ends.” 

Objective Evidence

The progression to get here, of course, was an evolution. Kallberg’s research generally focuses on what he describes as “compositional process,” which means trying to understand how Chopin’s musical style evolved through the 230 or so known pieces he created in his lifetime. The work is painstaking. It entails investigating both musical changes, like the melody and rhythms, and physical ones, like handwriting and paper size. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what Chopin’s manuscripts look like and what they mean,” Kallberg says. 

When he received the request from the Morgan Library, he knew he needed to see the original copy of the waltz firsthand. He arranged a trip to New York, hoping to sort out objective evidence like ink, handwriting, and aspects of the paper size including its quality, thickness, material construction, and presence or absence of watermarks.

Kallberg says seeing the manuscript in person was a relief. When he first viewed the image via computer, it filled his entire laptop screen, distorting the image. In actuality, it’s quite small, 4 x 5 inches, or a little larger than an index card, and when seen in its original dimensions, revealed Chopin’s musical handwriting as it looks in all of his other authenticated manuscripts.

Next Kallberg looked for watermarks. “Chopin lived at a time that was transitioning from handmade paper with watermarks to handmade paper without watermarks to machine-made paper with watermarks to machine-made paper without watermarks,” he says. “This is clearly the second kind, handmade without watermarks, so that tells us it was early in his career.”

Collaborators at the Morgan tested the paper and ink. The former was machine-made wove paper, the latter a type called iron gall ink developed in the 4th century and remaining popular through Chopin’s time. “That all checked out,” Kallberg says.

The final physical element was the handwriting of two words—Valse or “Waltz” in the top-left corner, and “Chopin” at top center—as well any other visible penmanship. Everything on the page, including symbols like the bass clef, matched Chopin’s hand except for one: his name. “That’s not unusual,” Kallberg explains. “People who own Chopin manuscripts would often scribble his name on it if he hadn’t.”

All the physical signs pointed to a newly discovered Chopin waltz. So, they next turned to the musical evidence. 

Stylistic Fingerprints

In solving this type of puzzle, the physical evidence is, objectively, easier to parse. Was the ink appropriate to the time period? Does the handwriting match that of the study subject? They’re tangible, testable aspects that can generate (relatively) concrete answers. Understanding the musical evidence—the “stylistic fingerprints,” as Kallberg calls them—can be much more difficult.

In this case, this process started with the composition length—24 measures, which Chopin asks the musician to repeat once, for a total of 48 measures. It takes just over one minute to play. “Chopin loved short pieces. It’s kind of what he’s known for. He wrote a prelude that was just nine measures long,” Kallberg says. 

Then there was the piece’s progression. “Two thirds of this waltz do what we think a Chopin waltz should do, but one third doesn’t, and that’s the way it begins,” Kallberg says. “The first third is very odd.”

Specifically, at measure seven, Chopin asks for triple forte, denoted with three lowercase “fs” and indicating maximum volume, a stark contrast to the quieter sounds he generally used. What follows the loud dissonance is melancholy and subtle—an evolution leading to the question arguably hardest to answer: Why might Chopin have written this piece and for whom? 

Like most needles in haystacks, all we found was hay. I did find references to this pianist, but nothing to help me. This is how research works. Most of the time is going to be spent not finding anything. 

Some suggest the triple forte and the unusual sound at measure seven indicate it was an inside joke for the pianist who would play it. Other theories include the idea that he was copying someone else’s music or using it to teach composition. Kallberg initially believed the most likely explanation, given Chopin’s social circles, was that the composer created the manuscript as a gift. The early years of Chopin’s music making aligned with a moment when autograph albums were in vogue. People would glue or slip prized possessions into these scrapbooks, which fit small papers generally around the size of the waltz in question.

But this spring, evidence emerged to suggest that the waltz was probably written for Chopin’s sister Ludwika. To verify this, Kallberg focused on one line from a December 1830 letter from Vienna that Chopin penned to his family: “I wanted to send you a waltz I’ve composed but it’s already late; you will still get it.” It was eerily similar to recently discovered language on the back of a known Chopin song manuscript (more on that later) and explains why the waltz itself wasn’t signed and dated, “as was customarily the case for presentation manuscripts,” Kallberg says. “Signing and dating was something you did for highborn acquaintances or compositional colleagues, but not for your own family.”

Provenance

Until the turn of events revealing Chopin’s sister as the waltz’s likely recipient, it wasn’t clear that Kallberg and McClellan might soon—or ever—verify that particular detail. That’s because to fully authenticate a musical manuscript, it’s necessary to understand its provenance, or in this case, who took ownership of the sheet music after it left Chopin’s hands, and how it ended up in the Morgan Library almost 100 years later. It’s not as simple as tracing the historical record.

Go back far enough and the available evidence is scant. It is known that A. Sherrill Whiton Jr., a former director of the New York School of Interior Design, had the manuscript at some point, perhaps acquired from the famous Walter R. Benjamin Autographs. Kallberg had scoured copies of the shop’s catalogs for more information, but found only a letter Chopin wrote to his doctor in the last year of his life, no waltz.

Kallberg had also been following two leads in a Polish catalog of Chopin’s manuscripts, one a description of Chopin juvenilia on display in St. Petersburg in 1911, another an anecdote about a review in the Polish press of a concert that might have featured this waltz. “Like most needles in haystacks, all we found was hay,” he says. “I did find references to the pianist who played the concert, but nothing to help me.” 

Image

Then, in March, McClellan from the Morgan Library emailed Kallberg about an upcoming auction at Berlin’s J. A. Stargardt auction house. A Chopin song manuscript would be listed, and it was the same size as the waltz they’d been studying. At Kallberg’s request, the auction house measured the dimensions of the staves, the lines that hold the musical notes. At first, it didn’t match the waltz, but Kallberg realized the measurements had been taken from an incorrect starting point. The second attempt, this one from the correct spot, was an exact match, indicating both pieces were Chopin’s and from the same time period.

“That alone would’ve made my day,” Kallberg says. But then they turned the paper over.

On the back, which had been hidden for nearly 70 years, the researchers discovered a note Chopin had written to someone close to him—a friend or family member, perhaps. The composer stated his regret at not being able to finish the second page of the song that day, and pledged to send it along soon, accompanied by a waltz he had also promised. “He literally refers to the Morgan Waltz,” Kallberg says. “This almost never happens.”

This revelation sealed it for Kallberg. The language similarity to the December 1830 letter, plus the paper and folds of the manuscripts, confirmed the waltz was meant for Ludwika, the most musical of Chopin’s family members and who had, herself, made copies of the song manuscript. 

Looking Ahead

Announcing the discovery of an unknown manuscript by a famous composer is sure to attract doubters. Before now, the last significant piece of Chopin’s showed up in the 1930s, so Kallberg understood people hesitating to believe a new one had been found. But, with the latest evidence, Kallberg is more than sure the waltz is Chopin.

“Now that we know this, we’re free to think deeply about what it says about Chopin’s approach to the genre. It expands our ideas and lets us confidently say this is a kind of waltz that Chopin wrote that we hadn’t known before. And it gives us food for thought about Chopin’s style and his approach to gift giving and interacting in society.”

Of course, at least one question remains: What explains the music’s odd progression from crashing dissonance to melancholic melody? Even without knowing that, though, Kallberg seems genuinely surprised and pleased at how much has been learned in such a short time.

Since that original email from the Morgan team, Kallberg has played the waltz many times, including at Penn on a donated Érard piano—one of two major piano makers in Paris at the time Chopin lived there. Érards have a lighter, more metallic sound. The keys are slightly narrower, and the pedals work a little differently, Kallberg explains.

There’s something extraordinary about playing a newly discovered Chopin piece on the type of piano he, himself, may have played it on, Kallberg adds. The piece likely sounds different than on a modern piano. One can almost imagine Chopin tinkering on the keys, resulting in a new waltz, just 24 measures long—mere seconds of music that expand what the world knows about one of the most famous composers of all time.