How Do You Authenticate a Long-Lost Chopin Waltz?

Jeffrey Kallberg was partway through a 10-day research trip in Europe 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, who has studied the composer’s works for the better part of 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 of these 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 public piano in the Strasbourg train station, but opted instead to wait until he was home in Philadelphia a few days later. “When I sat down and played it,” says Kallberg, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Music and incoming Interim Dean of Penn Arts & Sciences, “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.”

Yet, the road to authentication is long and sometimes bumpy. It took weeks of detailed probing from Kallberg and Robinson McClellan, associate curator of music at the Morgan, to verify what they thought they had. And even still, the work continues—an effort to assuage doubters who wonder why the 24-measure waltz is much shorter than others Chopin usually wrote, or why it starts with a loud dissonance when Chopin generally opted for quieter sounds, or why the physical paper the manuscript appears on is so small.

Kallberg has explanations for all of these questions and many others, but he understands those who still aren’t convinced it is the real deal. He’s also humbled by the work.

“It’s an ongoing process. It’s going to take a long time. I don’t pretend that I’m going to have this sorted out anytime soon or that Chopin scholars in general will have this sorted out,” he says. “There’s skepticism out there. There should be skepticism out there. I like hearing the skepticism because it challenges me to think about things I haven’t thought about before, and that’s what this process is really about.”

Objective Evidence

From the beginning, Kallberg’s research has focused on what he describes as “compositional process,” 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 firsthand the original copy of the waltz. He arranged a trip to New York. His initial aim was to try to sort out what he describes as the objective evidence: the paper size (its quality, thickness, and material construction, including the presence or absence of watermarks); ink; the handwriting of the words and the music on the page.

Seeing it in person was a relief. When Kallberg had first viewed the manuscript via computer, it filled up his entire laptop screen, distorting the image. In reality, it’s quite small, 4 x 5 inches, or a little larger than an index card. Though this didn’t change the “curious” fact the dimensions didn’t match those of any of Chopin’s previous waltzes, it did provide additional input about the physical nature of the manuscript.

Kallberg next 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. “We were left with thinking, ‘Well, it must be Chopin. What sense do we make of it?’” Kallberg says. That’s when they turned to the musical evidence.

Stylistic Fingerprints

In solving a puzzle such as this, the objective evidence is, objectively, easier to parse. Was the ink appropriate to the time period in question? 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 harder.

In this case, that began with the length of the composition. It’s 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. “It’s true we don’t have any other short Chopin waltzes, but we have a lot of short pieces in other genres.”

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 that leads to the question arguably hardest to answer: Why might Chopin have written this piece?

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 he did it as an inside joke for the pianist who would be playing it. Other theories include the idea that he was copying someone else’s music or using it as an aid to teach composition to a student. Kallberg believes the most likely explanation, given the societal circles Chopin found himself in, is that the composer created the manuscript to give 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.

“For a while, Chopin used small format paper to make gifts like this,” Kallberg says. “Later in life, he also loved to give manuscripts as gifts, but they were usually larger, the normal size that he would write out and send to his publishers. So that tells us something about when this waltz might’ve been written.”

Provenance

To fully authenticate the musical manuscript, the final factor was to understand its provenance. In other words, who took ownership of the sheet music after it left Chopin’s hands, and how did it end 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. However, 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 has been scouring copies of the shop’s catalogs for more information; he did find the sale of a letter Chopin wrote to his doctor in the last year of his life, but no listing for the waltz.

Kallberg is also following a lead he found in a Polish catalog of Chopin’s manuscripts in a description of Chopin juvenilia on display in St. Petersburg in 1911. “A Russian journalist wrote about the collection, saying, ‘The best thing in it was a waltz in A minor that he dedicated to Countess Łubieńska with the date 24 August 1824.’ The journalist wasn’t describing the Morgan manuscript itself, but it could be the same piece,” Kallberg explains. “In 1824, Chopin would’ve been 14. I could imagine a 14-year-old Chopin writing this.”

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The catalog also includes an anecdote claiming that a Polish pianist gave concerts in Moscow in 1916 that might have featured this 1824 waltz, and that her concerts were reviewed in the Polish press—but that’s all that’s known. With help from Penn Libraries Digital Scholarship Programmer Andy Janco and with Polish language skills that Kallberg honed in classes taught by Agnieszka Dziedzic of the Penn Language Center, Kallberg spent significant time looking through Polish newspapers for that review.

“Like most needles in haystacks, all we found was hay,” he says. “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. I’m shifting now to Russian newspapers, and I’ve been calling on my colleagues in the Department of Russian and East European Studies to give me advice on which newspapers I should be searching.”

Quieting Doubt, 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 understands people might hesitate to believe a new one has been found—it pushes him to dot as many Is and cross as many Ts as he can.

“The objective evidence adds up, the musical evidence adds up, and that’s why I’m confident that this is really Chopin,” he says.

Of course, that’s not where the story ends. “The next question to ask is, what does this tell us about Chopin and the waltz? It seems to me like it gives us food for thought about his style and his approach to gift giving and interacting in society and so much more.”

Since that email this past summer, Kallberg has played the waltz many times, including at Penn on an Érard piano donated by Yves Gaden, G’73. Érard was one of two major piano makers in Paris at the time Chopin lived there. These pianos 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. Just over a minute—mere seconds—of music that expand what the world knows about one of the most famous composers of all time.