Bolero (Chopin)
The Bolero, Op. 19, was written by Frédéric Chopin in 1833 and published the following year. It is one of his lesser-known piano pieces, although it has been recorded numerous times.
The overall key of the Bolero is difficult to establish. The work opens with three unison octaves in G fortissimo, then a lengthy Introduction in C major, moving to A minor for the Bolero proper. It is interrupted by sections in A major, A-flat major and B-flat minor before returning to A minor. It ends triumphantly in A major.
The work was dedicated to the Scottish-born but half-French Mademoiselle la Comtesse Émilie de Flahaut,[1] then aged only 14, but later to become Countess of Shelburne.
The apparent inspiration for the Bolero was Chopin's friendship with the French soprano Pauline Viardot, whose father, the famed Spanish tenor Manuel Garcia, had introduced boleros to Paris by the time of Chopin's arrival there.[2] His biographer Frederick Niecks speculated that it was inspired by the Bolero in Daniel Auber's La muette de Portici (1828).[3]
Despite the ostensibly Spanish flavour of the piece, it has been described as a polonaise in disguise, or a bolero à la polonaise,[3] as its rhythms are more redolent of the national dance of Chopin's homeland than anything Spanish. It was written five years before Chopin first visited Spain (1838).
References
 |
|
| ||||||||