The Wiener Urtext edition has been initiated in recent years and is continuing.
The Polish National edition (Warsaw, 1967) edited by Jan Ekier is accompanied by
detailed commentaries and is based on a single, identified best source rather than several
sources. Variants are set out in the commentary leaving the performer to make the choice
of alternatives.
The complexity of the manuscript tradition means that there can be no edition of Chopin
that will be entirely satisfactory.
Etudes
Although sets of exercises for the piano had been common from the end of the eighteenth
century, Chopin not only presented an entirely new set of technical challenges but also a
set of études that has become a regular part of the concert repertoire. Chopin’s two sets
of twelve études were the first to combine musical substance and technical challenge
whereas Carl Czerny’s studies are emotionally meaningless. Composers after Chopin,
such as Debussy and Rachmaninoff, wrote études that were influenced by those of
Chopin.
Unlike previous technical studies which sought to combine an independence of finger
action driven from the wrist, Chopin’s require the entire playing mechanism from the
shoulder downwards
All except three of the études are monothematic. The opus 10 études, with the exception
of nos. 7 and 8, are grouped into relative key pairs, so that, for example, no. 1 is in C
major and no 2 is in its relative minor.
The opus 10 études were published in 1833, although some had been written as early as
1829 when Chopin was in his teens. In Paris Chopin met fellow virtuoso pianist and
composer Franz Liszt to whom he dedicated the entire opus 10 set. Chopin’s opus 25
etudes were published in 1837 and were dedicated to the Countess Marie d’Agoult who
had been Liszt’s long-term partner and mother of their three children.
Chopin later wrote his ‘Trois Nouvelles Etudes’ as a contribution to the ‘Méthode des
Méthodes de Piano’, a piano instruction book by Ignaz Moscheles and François-Joseph
Fétis. They were written in response, perhaps, to requests for Chopin to write some
études of less technical technical difficulty. They are of no less quality musically.
Pedalling
Chopin was the first composer to mark the pedal in detail throughout his piano
compositions. Liszt remarked on this at a masterclass without making any further
comment on Chopin’s markings although he did remark on another occasion that
Chopin’s pedal markings in his Barcarolle did seem very detailed. Anton Rubinstein,
however, once expressed the view that the pedal markings in the editions of Chopin’s