Op. 24 No. 3, Mazurka in A♭ major

A presentation manuscript written as a souvenir for Luiza Linde, wife of Samuel Linde. Now lost, until the World War 2 it had been part of the collection of the Warsaw Music Society. Known from a reproduction in the book by Leopold Binental entitled Chopin (Warsaw, 1930). The text of the Mazurka differs in many details from  the version of A (meant for publication). The differences are as follows:

• the entire work has 30+1 written bars (2^ndvolta in bar 12), and 53 performed bars; in the final version these figures are, respectively,  43+2 and 79. The difference results from marking bars 25-35 as repetition of bars 1-11 in AI, lack of repeat of bars 13-36 and a different two-bar redaction of bars 21-24;
• in a number of places there are small rhythmic differences (e.g. bars 1, 2, 13-20) or pitch differences (e.g. bar 1);
• there are less performance markings (for instance, most accents  and   missing in bars 1-4 or  in bar 6 and 13); also, Chopin marked some fragments differently (e.g. at the beginning, at the end, in bars 6 and 10 or bar 11).

The question of mutual relations of AI and A, including their chronology, is not entirely clear. Traces of correction are seldom found in places in which the two autographs differ: the R.H. rhythm change in  bar 1 and adding a L.H. sixth in bar 12 (2. volta) suggest that A is the later version, yet corrections of the L.H. in bars 4 and 8 and in bar 12 (1. volta) would point to AI as written later. Chopin must have written both those known autographs on the basis of yet another one, a lost working autograph or sketch, and introduced certain improvements as he wrote them. This would explain the existence of two original versions in both AI and A. Also, from the stylistic point of view most differences offer no clues in this respect. The most important clue pointing to A as being the later of the two manuscripts is contained in bars 21-24 and 39-41 – the differences with relation to AI are significant here and it is difficult to presume that Chopin could later forget about such major improvements. Some other differences, e.g. the L.H. part in bar 1, the number of dotted rhythms or accents in bars 3-8, also, in our opinion, confirm the hypothesis that AI was written earlier. 

Regardless of the doubts discussed above, the presentation (souvenir) nature of AI makes it a merely supplementary source for determining the text of the Mazurka.

The presented photo is a reproduction from the above-mentioned book by Binental. The Fryderyk Chopin Museum has in its collection another, far less legible photograph (marked as F 854), on which the manuscript seems to be cut - this is not visible in the reproduction from Binental's book. We give both the original and the merged version of that second photograph as the final pages of AI.