Chopin most often used a numeral and a slur to mark an irregular rhythmic group. When adding - usually later – articulating and phrasing slurs, he treated the already present "rhythmic" slurs in various ways:
- he did not regard them as interpretation marks and added other, usually much longer, slurs. The irregular group was in this situation embraced by two slurs of various length; or
- he accepted them as part of the articulation-phrasing slurring and added other slurs before or after the "rhythmic" slur; we come across that type of situation several times in this Nocturne, cf. slurs over the triplets in bars 11 & 12;
- or else he replaced them with articulation and phrasing slurs, e.g. modifying their extent, which automatically changed their function – cf. bar 15 of the Nocturne.
The editors are of the opinion that the slur in FEJ belongs to the last-mentioned category.
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category imprint: Differences between sources; Corrections & alterations
issues: Annotations in teaching copies, Authentic post-publication changes and variants, Annotations in FEJ
notation: Slurs