Chopin: Piano Concerto in F Minor op.21, facsimile edition / Klavierkonzert F-moll, opus 21, faksimileausgabe

The Concerto in F Minor Op.21 was composed between October 1829 and February 1830. Along with the Concerto in E Minor op.11 composed a few months later these two concertos are the composer's first works of significance after graduating from the Warsaw High School of Music under Jósef Elsner in July 1829. Both stand in the tradition called the "brilliant style" after prototypes by Hummel, Kalkbrenner and Ries, their solo parts characterized by virtuosity, variety of ornamental figures and a poetic chararcter of the piano cantilena.

Although the Concerto in F was dedicated to Countess Delfina Potocka, the inspiration behind the Concerto, especially its second movement, was Fryderyk's youthful love for Konstancja Gładkowska, a singer of his own age making her stage debut at the Warsaw Opera. And although it is this adagio movement –"Larghetto"– that contemporary witnesses proclaimed "original" and the product of an "exceptional musical genius", the positive reception of the concerto as a whole is aptly captured by Robert Schumann's comment: "...[a concerto] which all of us put together would not be able to reach, and whose hem we can merely kiss".

The F Minor Concerto's first public performance took place on 17 March 1830 in Warsaw's National Theater; but when Chopin left for Paris, concertizing along the way, he did not give a single public performance of it. Although it is clear that an original autograph existed, scholars can only speculate that either the original orchestral parts went astray or that the original score might have been so heavily marked up with alterations and corrections that it was no longer usable for performance.

The precious manuscript–reproduced here in facsimile for the first time ever–shows Chopin (responsible for the piano solo part) working together with a professional copyist who provided the orchestration (a relationship possibly not unlike that of Gershwin's collaboration with Ferde Grofé). It is difficult to establish exactly the successive stages by which the two musicians prepared this score. It is certain that the copyist, having the "original" score as an exemplar, first set down the bar lines; this is confimed by the basic convergence between the layout of the lines and the density of the musical signs contained within them. As with other examples of fair copies from the period there are also traces of ‘trial runs’. The frequent, albeit minor, differences in dynamics, slurring and articulation between the autograph and copyist's part testifies to the heterogeneous origins of the fair copy score as a source document. Furthermore the copyist failed to add to the orchestra part the corrections and improvements made by Chopin in the piano part.