Chopin Complete Rondos - Piano Sheet Music

With Elsner, composition studies began with the polonaise, but it was immediately followed by rondos and variations (Tomaszewski)

The rondo appeared in the Chopin oeuvre as an autonomous work on five occasions, in his youthful years in Warsaw and subsequently in his early Parisian period (1833). It is this musical form that carries the opus number 1: the Rondo in C minor, by the fifteen-year-old Fryderyk, written and published in 1825. So the rondos composed by Chopin are on the one hand testimony to the young composer acquainting himself with one of the basic classical forms (the rondo of the Viennese Classics: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and their imitators), but on the other hand a way of composing in the dazzling and then fashionable style brillant, which for the young pianist Fryderyk was a matter of considerable importance. In his later years, however, the mature composer of the scherzos, ballades and études eschewed the genre of the free-standing rondo. The rondos which he had composed earlier played no greatly significant role in his oeuvre and are generally referred to as youthful or virtuosic pieces demonstrating the "classical" aspect of his compositional training.

Whilst familiarising himself with the basics of the classical rondo (reiterations of a refrain separated by a succession of couplets), the young Chopin also observed features of the style brillant in rondos by such composers as Hummel and Weber. This gave him the model for shaping the pianistic lustre of his own works. His very first effort, the Rondo in C minor, Op. 1 (1825), although just a modest piece by a budding composer, is already marked by a graceful brilliance. And yet in this early work it is difficult to discern any traits of Chopin's future style, and the melodic inventiveness is rather limited.


Rondo in C, Op 1

Rondo a la Mazur, Op 5

Introduction and Rondo, Op 16