A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
A curator was sorting through a collection gifted to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York when he stumbled upon a small piece of paper.
ROBINSON MCCLELLAN: This can't be what I think it is.
MARTÍNEZ: It was a music manuscript for a waltz.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Robinson McClellan recognized the name at the top - Frederic Chopin. Now, when I was learning piano as a kid from my mom, it looked like Chopin to me, C-H-O-P-I-N. Anyway, very famous Polish French composer who died in 1849. So big name, but McClellan did not recognize the music, so he went home and played it.
MCCLELLAN: If this is what I think it is, I'm one of the first people to hear this tune in living memory.
MARTÍNEZ: McClellan wasn't sure if this truly was an undiscovered work of Chopin, so he called an expert.
JEFFREY KALLBERG: It was astonishing.
INSKEEP: That's Jeffrey Kallberg, a professor of music history at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in the works of Chopin. And when he saw the handwriting on the manuscript, he recognized it immediately.
KALLBERG: The way that Chopin writes clefs, the way that he writes noteheads and stems, the way that he writes dynamics, the color of the ink - all of those immediately said Chopin.
MARTÍNEZ: Right, so the writing was obviously Chopin, but Kallberg was less sure about the music.
KALLBERG: It begins with a kind of storminess that is very unusual, really unknown in the waltzes that Chopin wrote.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: That's a New York Times recording by the pianist Lang Lang.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: Now, the chaotic opening to this piece led to some doubt. Was this really Chopin's original work, or did he write down somebody else's piece?
MARTÍNEZ: Kallberg sees the piece as a young Chopin experimenting.
KALLBERG: This is really a piece that shows Chopin early in his career, trying out a different idea for what a waltz could do that he then abandoned. He never really came back to this. There's another waltz in E minor that has a dissonant beginning, but it has a very different feel overall than this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALICE SARA OTT'S "WALTZ IN E MINOR, KK IVA NO. 15")
INSKEEP: The museum published a digital copy of the manuscript on its website. McClellan says now the real process of understanding this work begins.
MCCLELLAN: People will have opinions. And they'll have discoveries of their own, and they'll have insights of their own. We were the kind of shepherds, I suppose, to get it out there, but now the real fun begins.
(SOUNDBITE OF OLGA BORDAS' PERFORMANCE OF CHOPIN'S "NOCTURNE, OP. 9 NO. 2") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.