Chopin's Polonaise in A-flat major, Op. 53 — written in Paris in 1842. The polonaise is a dance from his homeland, and when he wrote this one, Poland no longer existed on the map. He left Warsaw at twenty and never returned. The title Heroic is not his; later hands added it. A hundred and eighty-one bars and six minutes fourteen, with a long stretch of left-hand octaves in the middle that is among the most famous passages in the piano literature. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
A banned dance, and a place he could not go back to
The polonaise was originally a processional dance of the Polish court: in three, walked rather than danced, the company moving once around the room with a certain ceremony. Chopin wrote them from childhood and produced more than a dozen in all.
But the weightiest of them come after Poland had ceased to exist. Partitioned by three neighbours in 1795, the country was off the map for a hundred and twenty-three years. Chopin left Warsaw for Vienna in 1830 at twenty; an uprising broke out the following month and was crushed by Russian troops the next year, and he never went home. After his death his heart was returned to Warsaw while his body stayed in Paris.
So in his hands the form is not only a dance. It keeps the rhythmic skeleton of the home dance — three beats, with that short syncopation just after the first — and becomes a large piece able to hold a concert hall on its own.
The word Heroic is not Chopin's. No such title appears on the score; the dedication page reads "to Monsieur Auguste Léo" — a Paris banker who was his friend and backer. The nickname came later.
As for the story that Chopin wrote it after dreaming of a procession of Polish cavalry, its source is unknown; it is a tale that circulates, not a verifiable fact.
Sixteen bars of run-up before the subject arrives
The first sixteen bars are not the theme: both hands stack chromatically upward, tightening as they go, like someone building pressure outside the door. No melody there, only accumulation.
The theme arrives around half a minute in, and it is the signature of the piece — a striding three, chains of chords in the right hand, the left walking out the polonaise rhythm underneath. This section never lowers its head.
The middle is another world: the left hand takes up continuous octaves, one after another, the same figure for dozens of bars, while the right plays a simple fanfare above. That run of octaves is the most famous thing here, and it sounds like a column approaching from a distance and passing by.
Each time the octaves reach the top, the whole passage drops to a hushed sotto voce (from bar 83, and again from bar 103), like the column receding; then it builds back “poco a poco cresc.”, a little at a time. A more inward transition follows (from bar 121, accents alternating with fading), down to a pp at bar 151, and from there one crescendo drives straight into the return of the theme (bar 155), fuller than before, all the way to the closing chords.
A hundred and eighty-one bars, with one left-hand figure holding the middle
A hundred and eighty-one bars and 5,948 written notes (seventy-five of them grace notes), in 3/4 and A-flat major, with no repeats.
The bar-by-bar counts mark the sections plainly: the first sixteen bars sit between twelve and thirty-one, the density of an introduction (bar 2, with twelve, is the sparsest bar inside the piece); once the theme enters it rises to between twenty-three and thirty-seven.
The three fullest bars have sixty-four notes each, and they fall at the same phrase-end of the theme’s three loud statements (bars 46, 78 and 168) — each time the theme returns, that closing run of chords and scales fills up again.
The left-hand octaves from bar 81 do not rely on numbers (twenty to fifty notes a bar); they rely on never stopping.
The theme returns at bar 155; the last bar has only five notes — the closing chord.
The range runs from C1 to D♯7, over six octaves, so the hands cover a great deal of ground.
The difficulty is the left hand in the middle, and there is no shortcut
First, those octaves in the middle. They are one of the best-known feats of stamina in the piano literature — dozens of bars without a break, the tempo not allowed to sag and the volume not allowed to collapse. There is no trick: short sections, slow, loose wrists, a little more length each day. Practising at full speed from the start only causes injury.
Second, the chords of the theme. The right hand's chains must land together; one note half a beat late and the striding posture collapses.
Third, do not hurry the introduction. Those sixteen bars accumulate rather than display, and taking them fast removes the drop into the theme.
Fourth, the sotto voce passages (from bars 83 and 103): marked pp and sempre staccato, they must drop to the softest touch the instant the octaves have peaked, every note short — the only place in the piece to breathe and the only place the listener can rest, so really let it down.
The tempo is the printed 120 to the quarter (checked in the file to confirm it was the editor's mark and not an untouched software default).
We rate this 5 out of 5.
Other large pieces by the same composer
The Ballade No. 1, Op. 23, on this channel is the opposite in character: that one travels from quiet to out of control, while this one holds its head high throughout. Both run to six minutes or more, and together they show Chopin's two faces.
For the quiet side: the Nocturnes Op. 9 No. 2 and Op. 27 No. 2, and the Prelude in E minor, Op. 28 No. 4, are all here.
