Chopin's Waltz in D-flat major, Op. 64 No. 1 — known in English as the Minute Waltz and in Chinese as the Little Dog Waltz. Chopin gave it neither name, and the English one misleads: the piece takes a minute and a half to two minutes, and nobody plays it in sixty seconds. A hundred and forty bars, with the right hand circling almost the whole time inside one small span. It runs one minute forty-five. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
"Minute" was never about the clock
In 1847 Chopin published three waltzes as Opus 64. This is the first of them, dedicated to Countess Delfina Potocka.
The dog comes from a story told at the time: Chopin was then living with the writer George Sand, whose small dog would chase its own tail in circles, and he is said to have written the piece after watching it. No direct evidence for this appears in their surviving correspondence, so it stays a story — but it does describe the music, because the right hand really does circle inside a very small span.
The name "Minute Waltz" was added later by a publisher, and it is a misunderstanding. The English word has two pronunciations: one means sixty seconds, the other, my-NEWT, means tiny. What was meant was "the little waltz"; what got read was "the one-minute waltz," and the piece has carried an impossible promise ever since.
In practice it takes a minute and a half to two minutes. Forced under sixty seconds those circling figures turn to mush, and what the score actually says is Molto vivace, not "as fast as possible."
A BBC programme has used it as its theme for decades
BBC Radio's Just A Minute has used this as its theme since 1967.
The game asks a contestant to talk on a subject for sixty seconds without hesitation, repetition or deviation — which is exactly why the waltz's nickname suits it.
The right hand circles on the spot while the left counts three
The first four bars are right hand only, a fast run turning over and over inside one small span — the signature gesture of the piece.
Then the left hand comes in and counts the waltz: one bass note, two chords, once a bar, as steady as a metronome. The right keeps circling above it. The two things happen at once, and it sounds like someone spinning while somebody else keeps time.
In the middle the expression changes: the circling stops and a real singing line appears, slower and longer — the one place in the piece where it speaks properly. That section ends with a clear slowing down.
Then the circling returns, more urgent than the first time. In the last bars the sound rushes to the highest point in the piece and is flung downward to finish — no lingering, it simply stops.
As background this will speed your hands up. It is not really music to work to; it is one short burst of excitement, walked all the way through.
A hundred and forty bars with one stretch of real singing in the middle
A hundred and forty bars as played (a hundred and twenty-five written, with bars 21 to 36 repeated), 3/4, D-flat major, one thousand four hundred and seventeen sounding notes.
Bars 1 to 4 are right hand alone at five or six notes a bar, half of what follows — the introduction. At bar 5 the left hand enters and the count jumps to thirteen a bar as the waltz begins.
From bar 21 comes the second section, played twice, opening the range upward with the top line pushed near F6.
From bar 53 is the middle: the note count falls to seven or nine and the top line comes down — the one place the circling stops and the melody sings, running to bar 84.
From bar 89 the entire opening returns, its bar-by-bar note counts and ranges almost identical to those from bar 1.
At bar 136 the highest note in the piece, F7, arrives; two bars fling the sound downward, and the last bar settles near C2.
The whole thing is under two minutes: an audio track of one minute forty-one, and a finished video of one minute forty-five.
The difficulty is evenness in the right hand, not speed
This gets treated as a display piece, but speed is not where the difficulty lies.
First, evenness in the right hand. Every note in the circling figure has the same value, and one note heavier or later than the rest gives the whole run away — at this tempo each lasts about six hundredths of a second, and there is nowhere to hide it. Practise at half speed with every note fully sounded, then step it up.
Second, do not chase the clock. The score says Molto vivace, which is a character and not a stopwatch reading; forcing it under a minute only smears the figure.
Third, breathe in the middle. That section is the only singing in the piece, and playing it with the tension of what comes before removes the contrast. The slowing at its end is written in and should be heard.
Fourth, the pedal. The left hand's three beats need to be clear, and a full pedal glues the bass to the two chords after it — in most places one change a bar is right.
The tempo follows the printed mark, dotted quarter = 168 (that is, 252 to the quarter); the finished video runs one minute forty-five.
We rate this 4 out of 5.
The second of the same set, and his other waltzes
Opus 64 is a set of three. The second is the Waltz in C-sharp minor, already on this channel — much slower and much darker, and the contrast between the two is striking. They were published the same year with different dedicatees. The third, in A-flat, has not been made yet.
Chopin wrote well over a dozen waltzes and published only eight in his lifetime. For more of him: the Prelude in E minor, Op. 28 No. 4, and the Nocturne in E-flat, Op. 9 No. 2, are both on this channel.
