What is Chopin’s Zal?

Chopin’s music is known for its rare combination of emotional prowess, interwoven with enormous technical demands, which together, in the professional’s hand, sound like the most delicate and astonishing music ever written. One aspect of Chopin’s music is rarely discussed and is actually of great importance to Chopin’s style of performance and composition style.

I am referring, of course, to Chopin’s Zal, the mysterious melancholic/longing anxiety that he produced in his music, and which manifested itself mainly in the mazurkas. Chopin was a master of the best art of the piano, but most of his music has that melancholy touch for which he became so famous. This special treatment of music came from Chopin’s longing for home, after leaving Warsaw Chopin went to Vienna to begin his career as a piano virtuoso, and then there was an uprising in Poland, which Russia took care of very quickly, at the expense of the Poles. Chopin thought of returning to Poland, but was advised against it.

He never returned to Poland and earned a living in France. This incident made Chopin an exile, and made him very uncomfortable, and his aching heart for his homeland can be heard in his music. As mentioned before, the Zal is best noted in Chopin’s mazurkas.

Chopin – Mazurka op. 63 no. 2 in F minor, it is one of Chopin’s last pieces (his last living work of his was op.65), it is one of the most sublime and minimal but full of pathos, and it embodies all of the above.

The main theme of this mazurka is one of the best examples of Zal sentiment. Of course there are more examples, but we will discuss them in other posts.