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<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>What George Sand characterized as the prevalence of “the unforeseen” in Chopin's music can be understood as his programmatic predilection. Within works whose generic titles promise nothing programmatic, he regularly introduces disruptions that announce a previously unsuspected persona in whose mind the music continues to unfold even as that persona brings the premises of the genre under scrutiny. In the Waltz in A♭, op. 42, for instance, a momentary interruption of the waltz beat, like the terminal interruption of the nocturne texture in the Nocturne in B, op. 32, no. 1, produces an ending that tests the capacity of the genre to absorb what most undermines it. In that Nocturne there is a second personifying tension between the genre-establishing texture of singing lines and the genre-challenging daubs of inconsistent damper-pedal coloring, drawing attention to the hand of the composer at work and therefore—if we adopt the insight of Chopin's artistic interlocutor Eugène Delacroix—to his thinking presence. The Mazurka in C Minor, op. 56, no. 3, represents a reverse strategy. There an imagining mind is personified from the beginning, restlessly searching through a catalog of mazurka features, and it is only in the coda, when the music settles into its genre as dance music, that the persona—the element of the unforeseen—retreats.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Chopin's Stuttgart diary, written in a state of fear for his loved ones after the defeat of the anti-Russian insurrection in fall 1831, reveals the exiled composer's emotional distress and morbid alienation. Chopin's intense feelings of mourning lent his imagination a peculiar fascination with the morbid. References to corpses and allusions to ghosts in the diary reflect a profound trauma caused by the uncertainty of his personal situation and his awareness of the political crisis. The Stuttgart crisis is only one of numerous instances in which Chopin mapped his personal losses onto the broader fate of those Poles forced into exile after the failure of the uprising. This identification with the estranged community was capable of producing a deeply subjective experience of haunting. Chopin's music carries a poignant relationship to loss and melancholia, exemplified in this article by the Étude, op. 10, no. 12 (“Revolutionary”), the Nocturne, op. 15, no. 3, and the Funeral March from the Piano Sonata, op. 35. These traits have prompted recent films by Andrzej Zulawski and Zbig Rybczynski to adopt Chopin's music as a means of collective mourning in post-Communist Poland.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Among Chopin's numerous musical identities is that of an important mid-nineteenth-century social type, the dandy: the young man of fashion characterized by a devotion to artifice and a fractious political energy masked by elegant mannerisms. This article seeks to ground the aesthetic of three of Chopin's later Mazurkas (the op. 59 set) in the cult of the dandy, especially as described by Charles Baudelaire; to identify the musical means Chopin devised to realize that aesthetic, namely the “rogue pitches” of my title; and to illustrate how these rogue pitches and the persona of the dandy inflect Chopin's later style.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This article views Chopin's Mazurka in C# Minor, op. 30, no. 4, as akin to a dream that is open to analysis from a Lacanian perspective. After a discussion of Jacques Lacan's famous orders of subjectivity (the imaginary, the symbolic order, and the Real), the article turns to his idea that a symptom is a message from the Real that demands interpretation. As such, strange moments in Chopin's Mazurka are like symptoms that require multiple interpretations in order to approach their hidden and overlapping meanings. The article proceeds to view Chopin's Mazurka through nineteenth-century notions of Orientalism (alterity), nationalism (nostalgia), coming to life (the automaton), tuberculosis (the boundary of life and death), and the uncanny (fragmentation of the body/mind). But just as Lacan argued that we can never reach a final meaning for a symptom, the article concludes that there can be no transcendental signified for the various symptomatic moments in Chopin's Mazurka. In the end, the Mazurka becomes what Lacan calls a sinthome, a form of subjectivity that is made up of the very symptoms that the subject strives to understand.</jats:p>