Chopin's Rogue Pitches: Artifice, Personification, and the Cult of the Dandy in Three Later Mazurkas

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.