When Robinson McClellan first happened upon what appeared to be an unknown composition by the legendary Frédéric Chopin hidden in a museum vault, he tried to keep a cool head.

"I was more cautious than excited at first," McClellan, curator at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

"I knew that it could be something really exciting. But given how unusual and unlikely it is, I took a sort of guilty-until-proven-otherwise approach."

But then he went home and played it on the piano.

"That's the moment I felt, you know, I could enjoy the excitement a bit more, feeling like, if this is what I think it is, I might be the first person in modern times to be hearing this tune of this great composer," he said.

Five years later, after working with experts to authenticate the composition, the museum says it has now confirmed McClellan's find as the first new piece of music by the 19th-century Polish composer discovered in nearly a century, and nearly 200 years after his death in 1849.

"It is thrilling to have uncovered a new and unknown work by such a renowned composer," Colin B. Bailey, the museum's director, said in a press release. "This is an exciting moment for the Morgan."

Calling in the expert

McClellan found the composition while cataloguing some of the museum's newly received items in 2019.

The music was written on a yellowed card, roughly 10-by-12 centimetres, which featured two words in cursive at the top: valse, which means waltz, and Chopin.

"The first thing I did was to call the real expert," McClellan said.

Enter Jeffrey Kallberg, dean of arts and letters at the University of Pennsylvania, and Chopin scholar.

Kallberg has dedicated much of his career to studying Chopin's manuscripts, and believes he has seen most of them in person.

In fact, he had just wrapped up a trip to Switzerland to look at some of Chopin's works first-hand when he got the email from McClellan asking him to look at a photo of something the museum had acquired. 

The writing style of the musical notes was immediately familiar as Chopin's, he said. But the music was entirely new to him.

"I was astonished and excited, and also skeptical because, you know, you're not supposed to see pieces that you don't see before in my business," he said. "It was remarkable."

Upon his return to the U.S., Kallberg immediately went to the Morgan to see it in person. From there, Kallberg, McClellan and other experts from in and outside the museum embarked on the long process of investigating and authenticating the discovery.

He wrote it, but did he compose it? 

What they know for sure, they say, is that Chopin wrote the manuscript. The handwriting matches, and the paper lines up with the era in which he was making music in the early to mid-1800s. 

But whether he composed the music itself, McClellan and Kallberg say, is much more open to interpretation. 

The piece, Kallberg says, stands out among Chopin's waltzes with its "stormy" opening notes. 

"It begins, you know, very quietly, but dissonantly. The sounds are sort of discordant and unsettling. And then there's a big crescendo and then a sudden outburst," he said. "There's no other waltz that begins quite that way"

Nevertheless, he says, "it really does sound like the sort of thing Chopin would have done, and very much shows signs of his compositional mastery. I mean, it's a tight little piece."

Pianist Lang Lang recorded the waltz for the New York Times, which first reported on this discovery. He told the newspaper the intro evoked, for him, an image of harsh winters in the Polish countryside.

"This is not the most complicated music by Chopin," he said, "but it is one of the most authentic Chopin styles that you can imagine."

How did it get in the museum vault?

The origin of the manuscript is not known, but it came to the museum's possession from the estate of music educator Arthur Satz, who himself purchased it from the wife of late autograph collector A. Sherrill Whiton Jr.

Ironically, Chopin's name on the manuscript is one of the only things on the sheet the composer himself didn't write, Kallberg says.

Kallberg says it's not unusual that Chopin never published the piece. 

It was common at the time, he says, to gift musical compositions on small cards as as a form of "social currency," and Chopin, in particular, made a habit of gifting waltzes.

"More than half of the waltzes that we know today remained unpublished during his life because he had given them as gifts," he said. 

The manuscript remains at the museum, where it will likely go on display.

But now that the music is out there in the world, McClellan hopes more people will "perform it and study it and appreciate it."

"We really consider this only the beginning of the process," he said. "We don't know what will happen. We might have someone come and say, 'We disagree with your conclusions.' And that's fine. You know, that's all part of healthy debate."