British and American authorities are investigating why several drones were flying over four U.S. air bases in England in recent days. As Henry Ridgwell reports, Britain has deployed dozens of troops around the bases amid concerns such drones could be used to disrupt operations or carry out acts of deception and sabotage.
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Three American citizens jailed for years in China arrived in the United States late Wednesday as part of a prisoner swap between Washington and Beijing.

The swap, which the White House announced earlier Wednesday, marked a rare diplomatic agreement between the United States and China as U.S. President Joe Biden’s tenure comes to a close.

Beijing announced Thursday that the United States has returned four people to China, including at least three Chinese citizens whom Beijing said were held for “political purposes.” The fourth was an individual sought by Beijing for crimes who had been living in the United States.

The Chinese government did not identify the four people.

The three Americans released in the swap — Mark Swidan, Kai Li and John Leung — landed Wednesday night at a military base in San Antonio, Texas.

Biden told reporters Thursday morning that he has spoken to all of them.

“I’m really happy they are home,” he said.

All three Americans had been designated as wrongfully detained. Swidan was facing a death sentence on drug charges, and Li and Leung were jailed on espionage charges.

In a separate but connected move, the State Department Wednesday lowered its travel warning to China to “level two” from “level three,” now advising American citizens to “exercise increased caution” when traveling to China.

Previously, the State Department advised Americans to “reconsider travel” to China, partially due to the risk of wrongful detention of Americans.

The prisoner swap comes two months after China released David Lin, a Christian pastor from California who had spent nearly 20 years jailed in China after being convicted of contract fraud.

And in August, the United States engaged in a separate historic prisoner swap.

That one, between the United States and Russia, included the release of American journalists Alsu Kurmasheva and Evan Gershkovich, as well as ex-U.S. Marine Paul Whelan and U.S. permanent resident and Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza.

Some information in this report came from the Associated Press and Reuters.

 
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New York — A century after the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the annual holiday tradition kicks off Thursday in New York City with new Spider-Man and Minnie Mouse balloons, zoo and pasta-themed floats, performances from Jennifer Hudson and Idina Menzel, and more.

This year’s star-studded lineup is a far cry from the parade’s initial incarnation, which featured floats showing scenes from Mother Goose, Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, Miss Muffet and the Spider, and other fairy tales.

Some things remain the same, though. As in 1924, there will be plenty of marching bands and lots of clowns, followed by the grand finale of Santa Claus riding through Manhattan and ushering in the holiday season.

This year’s parade features 17 giant, helium-filled character balloons, 22 floats, 15 novelty and heritage inflatables, 11 marching bands, 700 clowns, 10 performance groups, award-winning singers and actors, and the WNBA champion New York Liberty.

One new float will spotlight the Rao’s food brand, featuring a knight and a dragon in battle made with actual pasta elements. Another will celebrate the Bronx Zoo’s 125th anniversary with representations of a tiger, a giraffe, a zebra and a gorilla.

“The work that we do, the opportunity to impact millions of people and bring a bit of joy for a couple of hours on Thanksgiving morning, is what motivates us every day,” said Will Coss, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade executive producer.

The parade begins at 8:30 a.m. on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and ends 4 kilometers away around noon at Macy’s Herald Square flagship store on 34th Street, which serves as a stage and backdrop for performances.

It’ll happen rain or shine — the parade has only been canceled three times, from 1942 to 1944 during World War II — but organizers will be monitoring wind speeds throughout the festivities to make sure it’s safe for the big balloons to fly.

So far, the forecast calls for rain with temperatures in the upper-40s and winds around 16 kph, well within the acceptable range for letting Snoopy, Bluey and their friends soar. New York City law prohibits Macy’s from flying the full-size balloons if sustained winds exceed 37 kph or wind gusts are over 56 kph.

The parade airs on NBC with hosts Savannah Guthrie, Hoda Kotb and Al Roker and streams on the network’s Peacock service. Carlos Adyan and Andrea Meza will host a Spanish simulcast on Telemundo.
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WASHINGTON — As President-elect Donald Trump prepares for his second term as president of the United States, questions arise about what this means for U.S.-Africa relations. In this interview with VOA English to Africa’s Paul Ndiho, Tibor Nagy, the former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, shares insights into the administration’s past approach. Nagy shares his perspective on U.S. competition with China and Russia, trade policies, including the extension of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, commonly known as AGOA, which provides eligible sub-Saharan African countries with duty-free access to U.S. markets and the ongoing crises in the Sahel and other regions on the continent.

This interview, which aired on VOA’s Africa 54 TV program on November 27, from VOA headquarters in Washington, D.C., has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Paul Ndiho: As the former top diplomat for African affairs, what should we expect when it comes to President-elect Donald Trump’s second term for Africa?

Tibor Nagy: I’m very optimistic. I don’t think people should worry about the slogan “America First” because that doesn’t mean “America only.” There are many areas where interests between the U.S. and Africa intersect. China, we very much see as a long-term existential threat, and so I think we’ll be a little bit more honest in saying that part of our Africa relations is about China. Then there’s the very important issue of critical minerals. Why should China monopolize all the critical minerals in Africa when it would do much better if Western, i.e., American companies were also involved? So, I think Africans should be optimistic — I think they’ll have a lot more deals and a lot fewer lectures.

VOA: Many argue that China and Russia have an edge over the U.S. in Africa. What can the incoming Trump administration do better to compete with those two countries?

Nagy: I think you would agree that what Africans want more than anything else, especially young Africans, and everyone knows that there are millions and millions and millions of young Africans, are jobs. Frankly, yes, China has done an awful lot of infrastructure projects, but how many jobs did the African young people get out of that? I think the truth is that American and Western types of investments, do lead to the kind of jobs that young Africans are looking for. And I think that will be a successful foreign policy. And I think that that will be the true kind of win-win for both sides.

VOA: President-elect Trump is proposing a 10% tariff on all goods coming into the United States, obviously with AGOA, Africans are supposed to bring goods to the United States free of tariffs. What should we expect?

Nagy: What we should expect is to see what happens, aside from during campaigns, a lot of things are said, and then what the actual policy is might be a little bit different. I mean, AGOA is a law passed by Congress and I’m sure that the United States of America will comply with that law. And as you also well know that law will be going out soon and everybody’s kind of looking forward and wondering what kind of a new AGOA there will be.

VOA: How about the issue of the Sahel? There is a crisis in the Sahel. There are wars in Sudan, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. How can the incoming Trump administration do better on this front?

Nagy: The “three Cs” — crises, conflicts, and coups — have been really horrible. Again, here, U.S. engagement needs to be different. Lecturing, for example, the military government in Niger, I think had a lot to do with us being kicked out of some very valuable air bases that where we had agreements with and the whole issue of coups, I think it’s important for the United States to look at coups individually. When a coup happens and we say it’s a coup, then we have to cut certain ties and engagements. What we do is we call some coups, coups, and other coups, not coups, as it happened, for example, in Gabon, we didn’t call it a coup. We just need to be a little bit more honest and say we really need to be much more flexible in how we engage with those governments because often the military government really needs engagement more to kind of help them see the way forward, especially those that are very popular with the people when they happen.

VOA: What would you do differently if you got your old job back?

Nagy: I’m not looking to get my old job back because being Assistant Secretary once — is enough. I would look differently to be a little bit less hypocritical, to drop the megaphone, to engage with African governments where they are, not where we want them to be, and to see the world as it is and especially put so much more energy into Sudan, Ethiopia, Sahel, those kinds of conflicts.

This Q&A originated in VOA’s English to Africa Service.
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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has discussed the possibility of repealing birthright citizenship guaranteed under 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. However, repealing this right would face significant legal political challenges.

See full story here.
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As many Americans gather around the dinner table this Thanksgiving holiday, a recent report finds that in America’s largest city, more residents are experiencing food insecurity. Local food pantries in New York are seeing an increase in visitors, including those who are employed. VOA’s Tina Trinh explains.
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LINCOLN CITY, Ore. — Drumming made the floor vibrate and singing filled the conference room of the Chinook Winds Casino Resort in Lincoln City, on the Oregon coast, as hundreds in tribal regalia danced in a circle.

For the last 47 years, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians have held an annual powwow to celebrate regaining federal recognition. This month’s event, however, was especially significant: It came just two weeks after a federal court lifted restrictions on the tribe’s rights to hunt, fish and gather — restrictions tribal leaders had opposed for decades.

“We’re back to the way we were before,” Siletz Chairman Delores Pigsley said. “It feels really good.”

The Siletz is a confederation of over two dozen bands and tribes whose traditional homelands spanned western Oregon, as well as parts of northern California and southwestern Washington state. The federal government in the 1850s forced them onto a reservation on the Oregon coast, where they were confederated together as a single, federally recognized tribe despite their different backgrounds and languages.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, Congress revoked recognition of over 100 tribes, including the Siletz, under a policy known as “termination.” Affected tribes lost millions of acres of land as well as federal funding and services.

“The goal was to try and assimilate Native people, get them moved into cities,” said Matthew Campbell, deputy director of the Native American Rights Fund. “But also I think there was certainly a financial aspect to it. I think the United States was trying to see how it could limit its costs in terms of providing for tribal nations.”

Losing their lands and self-governance was painful, and the tribes fought for decades to regain federal recognition. In 1977, the Siletz became the second tribe to succeed, following the restoration of the Menominee Tribe in Wisconsin in 1973.

But to get a fraction of its land back — roughly 1,457 hectares of the 445,000-hectare reservation established for the tribe in 1855 — the Siletz tribe had to agree to a federal court order that restricted their hunting, fishing and gathering rights. It was only one of two tribes in the country, along with Oregon’s Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, compelled to do so to regain tribal land.

The settlement limited where tribal members could fish, hunt and gather for ceremonial and subsistence purposes, and it imposed caps on how many salmon, elk and deer could be harvested in a year. It was devastating, tribal chair Pigsley recalled: The tribe was forced to buy salmon for ceremonies because it couldn’t provide for itself, and people were arrested for hunting and fishing violations.

“Giving up those rights was a terrible thing,” Pigsley, who has led the tribe for 36 years, told The Associated Press earlier this year. “It was unfair at the time, and we’ve lived with it all these years.”

Decades later, Oregon and the U.S. came to recognize that the agreement subjecting the tribe to state hunting and fishing rules was biased, and they agreed to join the tribe in recommending to the court that the restrictions be lifted.

“The Governor of Oregon and Oregon’s congressional representatives have since acknowledged that the 1980 Agreement and Consent Decree were a product of their times and represented a biased and distorted position on tribal sovereignty, tribal traditions, and the Siletz Tribe’s ability and authority to manage and sustain wildlife populations it traditionally used for tribal ceremonial and subsistence purposes,” attorneys for the U.S., state and tribe wrote in a joint court filing.

Late last month, the tribe finally succeeded in having the court order vacated by a federal judge. And a separate agreement with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has given the tribe a greater role in regulating tribal hunting and fishing.

As Pigsley reflected on those who passed away before seeing the tribe regain its rights, she expressed hope about the next generation carrying on essential traditions.

“There’s a lot of youth out there that are learning tribal ways and culture,” she said. “It’s important today because we are trying to raise healthy families, meaning we need to get back to our natural foods.”

Among those celebrating and praying at the powwow was Tiffany Stuart, donning a basket cap her ancestors were known for weaving, and her 3-year-old daughter Kwestaani Chuski, whose name means “six butterflies” in the regional Athabaskan language from southwestern Oregon and northwestern California.

Given the restoration of rights, Stuart said, it was “very powerful for my kids to dance.”

“You dance for the people that can’t dance anymore,” she said.
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The prospect of punishing new U.S. tariffs will hang over the deliberations at China’s highest-level economic meeting when the Central Economic Work Conference of the Chinese Communist Party convenes for its annual session next month.

A key function of the meeting will be to set the nation’s growth target for 2025, a task made more challenging by the prospect of tariffs that could stunt the crucial export sector.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump threatened repeatedly during his election campaign to swiftly impose a 60% tariff on Chinese-made goods. He wrote on his Truth Social account late Monday that he will impose “an additional 10% Tariff, above any additional Tariffs, on all of [China’s] many products coming into the United States of America.”

Most of the Chinese government advisers interviewed for a Reuters report this month recommended that Beijing maintain an economic growth target of 5.0% for next year, the same target as 2024.

Some said the country would have to launch stronger fiscal stimulus measures to offset the impact of new U.S. tariffs after Trump takes office in January.

Cai Shenkun, an independent commentator in the United States, told VOA Mandarin that Beijing’s “5% target” is clearly based on political necessity, rather than a market perspective.

After securing an extraordinary third term as president last year, Chinese leader Xi Jinping “will have to give the CCP an explanation and a vision,” Cai said. “He must make a good gesture. If he does not maintain the 5% target, his ruling position will be greatly threatened.”

Si Ling, a financial scholar in Australia, said in a phone interview with VOA Mandarin that if China wants to achieve its goal of doubling the size of its economy from 2020 to 2035, the annual economic growth rate must reach 4%.

“China has taken into account the uncertainty factors, like external shocks when Trump pledged to impose high tariffs. China must face the sudden decline in GDP growth,” said Si.

Reuters reported last month that China’s economy is likely to expand 4.8% in 2024, missing the government’s 5% growth target, and could slow to 4.5% in 2025. 

Si said the growth of China’s current GDP is dependent on exports and investments. If Trump fulfills his promise to impose high tariffs on Chinese goods, the impact on China’s economy will be profound, he said.

“China’s advantages in industrial products exports, brought by high state subsidies, will be completely wiped out due to high tariffs,” Si said. “Can the domestic market digest the industrial products intended for export? Many of these industrial enterprises have already begun to reduce their production scale. This means more people will lose their jobs.”

Local debt and real estate woes

Independent commentator Cai warned that overreliance on stimulus measures may exacerbate local government debt problems.

“Private capital does not dare to invest anymore. State-owned enterprises can no longer play the role of investment pioneers,” Cai said. “‘Maintaining the 5% target’ means printing a lot of cash, pouring it into the market, issuing a lot of treasury bonds and increasing the fiscal deficit. This is the only way. But it will have a great negative impact on the stability of the RMB currency value.”

A new wave of property market challenges will likely occur in the next 10 years, Cai said.

“In the past, people saw property as a means of asset appreciation or value preservation. Now the future housing market looks dark to everyone. If we continue to build houses, who will buy them? In the end, it may only lead to an avalanche-like bubble, which will burst completely.”

Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said last month that unless China’s economy shifts from an export and investment-driven model to a consumer demand-driven model, its economic growth may slow to “well below 4%.”
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Denver, Colorado — It hasn’t been a typical fall for the northeastern United States. 

Fires have burned in parks and forests around New York City. Towns and cities in a stretch from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to south of Philadelphia had their driest three months on record, according to the Applied Climate Information System. Some reservoirs in the region are near historic lows. 

Major changes need to happen to avoid critical shortages of water in the future, even if that future isn’t immediate. As the climate warms, droughts will continue to intensify and communities should use this one as motivation to put in place long-term solutions, experts say. 

“This is the canary in the coal mine for the future,” said Tim Eustance, executive director of the North Jersey District Water Supply Commission. “People should stop watering their lawns yesterday.” 

Eustance wants New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy to issue a drought emergency to increase people’s sense of urgency. 

Here are some ways to stretch water experts said could become necessary in the Northeast. 

Replenishing more water underground 

One important place water is stored is under our feet. Groundwater has dropped significantly over the years in parts of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey and New York. 

Groundwater makes up about half of New Jersey’s drinking water. Sprawl and concrete can make it tough for rain to replenish the water underground. 

“New Jersey is ‘mall-landia.’ We have these giant parking lots that could be ways to reclaim water instead of having runoff,” Eustance said. 

In some other parts of the country, there is increasing use of permeable asphalt, concrete and pavers that allow water to percolate into the ground and back into the aquifer. It would be up to municipalities to require that, he said. 

A faster way to replenish the aquifer is by injecting highly treated wastewater into it, something Los Angeles has been doing for years. It is dramatically adding to the city’s available water. 

Virginia Beach, Virginia, is also pumping highly treated water back into its aquifer, and Anne Arundel County in Maryland is trying to pass legislation that would allow the same. 

Paying people to conserve 

In some places in the western U.S., getting paid to save water has long been an option. Some cities and counties pay dollars for every square foot of lawn torn out and replaced with native landscaping. 

Those policies are not nearly as widespread in the Northeast, said Alan Roberson, CEO of the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators. 

“The abundance has created a different perspective,” he said. This can make it hard to get people on board with conservation. 

Upgraded water meters can give customers details about their water use and help them see where they can save money when drought doesn’t feel as urgent, said Beth O’Connell, chief engineer for Anne Arundel County, Maryland. 

Reusing water could become more common 

The concept is simple: capture water from the sink, clothes washer, shower and toilet, treat it to a high standard and use it again for nonpotable purposes: It can be sent back through pipes to flush toilets, cool buildings, water yards or help raise water levels in a river or aquifer. 

“One of the crimes I think, in America, is we use drinking water to water our lawns and flush our toilet,” Eustance said. 

Zach Gallagher is CEO of Natural Systems Utilities, which designs, builds and operates water recycling systems. He also is the father of three kids and lives in New Jersey, so this drought hits close to home. 

“I feel like I’m doing something that is going to be meaningful and leave something beyond for my children, and their children,” he said. 

Reuse can be a tool for both drought and flood, he explained. When a building can reuse its own wastewater and discharge it directly into a body of water, it eases stress on a city’s fragile sewer system, which is a common vulnerability in old coastal cities. It also reduces demand on new water. 

Once open this summer, the company’s redesign of the old Domino Sugar Refinery on New York’s East River will be able to treat 400,000 gallons (1.5 million liters) of wastewater a day, enough to cover a football field in nearly 15 inches (38 centimeters) of water. The cleaned water will be piped back into the new mixed-use buildings for flushing toilets, cooling and landscaping, with some of it discharged back into the river. 

Nonpotable reuse has a growing footprint in the eastern U.S., but scaling it to a regional level should be the next focus, O’Connell said. 

A new mindset 

Planning for a future that includes extended drought can be costly. It could also require a shift in mindset from one of abundance to conservation, said Del Shannon, dam engineer and member of the American Society of Civil Engineers. 

He has worked on water projects around the world and said many developing countries are focused on getting reliable water for crops and drinking. 

“We need to treat our water and guard it as gently as those countries are.”
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In the U.S. state of Colorado, a local youth hockey team wanted to give their counterparts in Ukraine a break from the constant threat of war. So, they invited a Ukrainian hockey team to come to American to play in a tournament. Svitlana Prystynska has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: Volodymur Petruniv 
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NEW YORK — Walk into any supermarket and you can generally buy a banana for less than $1. But a banana duct-taped to a wall? That sold for $6.2 million at an auction at Sotheby’s in New York.

The yellow banana fixed to the white wall with silver duct tape is a work entitled “Comedian,” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. It first debuted in 2019 as an edition of three fruits at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, where it became a much-discussed sensation.

Was it a prank? A commentary on the state of the art world? Another artist took the banana off the wall and ate it. A backup banana was brought in. Selfie-seeking crowds became so thick, “Comedian” was withdrawn from view, but three editions of it sold for between $120,000 and $150,000, according to Perrotin gallery.

Five years later, someone has now paid more than 40 times that higher price point at the Sotheby’s auction. Or, more accurately, they have purchased a certificate of authenticity that gives them the authority to duct-tape a banana to a wall and call it “Comedian.”

Bidding started at $800,000 and within minutes shot up to $2 million, then $3 million, then $4 million, as the auctioneer joked, “It’s slipping through the auction room.” The final hammer price announced in the room Wednesday was $5.2 million, which didn’t include the about $1 million in auction house fees, paid by the buyer.

Sotheby’s calls Cattelan “among Contemporary Art’s most brilliant provocateurs.”

“He has persistently disrupted the art world’s status quo in meaningful, irreverent, and often controversial ways,” the auction house said in a description of “Comedian.”

“What Cattelan is really doing is turning a mirror to the contemporary art world and asking questions, provoking thought about how we ascribe value to artworks, what we define as an artwork,” Galperin said.

The banana that was on display in Miami is long gone. Sotheby’s says the fruit always was meant to be replaced regularly, along with the tape.

“What you buy when you buy Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’ is not the banana itself, but a certificate of authenticity that grants the owner the permission and authority to reproduce this banana and duct tape on their wall as an original artwork by Maurizio Cattelan,” Galperin said.

The very title of the piece suggests Cattelan himself likely didn’t intend for it to be taken seriously. But Chloé Cooper Jones, an associate professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts, said it is worth thinking about the context.

Cattelan premiered the work at an art fair, visited by well-off art collectors, where “Comedian” was sure to get a lot of attention on social media. That might mean the art constituted a dare, of sorts, to the collectors to invest in something absurd, she said.

If “Comedian” is just a tool for understanding the insular, capitalist, art-collecting world, Cooper Jones said, “it’s not that interesting of an idea.”

But she thinks it might go beyond poking fun at rich people.

Cattelan is often thought of as a “trickster artist,” she said. “But his work is often at the intersection of the sort of humor and the deeply macabre. He’s quite often looking at ways of provoking us, not just for the sake of provocation, but to ask us to look into some of the sort of darkest parts of history and of ourselves.”

And there is a dark side to the banana, a fruit with a history entangled with imperialism, labor exploitation and corporate power.

“It would be hard to come up with a better, simple symbol of global trade and all of its exploitations than the banana,” Cooper Jones said. If “Comedian” is about making people think about their moral complicity in the production of objects they take for granted, then it’s “at least a more useful tool or it’s at least an additional sort of place to go in terms of the questions that this work could be asking,” she said.

“Comedian” hits the block around the same time that Sotheby’s is also auctioning one of the famed paintings in the “Water Lilies” series by the French impressionist Claude Monet, with an expected value of around $60 million.

When asked to compare Cattelan’s banana to a classic like Monet’s “Nymphéas,” Galperin says impressionism was not considered art when the movement began.

“No important, profound, meaningful artwork of the past 100 years or 200 years, or our history for that matter, did not provoke some kind of discomfort when it was first unveiled,” Galperin said.
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NEW YORK — The brooding waltz was carefully composed on a sheet of music roughly the size of an index card. The brief, moody number also bore an intriguing name, written at the top in cursive: “Chopin.”

A previously unknown work of music penned by the European master Frederic Chopin appears to have been found at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan.

The untitled and unsigned piece is on display this month at the opulently appointed institution, which had once been the private library of financier J. P. Morgan.

Robinson McClellan, the museum curator who uncovered the manuscript, said it’s the first new work associated with the Romantic era composer to be discovered in nearly a century.

But McClellan concedes that it may never be known whether it is an original Chopin work or merely one written in his hand.

The piece, set in the key of A minor, stands out for its “very stormy, brooding opening section” before transitioning to a melancholy melody more characteristic of Chopin, McClellan explained.

“This is his style. This is his essence,” he said during a recent visit to the museum. “It really feels like him.”

Curator finds composition in collection

McClellan said he came across the work in May as he was going through a collection from the late Arthur Satz, a former president of the New York School of Interior Design. Satz had acquired it from A. Sherrill Whiton Jr., an avid autograph collector who had been director of the school.

McClellan then worked with experts to verify its authenticity.

The paper was found to be consistent with what Chopin favored for manuscripts, and the ink matched a kind typical in the early 19th century when Chopin lived, according to the museum. But a handwriting analysis determined the name “Chopin” written at the top of the sheet was penned by someone else.

Born in Poland, Chopin was considered a musical genius from an early age. He lived in Warsaw and Vienna before settling in Paris, where he died in 1849 at the age of 39, likely of tuberculosis.

He’s buried among a pantheon of artists at the city’s famed Pere Lachaise Cemetery, but his heart, pickled in a jar of alcohol, is housed in a church in Warsaw, in keeping with his deathbed wish for the organ to return to his homeland.

Artur Szklener, director of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, the Polish capital city where the composer grew up, agreed that the document is consistent with the kinds of ink and paper Chopin used during his early years in Paris.

Chopin expert calls piece ‘little gem’

Musically, the piece evokes the “brilliant style” that made Chopin a luminary in his time, but it also has features unusual for his compositions, Szklener said.

“First of all, it is not a complete work, but rather a certain musical gesture, a theme laced with rather simple piano tricks alluding to a virtuoso style,” Szklener explained in a lengthy statement released after the document was revealed last month.

He and other experts conjecture the piece could have been a work in progress. It may have also been a copy of another’s work, or even co-written with someone else, perhaps a student for a musical exercise.

Jeffrey Kallberg, a University of Pennsylvania music professor and Chopin expert who helped authenticate the document, called the piece a “little gem” that Chopin likely intended as a gift for a friend or wealthy acquaintance.

“Many of the pieces that he gave as gifts were short – kind of like ‘appetizers’ to a full-blown work,” Kallberg said in an email. “And we don’t know for sure whether he intended the piece to see the light of day because he often wrote out the same waltz more than once as a gift.”

David Ludwig, dean of music at The Juilliard School, a performing arts conservatory in Manhattan, agreed the piece has many of the hallmarks of the composer’s style.

“It has the Chopin character of something very lyrical and it has a little bit of darkness as well,” said Ludwig, who was not involved in authenticating the document.

But Ludwig noted that, if it’s authentic, the tightly composed score would be one of Chopin’s shortest known pieces. The waltz clocks in at under a minute long when played on piano, as many of Chopin’s works were intended.

“In terms of the authenticity of it, in a way it doesn’t matter because it sparks our imaginations,” Ludwig said. “A discovery like this highlights the fact that classical music is very much a living art form.”

The Chopin reveal comes after the Leipzig Municipal Libraries in Germany announced in September that it had uncovered a previously unknown piece likely composed by a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in its collections.
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