These Polish songs by Chopin are, comparatively speaking, unknown, even among musicians, overshadowed and hidden as they have always been by the number and magnitude of his pianoforte works, like wood-violets lost in the depths of a forest. Yet, though small and unpretentious as the violets, they are among his most genial and poetic creations. Seventeen of them have been published, as genuine bits of vocal melody as ever were penned or sung; and there are many more which have never been printed, scarcely even written out in full; hasty pastime sketches, the fair daughters of a momentary inspiration, wedded to stray verses of Polish poetry which caught Chopin’s fancy, from the pen of Mickiewicz and other national bards.
The Maiden’s Wish
“The Maiden’s Wish,” the first of the two songs presented, is one of the earliest and most popular, so far as known; a dainty, capricious little mazurka song, half playful, half tender. The words embody the fond wish of a merry, winsome maiden, whose life is touched to seriousness by the shadow of first love upon her pathway, the wish that she were a sunbeam to leave the high vault of Heaven and desert the flowers and streams of earth to shine through her lover’s window and gladden him alone; or that she were a bird to leave the fields and forests and fly on swift pinions to his window at early dawn and wake him with a song of love.
The music accurately and closely reproduces the spirit of the words, in all their warmth, archness, and grace. The short but continually recurring trill, “ever on the self-same note,” in prelude and interlude, suggests the thrill which the maiden feels at heart as she flits singing about the house and garden, unconsciously keeping step to the rhythm of the mazurka, the native dance of her province.
The Ring
The second song selected resembles in form the ordinary folk-song, with its single, reiterated musical strophe, and also in its simplicity, its fresh, unaffected sincerity of mood. But it shows far more perfect workmanship, and is of a much more refined and poetic quality. It is plaintively sad, tenderly pathetic in every phrase, a pale, delicate blossom of sentiment, dropped upon the grave of youth and first love. It describes the early betrothal of a youth, full of faith, hope, and happiness, to his playmate and child-love. On departing into strange lands, the youth gives the maiden a ring and she gives him in exchange a promise to become his bride on his return. After years of weary wandering, during which his heart has been ever faithful to his early love, he returns to find she has forgotten ring and promise and lover. But in spite of her perfidy and the hopelessness of his attachment, his constant thoughts cling ever to the little ring he gave and the little playmate with her childish grace and garb. A very old story and a very simple one, but none the less sad for that.
In addition to its intrinsic charm and artistic merit this little composition possesses a personal interest in its subtle reference to Chopin’s own experience. The great tone-poet knew a love other and earlier than that destructive passion for George Sand which blasted his life and broke his heart. But his beloved Constantia, to whom he was betrothed before leaving Poland, at twenty years of age, to seek his fortune in the great world, forgot her plighted vows and the little ring he gave as their visible token, and married another; and it is the composer’s own grieved and disappointed heart that speaks in this tenderly beautiful song, saddened by the first of the many swiftly gathering clouds which obscured the brightness of his sunny youth, and in a few short years rendered the name of Chopin synonymous to his friends with grief and suffering.
The Poetic and Religious Harmonies by Franz Liszt
Liszt’s reputation in this country as a pianoforte composer has hitherto rested, in the main, upon his brilliant and popular operatic fantasies, a few of his études, and his unique and world-famous Hungarian rhapsodies; all of which, though effective and by no means to be despised, are, after all, only the bright bubbles tossed off in playful mood from the surface of his genius, like the globules that rise from the sparkling champagne.