Chopin : the Man and His Music

by James Huneker

XIII. MAZURKAS:—DANCES OF THE SOUL

I

"Coquetries, vanities, fantasies, inclinations, elegies, vague emotions, passions, conquests, struggles upon which the safety or favors of others depend, all, all meet in this dance."

Thus Liszt. De Lenz further quotes him: "Of the Mazurkas, one must harness a new pianist of the first rank to each of them." Yet Liszt told Niecks he did not care much for Chopin's Mazurkas. "One often meets in them with bars which might just as well be in another place. But as Chopin puts them perhaps nobody could have put them." Liszt, despite the rhapsodical praise of his friend, is not always to be relied upon. Capricious as Chopin, he had days when he disliked not only the Mazurkas, but all music. He confessed to Niecks that when he played a half hour for amusement it was Chopin he took up.

There is no more brilliant chapter than this Hungarian's on the dancing of the Mazurka by the Poles. It is a companion to his equally sensational description of the Polonaise. He gives a wild, whirling, highly-colored narrative of the Mazurka, with a coda of extravagant praise of the beauty and fascination of Polish women. "Angel through love, demon through fantasy," as Balzac called her. In none of the piano rhapsodies are there such striking passages to be met as in Liszt's overwrought, cadenced prose, prose modelled after Chateaubriand. Niema iak Polki—"nothing equals the Polish women" and their "divine coquetries;" the Mazurka is their dance—it is the feminine complement to the heroic and masculine Polonaise.

An English writer describes the dancing of the Mazurka in contemporary Russia:

In the salons of St. Petersburg, for instance, the guests actually dance; they do not merely shamble to and fro in a crowd, crumpling their clothes and ruffling their tempers, and call it a set of quadrilles. They have ample space for the sweeping movements and complicated figures of all the orthodox ball dances, and are generally gifted with sufficient plastic grace to carry them out in style. They carefully cultivate dances calling for a kind of grace which is almost beyond the reach of art. The mazurka is one of the finest of these, and it is quite a favorite at balls on the banks of the Neva. It needs a good deal of room, one or more spurred officers, and grace, grace and grace. The dash with which the partners rush forward, the clinking and clattering of spurs as heel clashes with heel in mid air, punctuating the staccato of the music, the loud thud of boots striking the ground, followed by their sibilant slide along the polished floor, then the swift springs and sudden bounds, the whirling gyrations and dizzy evolutions, the graceful genuflections and quick embraces, and all the other intricate and maddening movements to the accompaniment of one of Glinka's or Tschaikowsky's masterpieces, awaken and mobilize all the antique heroism, mediaeval chivalry and wild romance that lie dormant in the depths of men's being. There is more genuine pleasure in being the spectator of a soul thrilling dance like that than in taking an active part in the lifeless make-believes performed at society balls in many of the more Western countries of Europe.

Absolutely Slavonic, though a local dance of the province of Mazovia, the Mazurek or Mazurka, is written in three-four time, with the usual displaced accent in music of Eastern origin. Brodzinski is quoted as saying that in its primitive form the Mazurek is only a kind of Krakowiak, "less lively, less sautillant." At its best it is a dancing anecdote, a story told in a charming variety of steps and gestures. It is intoxicating, rude, humorous, poetic, above all melancholy. When he is happiest he sings his saddest, does the Pole. Hence his predilection for minor modes. The Mazurka is in three-four or three-eight time. Sometimes the accent is dotted, but this is by no means absolute. Here is the rhythm most frequently encountered, although Chopin employs variants and modifications. The first part of the bar has usually the quicker notes.

The scale is a mixture of major and minor—melodies are encountered that grew out of a scale shorn of a degree. Occasionally the augmented second, the Hungarian, is encountered, and skips of a third are of frequent occurrence. This, with progressions of augmented fourths and major sevenths, gives to the Mazurkas of Chopin an exotic character apart from their novel and original content. As was the case with the Polonaise, Chopin took the framework of the national dance, developed it, enlarged it and hung upon it his choicest melodies, his most piquant harmonies. He breaks and varies the conventionalized rhythm in a half hundred ways, lifting to the plane of a poem the heavy hoofed peasant dance. But in this idealization he never robs it altogether of the flavor of the soil. It is, in all its wayward disguises, the Polish Mazurka, and is with the Polonaise, according to Rubinstein, the only Polish-reflective music he has made, although "in all of his compositions we hear him relate rejoicingly of Poland's vanished greatness, singing, mourning, weeping over Poland's downfall and all that, in the most beautiful, the most musical, way." Besides the "hard, inartistic modulations, the startling progressions and abrupt changes of mood" that jarred on the old-fashioned Moscheles, and dipped in vitriol the pen of Rellstab, there is in the Mazurkas the greatest stumbling block of all, the much exploited rubato. Berlioz swore that Chopin could not play in time—which was not true—and later we shall see that Meyerbeer thought the same. What to the sensitive critic is a charming wavering and swaying in the measure—"Chopin leans about freely within his bars," wrote an English critic—for the classicists was a rank departure from the time beat. According to Liszt's description of the rubato "a wind plays in the leaves, Life unfolds and develops beneath them, but the tree remains the same—that is the Chopin rubato." Elsewhere, "a tempo agitated, broken, interrupted, a movement flexible, yet at the same time abrupt and languishing, and vacillating as the fluctuating breath by which it is agitated." Chopin was more commonplace in his definition: "Supposing," he explained, "that a piece lasts a given number of minutes; it may take just so long to perform the whole, but in detail deviations may differ."