The tempo rubato is probably as old as music itself. It is in Bach, it was practised by the old Italian singers. Mikuli says that no matter how free Chopin was in his treatment of the right hand in melody or arabesque, the left kept strict time. Mozart and not Chopin it was who first said: "Let your left hand be your conductor and always keep time." Halle, the pianist, once asserted that he proved Chopin to be playing four-four instead of three-four measure in a mazurka. Chopin laughingly admitted that it was a national trait. Halle was bewildered when he first heard Chopin play, for he did not believe such music could be represented by musical signs. Still he holds that this style has been woefully exaggerated by pupils and imitators. If a Beethoven symphony or a Bach fugue be played with metronomical rigidity it loses its quintessential flavor. Is it not time the ridiculous falsehoods about the Chopin rubato be exposed? Naturally abhorring anything that would do violence to the structural part of his compositions, Chopin was a very martinet with his pupils if too much license of tempo was taken. His music needs the greatest lucidity in presentation, and naturally a certain elasticity of phrasing. Rhythms need not be distorted, nor need there be absurd and vulgar haltings, silly and explosive dynamics. Chopin sentimentalized is Chopin butchered. He loathed false sentiment, and a man whose taste was formed by Bach and Mozart, who was nurtured by the music of these two giants, could never have indulged in exaggerated, jerky tempi, in meaningless expression. Come, let us be done with this fetish of stolen time, of the wonderful and so seldom comprehended rubato. If you wish to play Chopin, play him in curves; let there be no angularities of surface, of measure, but in the name of the Beautiful do not deliver his exquisitely balanced phrases with the jolting, balky eloquence of a cafe chantant singer. The very balance and symmetry of the Chopin phraseology are internal; it must be delivered in a flowing, waving manner, never square or hard, yet with every accent showing like the supple muscles of an athlete beneath his skin. Without the skeleton a musical composition is flaccid, shapeless, weak and without character. Chopin's music needs a rhythmic sense that to us, fed upon the few simple forms of the West, seems almost abnormal. The Chopin rubato is rhythm liberated from its scholastic bonds, but it does not mean anarchy, disorder. What makes this popular misconception all the more singular is the freedom with which the classics are now being interpreted. A Beethoven, and even a Mozart symphony, no longer means a rigorous execution, in which the measure is ruthlessly hammered out by the conductor, but the melodic and emotional curve is followed and the tempo fluctuates. Why then is Chopin singled out as the evil and solitary representative of a vicious time-beat? Play him as you play Mendelssohn and your Chopin has evaporated. Again play him lawlessly, with his accentual life topsy-turvied, and he is no longer Chopin—his caricature only. Pianists of Slavic descent alone understand the secret of the tempo rubato.
I have read in a recently started German periodical that to make the performance of Chopin's works pleasing it is sufficient to play them with less precision of rhythm than the music of other composers. I, on the contrary, do not know a single phrase of Chopin's works—including even the freest among them—in which the balloon of inspiration, as it moves through the air, is not checked by an anchor of rhythm and symmetry. Such passages as occur in the F minor Ballade, the B flat minor Scherzo—the middle part—the F minor Prelude, and even the A flat Impromptu, are not devoid of rhythm. The most crooked recitative of the F minor Concerto, as can be easily proved, has a fundamental rhythm not at all fantastic, and which cannot be dispensed with when playing with orchestra. ... Chopin never overdoes fantasy, and is always restrained by a pronounced aesthetical instinct. ... Everywhere the simplicity of his poetical inspiration and his sobriety saves us from extravagance and false pathos.
Kleczynski has this in his second volume, for he enjoyed the invaluable prompting of Chopin's pupil, the late Princess Marceline Czartoryska.
Niecks quotes Mme. Friederike Stretcher, nee Muller, a pupil, who wrote of her master: "He required adherence to the strictest rhythm, hated all lingering and lagging, misplaced rubatos, as well as exaggerated ritardandos. 'Je vous prie de vous asseoir,' he said, on such an occasion, with gentle mockery. And it is just in this respect that people make such terrible mistakes in the execution of his works."
And now to the Mazurkas, which de Lenz said were Heinrich Heine's songs on the piano. "Chopin was a phoenix of intimacy with the piano. In his nocturnes and mazurkas he is unrivalled, downright fabulous."
No compositions are so Chopin-ish as the Mazurkas. Ironical, sad, sweet, joyous, morbid, sour, sane and dreamy, they illustrate what was said of their composer—"his heart is sad, his mind is gay." That subtle quality, for an Occidental, enigmatic, which the Poles call Zal, is in some of them; in others the fun is almost rough and roaring. Zal, a poisonous word, is a baleful compound of pain, sadness, secret rancor, revolt. It is a Polish quality and is in the Celtic peoples. Oppressed nations with a tendency to mad lyrism develop this mental secretion of the spleen. Liszt writes that "the Zal colors with a reflection now argent, now ardent the whole of Chopin's works." This sorrow is the very soil of Chopin's nature. He so confessed when questioned by Comtesse d'Agoult. Liszt further explains that the strange word includes in its meanings—for it seems packed with them—"all the tenderness, all the humility of a regret borne with resignation and without a murmur;" it also signifies "excitement, agitation, rancor, revolt full of reproach, premeditated vengeance, menace never ceasing to threaten if retaliation should ever become possible, feeding itself meanwhile with a bitter if sterile hatred."
Sterile indeed must be such a consuming passion. Even where his patriotism became a lyric cry, this Zal tainted the source of Chopin's joy. It made him irascible, and with his powers of repression, this smouldering, smothered rage must have well nigh suffocated him, and in the end proved harmful alike to his person and to his art. As in certain phases of disease it heightened the beauty of his later work, unhealthy, feverish, yet beauty without doubt. The pearl is said to be a morbid secretion, so the spiritual ferment called Zal gave to Chopin's music its morbid beauty. It is in the B minor Scherzo but not in the A flat Ballade. The F minor Ballade overflows with it, and so does the F sharp minor Polonaise, but not the first Impromptu. Its dark introspection colors many of the preludes and mazurkas, and in the C sharp minor Scherzo it is in acrid flowering—truly fleurs du mal. Heine and Baudelaire, two poets far removed from the Slavic, show traces of the terrible drowsy Zal in their poetry. It is the collective sorrow and tribal wrath of a down-trodden nation, and the mazurkas for that reason have ethnic value. As concise, even as curt as the Preludes, they are for the most part highly polished. They are dancing preludes, and often tiny single poems of great poetic intensity and passionate plaint.
Chopin published during his lifetime forty-one Mazurkas in eleven cahiers of three, four and five numbers. Op. 6, four Mazurkas, and op. 7, five Mazurkas, were published December, 1832. Op. 6 is dedicated to Comtesse Pauline Plater; op. 7 to Mr. Johns. Op. 17, four Mazurkas, May 4, dedicated to Madame Lina Freppa; op. 24, four Mazurkas, November, 1835, dedicated to Comte de Perthuis; op. 30, four Mazurkas, December, 1837, dedicated to Princesse Czartoryska; op. 33, four Mazurkas, October, 1838, dedicated to Comtesse Mostowska; op. 41, four Mazurkas, December, 1840, dedicated to E. Witwicki; op. 50, three Mazurkas, November, 1841, dedicated to Leon Szmitkowski; op. 56, three Mazurkas, August, 1844, dedicated to Mile. C. Maberly; op. 59, three Mazurkas, April, 1846, no dedication, and op. 63, three Mazurkas, September, 1847, dedicated to Comtesse Czosnowska.
Besides there are op. 67 and 68 published by Fontana after Chopin's death, consisting of eight Mazurkas, and there are a miscellaneous number, two in A minor, both in the Kullak, Klindworth and Mikuli editions, one in F sharp major, said to be written by Charles Mayer—in Klindworth's—and four others, in G, B flat, D and C major. This makes in all fifty-six to be grouped and analyzed. Niecks thinks there is a well-defined difference between the Mazurkas as far as op. 41 and those that follow. In the latter he misses "savage beauties" and spontaneity. As Chopin gripped the form, as he felt more, suffered more and knew more, his Mazurkas grew broader, revealed more Weltschmerz, became elaborate and at times impersonal, but seldom lost the racial "snap" and hue. They are sonnets in their well-rounded mecanisme, and, as Schumann says, something new is to be found in each. Toward the last, a few are blithe and jocund, but they are the exceptions. In the larger ones the universal quality is felt, but to the detriment of the intimate, Polish characteristics. These Mazurkas are just what they are called, only some dance with the heart, others with the heels. Comprising a large and original portion of Chopin's compositions, they are the least known. Perhaps when they wander from the map of Poland they lose some of their native fragrance. Like hardy, simple wild flowers, they are mostly for the open air, the only out-of-doors music Chopin ever made. But even in the open, under the moon, the note of self-torture, of sophisticated sadness is not absent. Do not accuse Chopin, for this is the sign-manual of his race. The Pole suffers in song the joy of his sorrow.