Chopin’s Polish Songs, opus 74, are his only vocal works. They purport to be arrangements of Polish folk-songs, but it is to be doubted whether they are to any great extent popular melodies. Probably Chopin drew freely on Polish motives and rearranged them to suit himself. However that may be, some of them are masterpieces. ‘The Maiden’s Wish’ is well known to concert audiences through Liszt’s arrangement of it for piano. The Bacchanal is a glorious piece, admirable for an encore number, the simplest of quatrain tunes, but overpowering in its frenzied energy. ‘The Spring’ is a charming thing, undoubtedly of folk origin, a tender alternation of major and minor which would become monotonous except for its ineffable beauty. ‘Melancholy,’ a folk-like tune with a genuine Slavic touch, is likewise among the best, and ‘My Sweetheart,’ which recalls the Tyrolese folk-songs, is well worth knowing. These songs are of the simplest character. The last two of the collection, the ‘Lithuanian Song’ and ‘Poland’s Funeral Song,’ are more pretentious—rather like scenas than Lieder—and in spite of certain beauties are overweighted with pretense.
Another song writer who does not usually find his way into song lists should be mentioned here. This is Michail Ivanovitch Glinka (1804-1857), founder of the national school of Russian music. Glinka was a man of remarkable talent, one who was able to fuse Italian grace, French subtlety, and German solidity into an individual style of his own, and to develop out of it an original native touch which had never appeared before in Russian music. Of his eighty-five or more songs (exclusive of those in his operas) a great number are in the thin and pretentious style of the day. But from a few of them there speaks real genius—the forerunner of the wonderful Russian song literature of recent times. The grand Hebrew Song from the incidental music to ‘Prince Kholmsky’ is the work of a man in whom much learning could not stifle the personal message. Another song, ‘Our Rose,’ is in a mixed rhythm which foreshadows the wonderful songs of Moussorgsky, and yet another, a ‘Traveller’s Song,’ makes use of the lively two-four rhythm which has since come to be associated with the Russian Cossacks. The lyric known as ‘Ilia’s Song’ and that entitled ‘Deserted Land’ both show the personal genius of the composer. We should also mention ‘Doubt,’ Meine Ruh’ ist hin, and ‘The Lark’ as among his best. It is not likely that singers will dig up these old songs for study, but Glinka’s distinguished name should not be forgotten in the examination of the wonderful Russian song literature which took its rise from him.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] Vol. II, Chapter VI.
[24] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII).
[25] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII).
CHAPTER X
THE CONTEMPORARIES OF SCHUBERT AND SCHUMANN
The spirit of the ‘thirties’ in France; the lyric poets of the French romantic period—Monpou and Berlioz—Song-writers of Italy; English song-writers—Robert Frans—Löwe and the art-ballad.
In another volume[26] we have seen what a remarkable wave of literary romanticism swept over France in the late twenties and early thirties of the nineteenth century. There has rarely been an age of more pronounced lyricism, rarely an age which created in a short time so many excellent lyrics. There were a number of fine talents working at this time. The purely literary virtuosity was remarkable. The radicalism of their method was marked, and the strangeness of their product revealed a movement in all the vigor of its early youth. In their insistence on the sensuous quality of words the romanticists of the thirties looked forward to the France of the early twentieth century, with its hazy, indefinite outlines. The early romanticists reduced the sound of words to a fine art. The later impressionists reduced it almost to an exact science.
The central tenet of the romanticists was freedom—freedom from the old classic forms, freedom from a host of conventions which governed the French language in poetry, and freedom especially from the severity and reserve of the classic ideal. To the poet of the Napoleonic age any violence of manner was an error in taste. He shunned it as he would have shunned the smell of garlic on a peasant’s breath. To the poet of the age of Louis Philippe any conscious reserve of manner was a coldness, a lack of genuine human feeling, an artistic lie. The emotions as well as the artistic sense must be stirred. And they must be stirred both by the picturing of emotion and by the beauty of lovely sounds. We have occasion to notice throughout the art of the nineteenth century an increasing insistence on the sensuous (it cannot be too often repeated). It shows in every department of artistic life. In poetry it is shown in a development of the mellifluousness of rhythm and suggestiveness of word. The French romanticists did for French poetry what Shelley did for English and what Poe did for American. These three qualities—freedom, emotionalism, and sensuousness—we may accept as the dominant notes of French romantic poetry.