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Chopin, as I have already said, is most national in the mazurkas and polonaises, for the former of which he draws not only inspiration, but even rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic motives from his country's folk-music. Liszt told me, in a conversation I had with him, that 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."
With an equalized scale a singer can produce a perfectly ordered series of notes, a charming string of matched pearls, but nothing else. It is worthy of note that it is impossible to sing Spanish or negro folk-songs with an equalized scale. Almost all folk-music, indeed, exacts a vocal method of its interpreter quite distinct from that of the art song.
In the following excerpt, from a lecture on "Folk-Music," he pays his respects to Dvorák's "New World" symphony, and touches upon his own attitude toward the case as exemplified in his "Indian" suite: "A man is generally something different from the clothes he wears or the business he is occupied with; but when we do see a man identified with his clothes we think but little of him.
There is also no fixed limit to the number of singers in either band: these may be very many or very few. I think that the curious Izumo way of singing the burden so that the vowel sounds in the word iya uttered by one band, and in the word sorei uttered by the other, are made to blend together might be worth the attention of some one interested in Japanese folk-music.
She was only twenty at the time, and he was only twenty-one. He had about a hundred and fifty pounds a year of his own and nothing else but his very considerable personal attractions. He had no profession: he earned nothing. But he talked of literature and music, he had a passion for old folk-music, collecting folk-songs and folk-dances, studying the Morris-dance and the old customs.
Beyond the confines of the church was another musical growth, springing up by the wayside and in remote places. Folk-music it is called, and it gives untrammeled utterance to human longings, human grief and despair, and human wondering over the mysteries of life, death and the great Beyond.
He has carried this belief into action, not only by his scientific interest in the collection and compilation of the folk-music of our prairies, but by his artistic use of actual Indian themes in one of his most important works, his "Indian Suite" for full orchestra, a work that has been often performed, and always with the effect of a new and profound sensation, particularly in the case of the deeply impressive dirge.
But, on the other hand, it is emphatically true that this same folk-music was to him a potent inspirer and trainer. Generally speaking, however, Chopin has more of the spirit than of the form of Polish folk-music.
It's as homely as a country prayer meeting: might be any lonely woman getting ready to die. It's full of the thing every plain creature finds out for himself, but that never gets written down. It's unconscious memory, maybe; inherited memory, like folk-music. I call it personality." Fred laughed, and turning to the piano began coaxing the FRICKA music again. "Call it anything you like, my boy.
He has the welter of raw material around him; the shaping instinct crystallizes it into coherent forms. For that intellect is indispensable, and almost from the beginning Haydn's intellect was at work slowly building his folk-music into definite forms easily to be grasped.
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