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Updated: June 10, 2025
The following melodies and snatches of melodies will to some extent illustrate what I have said, although they are chosen with a view rather to illustrate Chopin's indebtedness to Polish folk-music than Polish folk-music itself:
It seems a poet of distant land at the same time and in the same tones uttered his longing for his own country and expressed the pathos and the romance of the new. Dvôrák, like all true workers, did more than he thought: he taught Americans not so much the power of a song of their own, as their right of heritage in all folk-music.
Not only do they represent a very ancient, perhaps primitive musical sense: they represent also something essentially characteristic of the race; and there is surely much to be learned in regard to race-emotion from the comparative study of folk-music.
The fact that Haydn gave it in its naïve form, invented themes which in their deliberate naïveté suggest folk-song and dance, hints at what his later music proves conclusively, that he found his inspiration as well as his raw material in folk-music. The business of the creative artist is to turn chaos into cosmos.
The remarks on Polish folk-music lead us naturally to the question of Chopin's indebtedness to it, which, while in one respect it cannot be too highly rated, is yet in another respect generally overrated. The opinion that every peculiarity which distinguishes his music from that of other masters is to be put to the account of his nationality, and may be traced in Polish folk-music, is erroneous.
Those first beautiful compositions, full of the folk-music of his own country, had been wrung out of him by home-sickness and heart-ache. I wondered whether he could compose only under the spur of hunger and loneliness, and whether his talent might not subside with his despair.
Indeed, I am convinced that a very delightful and wholly unexplored field of study offers itself in Japan to the student of folk-music and popular chants.
But many who excuse us for the present lack of a natural nationalism, are so eager for such a differentiation that they would have us borrow what we cannot breed. The folk-music of the negro slaves is most frequently mentioned as the right foundation for a strictly American school. A somewhat misunderstood statement advanced by Dr.
Forestier says of the spring dance of Norway: "There is a freshness, a sparkle, and energy, a graceful life about it that is invigorating." He was, as Grieg once declared, a pathbreaker for the young national music. At the early age of nineteen he sallied forth with his fiddle and wherever he appeared in Europe and America he played the folk-music and national dances of Norway.
The polonaises are marked by the fire and ardor of his soldier race, and the mazurkas are full of the coquetry and tenderness of his countrywomen; while the ballads are a free and powerful rendering of Polish folk-music, beloved alike in the herdsman's hut and the palace of the noble.
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