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Updated: June 24, 2025
The "native wood-notes wild" make themselves often heard, only they are almost as often stifled in the close air of the study. Strange to say, the last opus of mazurkas published by Chopin has again something of the early freshness and poetry. Schumann spoke truly when he said that some poetical trait, something new, was to be found in every one of Chopin's mazurkas.
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.
I should like very much to have your copy of the last mazurkas, if you have such a thing, for I do not know if my gallantry went so far as to give you a copy. Pleyel wrote to me that you were very obliging, and have corrected the Preludes. Do you know how much Wessel paid him for them? It would be well to know this for the future.
His polonaises and nocturnes are vastly superior to those of Weber and Field; and his poetic preludes, his romantic ballads, his lovely berçeuse, his amorous mazurkas, are new types in art which have often been imitated but never equalled. Only in one field did Chopin have a dangerous rival among his predecessors, namely, in the Waltz.
He inherited that national melancholy of the Poles which causes them even to dance to tunes in minor keys, and which is commonly attributed to the long-continued political oppression under which they have suffered. But, apart from this national trait, Chopin had sufficient personal reasons for writing the greater part of his mazurkas and his other pieces in minor keys.
A passionate lover of his native country, and burning with those aspirations for freedom which have made Poland since its first partition a volcano ever ready to break forth, the folk-themes of Poland are at the root of all of Chopin's compositions, and in the waltzes and mazurkas bearing his name we find a passionate glow and richness of color which make them musical poems of the highest order.
What a sweet, simple young woman she was! he thought; and straightway began to argue with himself that, as his boots were in such evil plight, it would be more pleasant to spend the evening with Letty and her friend, than to hold on his way to his own friend's, and spend the evening smoking and lounging about the stable, or hearing his sister play polkas and mazurkas all the still Sunday twilight.
Both musicians were quite proficient in mazurkas and polkas and old-fashioned reels and ballads, and let us not forget to mention variations of every conceivable variety, for Miss Letitia possessed a whole book of variations, and it was quite a thick book. Just at present, Arethusa was busily engaged in committing to memory "The Babbling Brook."
In music not his own, we happen to know he can be as staid as a metronome; while his Mazurkas, etc., lose half that wildness if played without a certain freedom and license impossible to imitate, but irresistible if the player at all feels the music. This we have always fancied while reading Chopin's works: we are now sure of it after hearing him perform them."
To his beautiful Jackson Street palace the city's best people should come, and sometimes for a favoured few he would play his rippling etudes and nocturnes, his mazurkas and polonaises. Julia was not the ideal wife of his mind or heart; nor was she apt to grow to fill that ideal. Mrs.
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