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Updated: June 24, 2025
It was possibly written after some of his less promising pupils had finished a lesson. The last number of the suite is a quaint Novelette. Copyright, 1883, by G. Schirmer. Sherwood's sixth opus is made up of a brace of mazurkas. The former, in C minor, contains some of his best work. It is original and moody, and ends strongly. The second, in A major, is still better.
When he is not THUS singular, he is no better than Strauss or any other waltz compounder...such as admire Chopin, and they are legion, will admire these Mazurkas, which are supereminently Chopin-ical; that do NOT we. Wessel and Stapleton, the publishers, protested against this shameful criticism, defending Chopin and adducing the opinions of numerous musicians in support of their own.
Perhaps the importance of the rubato in Chopin cannot be more readily realized than by his concession that he could never play a Viennese waltz properly, and by the fact that sometimes, when he was in a jocular mood, he would play one of his mazurkas in strict, metronomic time, to the great amusement of those who had heard him play them properly.
Chopin, the young Polish artist, now appeared in Paris, playing his E minor Concerto, his Mazurkas and Nocturnes, revealing new phases of art. Chopin's calm composure tranquilized Liszt's excitable nature. From Chopin, Liszt learned to "express in music the poetry of the aristocratic salon."
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.
In the stormy, blood-soaked, ruined Paris of to-day it is not easy to imagine those evenings at the Prince Czartoryski's, when Chopin played in the moonlight the mazurkas and polonaises and waltzes which moonlight or dreams seem often to have inspired, but through which the proud movement of the old Polish dance and song triumphantly rings.
Indeed, it was a little harsh and was likened to the taste of a bitter orange. But it was just the voice for a tragedy or an epic, for it was superhuman rather than human. Light things like Spanish songs and Chopin mazurkas, which she used to transpose so that she could sing them, were completely transformed by that voice and became the playthings of an Amazon or of a giantess.
Divers fragments de Handel, chante par Madame Viardot- Garcia. Solo pour Violoncello, par M. Franchomme. Nocturne, Preludes, Mazurkas et Impromptu. Le Chene et le Roseau, chante par Madame Viardot-Garcia, accompagne par Chopin. Maurice Bourges, who a week later reports on the concert, states more particularly what Chopin played. Maurice Bourges's account is not altogether free from strictures.
Quadrilles, waltzes, polkas, and mazurkas are danced with great vigour and much skill. The refreshments are muddy coffee and a few sweetmeats. Dancing is kept up for hours, and all is conducted with much decorum and propriety. A party of this kind meets about once a week, the principal inhabitants taking it by turns, and all who please come in without much ceremony.
Later in the evening she sat down at the piano, as was a not infrequent custom of hers before going to bed, not so much because of her enthusiasm for music, but because she did not want to retire to rest too early. On such occasions she played, for the most part, the few pieces which she still knew by heart mazurkas by Chopin, some passages from one of Beethoven's sonatas, or the Kreisleriana.
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