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Chopin was gay, fairly healthy and bubbling over with a pretty malice. His first period shows this; it also shows how thorough and painful the processes by which he evolved his final style. How is one to reconcile "the want of manliness, moral and intellectual," which Hadow asserts is "the one great limitation of Chopin's province," with the power, splendor and courage of the Polonaises?
In the Polonaises of Lipinski we hear the music of the pleasure-loving heart once more beating joyously, giddily, happily, as it had done before the days of disaster and defeat. The melodies breathe more and more the perfume of happy youth; love, young love, sighs around.
Chopin, however, emancipated himself more and more from these conventionalities in his later poetic polonaises. It does not breathe any passion, but seems to be only a triumphal march, an expression of chivalrous and polite manners.
Anton Rubinstein, when I last heard him, played Chopin inimitably. Never shall I forget the Ballades, the two Polonaises in F sharp minor and A flat major, the B flat minor Prelude, the A minor "Winter Wind" the two C minor studies, and the F minor Fantasie. Yet the Chopin pupils, assembled in judgment at Paris when he gave his Historical Recitals, refused to accept him as an interpreter.
There are thoughts of sweet resignation, but the absence of hope makes them perhaps the saddest of all. The martial strains, the bold challenges, the shouts of triumph, which we heard so often in the composer's polonaises, are silenced.
Some contemporary Polonaises are of a character so sad, that they might almost be supposed to accompany a funeral train. It was published with a vignette, representing the author in the act of blowing his brains out with a pistol. Full of gloom as they still are, they soothe by their delicious tenderness, by their naive and mournful grace.
But what others imparted to him in regard to it was supplemented by his fancy and his nationality." Chopin wrote fifteen Polonaises, the authenticity of one in G flat major being doubted by Niecks. This list includes the Polonaise for violoncello and piano, op. 3, and the Polonaise, op. 22, for piano and orchestra.
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