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Chopin, while piquantly and daringly varying the tonality prevailing in art-music, hardly ever departs from it altogether he keeps at least in contact with it, however light that contact may be now and then in the mazurkas. Further, he adopted only some of the striking peculiarities of the national music, and added to them others which were individual.
There is a misprint in the Kullak edition: at the beginning of the thirty-second notes an A instead of an F upsets the tonality, besides being absurd. Of the fourth study in A minor there is little to add to Theodor Kullak, who writes: "In the broadest sense of the word, every piece of music is an etude.
He had a power of weighing almost by instinct the constituent elements of character, which seemed to me something like the power of tonality in a musician, the gift of recognising, by pure faculty, what any notes may be, however confusedly jangled on an instrument. It was wonderful to me how often his instantaneous judgments proved more sagacious than our carefully formed conclusions.
As Bach glorified the melodies of the German people, so Chopin glorified those of the Poles. The national tonality became to him a vehicle to be freighted with his own individual conceptions. "I should like to be to my people what Uhland was to the Germans," he once said to a friend.
And if, from these texts so wisely selected, these Sequences so solemnly sealed, Durtal passed to the sacerdotal robe of their sounds, to those neumatic chants, that divine psalmody all uniform, all simple, which is plain chant, he had to admit, that except in Benedictine cloisters, an organ accompaniment was everywhere added, that plain chant had been put forcibly in modern tonality, and it disappeared under vegetations which stifled it, became everywhere discoloured, amorphous and incomprehensible.
That is, the possibility of musical expectation, and pleasure in its satisfaction, is conditioned by the possession of a tonality- feeling which covers the constituents of the piece of music, but which has not become absolutely mechanical in its action.
There is here a wonderful unity between the even, unaccented harmony of the delicate tonality and the mood of the personages the one aiding the other to express the moment of pause in nature and in love, which in itself is a delight more deep than all that the very whirlwind of passion can give.
The key is A minor, to which it pretty closely adheres, the transient modulations into a'+, c'+, etc., only serving to enforce the feeling of tonality. The reason for this close adherence to one key is not far to seek. Wagner never modulates without a reason; the Prelude presents one simple feeling, and there is no cause for or possibility of modulation.
Thus, since complete tonality was developed late in the history of music, while the closing on the tonic was certainly prior to it, the finality of the tonic would seem to be the primary fact, out of which the other has been developed. We speak to-day, for instance, of dissonant chords, which call for a resolution and are inclined to interpret them as dissonant just because they do so call.
The old manner in church music, that Bach often used, of closing a minor tonality with a major chord, was probably due to a regard for the mood of the congregation. An extension of this tradition is frequent in a long coda in the major. But this is quite different in kind from a plan where all of the last movement is in insistent major.
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