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"Don't you wecollect what bad use I made of your lessons?" "Oh no!" said Iogel, hastening to reassure him. "You were only inattentive, but you had talent oh yes, you had talent!" The band struck up the newly introduced mazurka. Nicholas could not refuse Iogel and asked Sonya to dance.
Then he remembered a ball and the mazurka he danced with the beautiful D . "How much in love I was that night and how happy! And how hurt and vexed I was next morning when I woke and felt myself still free! Why does not love come and bind me hand and foot?" thought he. "No, there is no such thing as love!
However, Chichikov slipped past the mazurka dancers, and, almost treading on their heels, made his way towards the spot where Madame and her daughter were seated. Yet he approached them with great diffidence and none of his late mincing and prancing. Nay, he even faltered as he walked; his every movement had about it an air of awkwardness.
I tell you what: let’s have a game of cards, of vingt et un or whist; or shall we start a mazurka? Hey, in the name of three hundred devils, why, I am the best dancer of the mazurka in the whole yager regiment!” Thereupon he leaned forward closer to the ladies, and puffed out smoke and compliments by turns.
A few weeks later a mazurka, a posthumous work of F. Chopin, published by J. Gotthard, came into his hands. At first, although the piece 'struck him as being an old acquaintance, he could not fix the time when and the place where he had heard it; but at last the Mayer mazurka mentioned above returned to his remembrance, and on comparing the two, he found that they were one and the same piece.
Then some one opened the doors from within; the sound of the music, suddenly freed, rushed out and smote them; and they entered the ball-room. She was acutely conscious of her beauty, and of the distinction of his blanched, stern face. The floor was thronged by entwined couples who, under the rhythmic domination of the music, glided and revolved in the elaborate pattern of a mazurka.
The doves pecked the crumbs on the sill, huddling against her and eating from her hands. She began to trill from one note to another, and in trilling, her thoughts ran hither and thither even as her voice, and her eyes wandered from the wheel, resting dreamily on the promenade, and the people walking under the trees. The rhythm of a mazurka was in her ears and she sang louder, trying to drown it.
They whirled, gliding, twisting in and out among the dancers; and suddenly, swiftly, as at a signal, the music broke into the measure of the mazurka. A cry went up from the throng. In a twinkling the floor was cleared, the crowd pressed back against the columns; under the reddish marble of the dome four couples gathered, poised hand in hand.
Then the song went on again, with variations to suit; and thus the rustic mazurka proceeded until all had had a chance of tasting the rosy lips, so tempting to youthful swains. Often a coy maiden resisted, and then a pleasant scuffle ensued, in which she sometimes eluded the penalty, much to the chagrin of the claimant.
It is this: Chopin did not care for programme music, though more than one of his compositions, full of expression and character, may be included under that name. Who does not know the A minor Mazurka of op. 17, dedicated to Lena Freppa? Itwas already known in our country as the "Little Jew" before the departure of our artist abroad.
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