Milewski - Chopins Mazurkas and The Myth of The Folk

Chopin's Mazurkas and the Myth of the Folk
Author(s): Barbara Milewski

Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 113-135
Published by: University of California Press
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Chopin's
Mazurkas
and
the
Myth
of
the
Folk
BARBARA MILEWSKI
In 1852 there appeared under Franz Liszt's name

a seminal monograph, F. Chopin, which contained the notion that prototypical Polish mazurkas played a role in Chopin's pieces:
Chopin releasedthe poetic unknown which was only
suggested in the original themes of Polish mazurkas.
He preserved the rhythm, ennobled the melody, enlargedthe proportions,and infused a harmonic chiaroscuro as novel as the subjects it supported-all this
in order to paint in these productions (which he
loved to hear us call easel pictures) the innumerable
19th-Century Music XXIII/2 (Fall 1999) ? by The Regents

of the University of California.
A shorter version of this essay was presented at the 1998
national meeting of the American Musicological Society in
Boston. I am grateful to Harry Powers, Scott Burnham, and
Simon Morrison for their thoughts and guidance on the
early drafts. Many warm thanks also to Professor Emeritus
Leon Tadeusz Blaszczyk and Bret Werb for helpful discussions of things Polish and folk, as well as to Nicole Monnier
for her most careful reading of numerous later drafts.
and so widely differing emotions that excite the

heart while the dance goes on.'
The gesture was a common Romantic conceit;
by the mid-nineteenth century, the description
of art music in terms of national practice was a
familiar topos in music criticism. This is why
Liszt went to great lengths to paint the character of the Polish people when they danced the
mazurka in their native land:
It is essential to have seen the mazurka danced in
Poland. . . . There are few more delightful scenes
than a ball in that country when, the mazurka once
begun, the attention of the entire room, far from
obscuredby a crowd of persons colliding from oppo'Franz Liszt, Frederic Chopin, trans. Edward N. Waters
(London, 1963), p. 69. Much of the material found in the
original French edition of 1852 was rearranged and expanded when Breitkopf and Hirtel brought out a new edition in 1879. Waters's translation is that of the original
1852 edition.
113

19TH
CENTURY
site directions, is drawn to a single couple, each of

equal beauty, darting forth into empty space. And
what varied manifestations there are in the turns
around the ballroom! Beginning at first with a kind
of shy hesitation, the lady tenses like a bird about to
take flight. A long glide on one foot alone and she
skims like a skater over the ice-smooth floor; she
runs like a child and suddenly bounds in the air.
Like a goddess of the hunt, with eyes wide open,
head erect, and bosom high, she sails in nimble leaps
through the air like a boat riding the waves. ...
Exertion colors her cheeks and brightens her glance,
bows her figure and slows her pace until, panting
and exhausted, she gently sinks and falls into the
arms of her cavalier,who seizes her firmly and raises
her for a moment into the air before they finish the
intoxicating round.2
But while the exotic description of cavaliers
and flushed-cheeked Polish ladies leaping and
gliding with abandon was meant to evoke a
native source for Chopin's mazurkas, it was
never an ethnographic attempt to recover a specific folk practice important to Chopin's music. Rather, positioning Chopin's mazurkas
within a Polish dance music tradition was a
way to raise the status of these works, to elevate the actual material of the music through
the suggestive power of Romantic metaphor.
Liszt's image of capering Polish dancers, then,
was a transcendental one; it served as a poetic
device that helped him to articulate the musical matter of Chopin's pieces.
Interestingly, though, Liszt's original anecdote assumed a power far greater than its metaphoric value would suggest. Firing the imagination of other Chopin critics, it became the
origin of one of the longest-standing myths in
Chopin criticism-the myth that Chopin's mazurkas are national works rooted in an authentic Polish folk-music tradition.3 In this article,
I explore exactly how the idea of an authentic
folk source for Chopin's mazurkas took on a
life of its own and why it has remained compelling for successive generations of Chopin schol2Ibid., pp. 66-68 (trans. slightly modified).
3Appropriately enough, Liszt may not have been responsible for the original anecdote that fed the myth, since
Princess Caroline Sayn-Wittgenstein, his Polish-born lover,
often served as his ghost writer. This authorial obscueven-lends
the folk story an even
rity-authorlessness,
greater mythic quality.
ars to the present day. I then examine the types

of music that sounded in the Warsaw of
Chopin's youth so as to redirect attention to
the urban musical culture that may, in fact,
hold some provisional answers to the question
that has led so many writers to search among
the music of the Polish peasants: how is it that
these mazurkas evoke the Polish nation?
I
Twenty years after the appearance of Liszt's
publication, critics began to take his Romantic
metaphor quite literally. The national music
Liszt spoke of metamorphosed into folk music
as writers of music history in Poland sought to
legitimize their observations in the more classconscious, truth-seeking climate of late-nineteenth-century
positivism. Marceli Antoni
Szulc, who in 1873 wrote the first Polish monograph on Chopin, turned to a rustic scene of
fiddlers playing and robust peasants stomping
their feet in the quintessential village setting
of the karczma, the Polish country tavern, in
order to describe the content of Chopin's op.
24, no. 2.
The second [mazurka of the op. 24 set], a lively
obertas [a fast-tempo variant of the mazurka], is
much like a quickly improvised picture of a country
tavern scene. Strappingyoung farm-handsand buxom
wenches (dorodneparobczakii hoze dziewoje)slowly
gather. The village musicians play with abandon,
pairs of dancers briskly form into circles, and the
gathered party dances until everyone dropsfrom exhaustion, all the while beating out the meter with
loud and lively heel stomping and clicking; finally
the jolly sounds quiet, and in the distance only receding footsteps are heard.4
Such a metaphor, to be sure, was not unlike
that of Liszt's Polish aristocrats dancing in ballrooms.5 But the shift from ballroom to karczma
4Marceli Antoni Szulc, Fryderyk Chopin i utwory jego

muzyczne (Fryderyk Chopin and His Musical Works) (1873;
rpt. Krak6w, 1986), p. 188. All Polish translations are my
own unless otherwise indicated.
5While Liszt never uses the word "aristocrats" in his discussion of the mazurka, his choice of the words "cavalier"
and (in this context) "lady," not to mention the gallant
behavior he describes, suggests something other than a
peasant scene. This is not simply a case of Liszt describing
the lower classes from a gentleman's point of view. Even
114

was significant. By relocating the dance to the

countryside,Szulc associatedthe mazurkaswith
an image of a pure and simple Polish folk; unadulteratedpeasants replacedcosmopolitan nobility to illustrate better the authentic national
content of Chopin's works. Szulc also found
mimetic explanations for the "Polishness" of
the music, and in suggesting that certain mazurkas in fact imitated the rasping sounds of
village fiddlers, he further blurred the line between the real and the imagined.
Szulc's most dramatic and influential elaboration of Liszt's original trope, however, was in
relation to op. 24, no. 2, and op. 68, no. 3, two
works that he singled out for their elements
"taken directly from folk music." Szulc was
reacting to the sharpened fourth scale degree
present in the melodic lines of each of these
mazurkas; specifically, to the Bis in the F-major section of op. 24, no. 2, and the Eisin the Bt
section of op. 68, no. 3.6 He thus became the
first writer to apply a general concept of folk

borrowing to specific mazurkas.
Four years later, in 1877, the Polish musician and music critic MaurycyKarasowskicame
out with his own monograph on Chopin in
German. In it, he recounted memoirs and letters that described a young Chopin listening
intently to peasant music. Even more brazenly
than Szulc, Karasowskiextrapolatedfrom these
fragmentary accounts that the composer had
not only listened to folk songs on a regular
basis, but had also internalized them in order
to incorporatethem-or, in Karasowski'swords,
"to idealize them"-in his art music. Recalling
Szulc's discussion of direct folk borrowings in
Chopin's op. 24, no. 2, and op. 68, no. 3,
Karasowski suggested that Chopin "frequently
interwove some especial favourite [folk song]
in the "subjects and impressions" he draws from Chopin's
mazurkas-the "rattling of spurs, the rustling of crepe and
gauze beneath the airy lightness of the dance, the murmur
deof fans and the clinking of gold and diamonds"-his
scription relies on what could only be the accoutrements
of the upper classes. See Liszt, Friddric Chopin, p. 78.
6Szulc writes: "We namely call attention to the jarring,
but nevertheless extremely characteristic, dissonant B? in
the raised seventh harmony of the third part in F major.
Compare this to the E? in the B6 Trio of posthumous op.
68, no. 3. This is taken directly from folk music (iywcem
to wyjite z muzyki ludowej)" (Szulc, Fryderyk Chopin i
utwory jego muzyczne, p. 188).
into his own compositions," a particularly embellished suggestion that would sparkthe imagination of subsequent biographers.7
Szulc's discussion of op. 24, no. 2, eventually found its independent way into two other
publications: Ferdynand Hoesick's Chopin
monographof 1910-11, andHugo Leichtentritt's
1921-22 analysis of Chopin's piano pieces. Both
'Moritz Karasowski, Freddric Chopin: His Life, Letters, and
Works, trans. Emily Hill, 2 vols. (London, 1879), I, 30-32;
emphasis added. Although Karasowski does not often cite
his sources, it is clear that most of his knowledge of Chopin's
youth derives from not only Chopin's letters but also
Kazimierz Wladyslaw W6jcicki's unusual history of Warsaw citizenry, Cmentarz Powpzkowski pod WarszawQ (The
Powazkowski Cemetary near Warsaw) (Warsaw, 1855-58;
Warsaw, 1974). For an interesting discussion of the numerous liberties Karasowski took in his interpretations of the
facts of Chopin's life and in his published transcriptions of
Chopin's letters, see Krystyna Kobylafiska, Korespondencja
Fryderyka Chopina z rodzinq (Chopin's Correspondence
with Relatives) (Warsaw, 1972), pp. 9-25. Kobylafiska also
offers a specific example of a change made by Bronislaw
Edward Sydow, another editor of Chopin's letters. It concerns one of the few letters in which Chopin discusses listening to folk music. Sydow embellished the now lost letter
to read: "wenches sang a familiar song [my emphasis] in
shrill, semi-tonal dissonant voices" (dziewki piskliwym
semitoniczno-falszywym
glosem
znanq piosnk?
wygpiewywaly), whereas Kazimierz W6jcicki, the first author to publish the letter (in 1856), and working with the
original in hand, offered this version: "girls sang in shrill,
semi-tonal dissonant voices" (dziewczyny piskliwym
semitoniczno-falszywym
wygpiewywaly glosem). Sydow's
transcription constitutes yet another attempt to demonstrate Chopin's "familiarity" with the folk.
It should be further noted that the tendency of music
historians to emphasize Chopin's unmediated contact with
folk music gave rise to another interesting myth: that of
Chopin's knowledge of Jewish folk music. In a letter sent to
his parents from Szafarnia in 1824, Chopin recounted playing a piece he referred to as "The Little Jew" when a Jewish
merchant visited the Dziewanowski manor where the young
composer was vacationing. W6jcicki, commenting on
Chopin's letter in 1855, correctly interpreted this as a
majufes, a degrading song and dance that Polish Jews were
obliged to perform for gentile Poles on request. In the hands
of historians, however, "The Little Jew" was not only misinterpreted as a title Chopin gave to his Mazurka op. 17, no.
4, but, more absurdly still, the offensive prank became evidence of Chopin's firsthand knowledge of Jewish folk music. See, for example, Ferdynand Hoesick, Chopin: iycie i
tworczo?6 (Chopin: Life and Works), 3 vols. (Warsaw, 191011); 4 vols. (rev. edn. Krak6w, 1962-68), I, 76, 82; Karasowski,
Frederic Chopin: His Life, Letters, and Works, I, 25;
Mieczyslaw Tomaszewski, Fryderyk Chopin: A Diary in
Images, trans. Rosemary Hunt (Krak6w, 1990), pp. 22, 30.
Chopin's letter appears in Kobylafiska, Korespondencja
Fryderyka Chopina z rodzinq, pp. 39-40. For an informative
and thoughtful study of the majufes, see Chone Shmeruk,
"Majufes," in The Jews in Poland, vol. I, ed. Andrzej K.
Paluch (Krak6w, 1992), pp. 463-74. I am grateful to Michael
Steinlauf for bringing this article to my attention.
115

BARBARA
MILEWSKI
Chopin's
Mazurkas
19TH
CENTURY
authors repeated Szulc's bold contention that

the sharpened fourths in the F-major section of
op. 24, no. 2, were "taken directly from folk
music."8 For reasons unknown, analytical interest in op. 24, no. 2, dwindled soon afterward,
whereas op. 68, no. 3, came under increased
scrutiny. In 1939, exercising more restraint than
previous writers, Gerald Abraham suggestedrather than asserted-that
op. 68, no. 3 (and
nos. 1 and 2) "might easily be simple transcriptions of authentic
peasant mazurkas."'9
Abraham offered this supposition in part because he found no element of virtuosity in
Chopin's op. 68. But he had other reasons, too:
All three possess the characteristics of the folk mazurka:love of the sharpenedfourth (opening of no. 2
and the middle section of no. 3), introduction of
triplets in the melody (no. 1), play with tiny motives
(all three), drone bass (whether stylized into an unobtrusive pedal as in the opening of no. 2 or emphasized in primitive open fifths as in the middle sections of the same piece and of no. 3), the feminine
ending of the piece (even if only suggested by the left
hand as in no. 2), and of course the characteristic
rhythms and melodic patterns of the folk mazurkas
throughout.10
Abraham thus effectively listed the idiosyncratic elements common to any number of classical renderings of European "folk" music. Ironically, the only characteristic unique to the mazurka that Abraham singled out-the mazurka
not at all peculiar to op. 68, but
rhythm-is
appears pervasively throughout all of Chopin's
mazurkas. Abraham was generalizing: in effect
he claimed that standard features of the mazurka genre as a whole (indeed, common features of "rustic" music) were both specific to
Chopin and the result of direct folk borrowings.11Delivered by one of the preeminent schol8Ferdynand Hoesick, Chopin: iycie i twdrczos6, IV, 218;
Hugo Leichtentritt, Analyse von Chopins Klavierwerken,
2 vols. (Berlin, 1921-22), I, 223.
9Gerald Abraham, Chopin's Musical Style (London, 1939),
p. 24.
1OIbid.,p. 24.
"Years after Abraham's study appeared, Carl Dahlhaus, in
his essay "Nationalism and Music," claimed that it is
aesthetically legitimate for something that is common to
all national music to be interpreted as specifically national
as long as there is collective agreement that certain characteristics are recognized as such: "Aesthetically it is per-
ars of British musicology, this opinion carried

significant weight.
A case in point is Arthur Hedley's 1947 study,
Chopin, which again isolated op. 68, no. 3,
from the rest of Chopin's mazurkas. Refuting a
claim made by B1la Bart6k that Chopin probably had no knowledge of authentic Polish folk
music, Hedley described Chopin as a national
composer who had had actual contact with rural music.12 He also referred his readers to one
of the only three letters in which the composer
mentions hearing peasant songs in the countryside. In order to explain the absence of authentic folk themes in the mazurkas, Hedley
made three observations: (1) that Chopin was a
connoisseur of Polish national music; (2) that
Chopin "chose" not to use folk songs in his
works; and (3) that the folk mazurkas served
only as a point of departure for his imagination.
Lest his readers be dissatisfied with this gloss,
Hedley offered them a small proof: the middle
section of op. 68, no. 3.
Indeed Chopin became a connoisseur of Polish national music and would not tolerate his less sensitive compatriots' tinkering with it. . . . Nor did he
fectly legitimate to call bagpipe drones and sharpened
fourths typically Polish when they occur in Chopin and
typically Norwegian when they occur in Grieg, even if
some historians are irritated by the paradox of something
which is common to national music generally and yet is
felt to be specifically national in the consciousness of the
individual nations. Firstly the national coloring does not
reside in separate, isolated traits, but in the context in
which they are found. Secondly the aesthetic element, the
validity, has to be distinguished from the history of the
origin and growth, the genesis: if there is a class of people
among whom the music is transmitted and who recognize
a body of characteristics as specifically national, regardless of the provenance of the separate parts, then those
people constitute an aesthetic authority." This claim is
part of Dahlhaus's overarching argument that nationalism
in music is primarily the result of its sociocultural function and only secondarily of its rhythmic and melodic
substance. While Dahlhaus's nonessentialist position is
welcome, it is not without problems. Who constitutes "the
consciousness of individual nations"? Who actually speaks
for a "class of people," and are we willing to grant whomever it may be "aesthetic authority"? What do we make of
an "aesthetic authority" that resides outside the nation
whose music is in question? Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of
the Later Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall
(Munich, 1974; Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), p. 95.
'2Arthur Hedley, Chopin (1947; rpt. London, 1953), p. 166.
Compare B6la Bartbk Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff (New
York, 1976; Lincoln, Neb., 1992), pp. 322-23.
116

choose to make direct use of folk themes in his own

works. Among his sixty Mazurkasvery few contain
an identifiable folk tune (the poco pizhvivo of op. 68,
no. 3 [1829], is an exception). The mazurs, obereks,
and kujawiaks (the three main forms of the mazurka), which Chopin heard constantly in his early
days, were no more than a stimulus to his imagination, a point of departurefrom which he carriedthe
basic materials to a new level, where they became
embodied in a highly civilized art-music without
losing anything of their native authenticity.13
Two years later, in 1949, the Polish musicologist Zdzislaw Jachimecki also identified an
"authentic rustic melody" in the middle section of op. 68, no. 3: "In the trio section (poco
piuzvivo) of the F-major mazurka written while
Chopin was still in Warsaw in 1830 (op. 68, no.
3), Chopin allowed himself to use an authentic
its primitive range and
rustic melody-with
and
mode-above
a constantly
form,
Lydian
bass
sounding open-fifth,
accompaniment."'14
But he amplified the claim, stating that it was
only one example among many in which
Chopin used authentic motives in his mazurkas.'5 Like Abraham, he pointed to the "telltale" folk elements in op. 68, no. 3-and in
Chopin's other mazurkas-as proof of folk borrowing: the use of an open-fifth bass accompaniment; short, repeating motives in a restricted
melodic range; and the appearance of sharpened fourths. Jachimecki's unique contribution,
however, was to portray Chopin as a composer
with very modern sensibilities, an empirical
scholar-composer
diligently collecting and
studying music of the folk-an image more
akin to Bart6k, Kodily, or Szymanowski than
to his Romantic contemporaries
Liszt or
Schumann. "He knew ... the most authentic
Polish folk music because he drew it straight
from its source, without the aid of middlemen.
... On numerous occasions, in conversations
with friends or in his letters, Chopin spoke of
his efforts to familiarize himself with folk mu-
13Hedley, Chopin, p. 166 (Hedley's emphasis).

14Zdzislaw Jachimecki, Chopin: rys zycia i tw6rczofci
(Chopin: His Life and Works) (Warsaw, 1949), p. 164.
15For the other instances where Jachimecki mentions
Chopin's use of folk material in the mazurkas, see ibid.,
pp. 164, 165, and 167.
sic and to study thoroughly this folk music's

intrinsic features."'16
By another route, then, Jachimecki, like
Hedley, tried to refute Bart6k's claim that
Chopin had probably not known authentic Polish folk music. The offending claim had come
as early as 1921 in Bart6k's essay, "The Relation of Folk Song to the Development of the
Art Music of Our Time." Here Bart6k spelled
out in no uncertain terms his distaste for imperfect (read: inauthentic) popular art music.
The outcome of this mixture of exoticism and banality is something imperfect, inartistic, in marked
contrast to the clarity of real peasant music with
which it comparesmost unfavorably.At all events it
is a noteworthy fact that artistic perfection can only
be achieved by one of the two extremes: on the one
hand by peasant folk in the mass, completely devoid
of the culture of the town-dweller, on the other by
creative power of an individual genius. The creative
impulse of anyone who has the misfortune to be
born somewhere between these two extremes leads
only to barren,pointless and misshapen works.'7
Bart6k linked up this negative assessment directly with Chopin, first by suggesting that
Chopin "probably had no opportunity of hearing the genuine peasant music at any time,"
then by stating directly that "Chopin was to a
certain extent influenced by the Polish, and
Liszt by the Hungarian popular art music....
[So] much that was banal was incorporated by
them with much that was exotic that the works
concerned were not benefited thereby."'8 With
the publication of Bart6k's article in England,
Poland, and later the United States, Chopin's
music and his image as a national composer
came under siege.
Why did Bart6k's views on national music
become such an important part of the Chopin
16Ibid.,p. 162.
"7Bla Bartok Essays, p. 322. (How sublimely fortunate for
Bart6k to have had an appreciation for peasant music and
the creative power of a genius!)
8lIbid., p. 323. Bart6k's criticism of Chopin in this essay
was not an isolated event. On at least three other occasions Bart6k questioned Chopin's knowledge of authentic
folk music. It seems that the first criticism appeared in
print a year earlier, in 1920, in his essay, "The Influence of
Folk Music on the Art Music of Today." But it was the
1921 essay reprinted in the Polish music journal Muzyka
in 1925 to which Jachimecki was reacting.
117

BARBARA
MILEWSKI
Chopin's
Mazurkas
19TH
CENUTRY
folk story? At the time of his death in 1945,

Bart6k was not only considered a major composer, but also recognized for his achievements
as a pianist, pedagogue,and ethnomusicologist.
During his lifetime, he often assumed the role
of reporter, critic, reviewer, musicologist, and
linguist, especially during the earlierpart of his
career. Most importantly, his writings, published in different languages throughout Europe and in the United States, established him
as a prominent expert on folk music and its
relationship to national high art music. So influential was he that by the time a collection of
his essays appeared in English translation in
1976, its editor, Benjamin Suchoff, characterized Bart6k as a "universal man of music of
modern times-a twentieth-century Leonardo"
and boldly added "champion of the musically
oppressed"to the already grandlist of Bart6k's
accomplishments.19
What was at stake if the great Hungarian
composer's view of Chopin's national music
went uncontested? Mythology. Fornearly a century historians and scholars had tried to demonstrate the Polish content of Chopin's mazurkas and in so doing had come to depend with
ever-increasingpersistence on the folk influence
argument. By calling into question Chopin's direct exposure to the music of Polish peasants,
and by underscoringthe importance of authentic folk music in the creation of national music,
Bart6k threatened to undermine the folk myth
that had been offered as historical truth for so
many years. In response,writers like Jachimecki
and Hedley scrambled to assemble the "proof"
that would preserve the myth.
Also at stake was Chopin's status as a "legitimate" national composer. Behind Bart6k's
criticism that Chopin had no contact with genuine peasant music was a more telling preoccupation with the concept of authenticity and the
related ideas of originality and genius, all of
which betrayedan anxiety of influence divorced
from any "genuine" concerns about the role of
folk songs in art music. Chopin had been the
first composer to export successfully to the
West a national music that was linked in the
Romantic imagination with an indigenous prac-
9gIbid., p. v.
tice. It was his music that had set the benchmark for subsequent generations of national
composers. Bart6k,then, was doing battle with
Chopin's legacy. That Bart6k's own paradigm
of national music was itself highly constructed
and idiosyncratic seemed to pass unnoticed;
authenticity d la Bart6k had now become the
generally acknowledged proving ground.
Thus by the time Maurice Brown set out in
1960 to create a complete index of Chopin's
compositions, he had his work cut out for him.
For almost a century the tale of folk-source
borrowing had passed from one writer to the
next. Along the way, it had become attached
first to two mazurkas, op. 24, no. 2, and op. 68,
no. 3, then most firmly associated with the
latter. Yet unluckily for Brown, none of his
predecessors had taken the trouble to produce
in print the precise folk melody supposedly
borrowed by Chopin for the middle section of
op. 68, no. 3. Brown rose to the occasion. In an
act of earnest positivism he included a textless
Polish folk melody entitled "Oj Magdalino"
(ex. 1), a tune that would serve as a floating
folk trope in music-historical literature for the
next thirty years.20
Unfortunately for us, however, Brown did
not cite any source for the tune, and it is not to
be found in the likeliest places: Kolberg'sPiedni
ludu polskiego (Songs of the Polish Folk), or
W6jcicki's Piesni ludu Bialochrobat6w,
Mazurdw i Rusi znad Bugu (Songs of the
Bialochrobat, Mazur and Ruthenian Folk from
the Bug Region).21And while Miketta in his
comprehensive study on Chopin's mazurkas,
20Maurice J. E. Brown, Chopin: An Index of His Works in

Chronological Order (rev. 2nd edn. London, 1972), p. 38.
21Oskar Kolberg, Piegni ludu polskiego, vol. 1 of Dziela
wszystkie
(The Complete Works) (Krak6w, 1961);
Kazimierz Wladyslaw W6jcicki, Piedni ludu Bialochrobatdw Mazurdw i Rusi znad Bugu, 2 vols. (Warsaw, 1836;
rpt. Wroclaw, 1976). Nor does it appear in the obvious
twentieth-century sources: J6zef Michal Chomifiski and
Teresa Dalila Turlo, Katalog dziel Fryderyka Chopina (A
Catalog of Fryderyk Chopin's Works) (Krak6w, 1990), pp.
116-17; Helena Windakiewiczowa, Wzory ludowei muzyki
polskiej w mazurkach Fryderyka Chopina (Examples of
Polish Folk Music in Fryderyk Chopin's Mazurkas)
vol. 61, no. 7 (Krak6w,
Wydzial Filologiczny-Rozprawy,
1926). I also consulted twentieth-century folk-song collections on the chance that "Oj Magdalino" may have come
from a more recent anthology, but was unable to find it in
any printed collection of folk songs.
118

Tempo di oberek
Ell i/IO
I a.
BARBARA
MILEWSKI
Chopin's
Mazurkas
I 12a.
I
O
Example 1: Maurice Brown's folk source for Chopin's Mazurka, op. 68, no. 3, in
Chopin: An Index of His Worksin Chronological Order (2nd rev. edn. London, 1972), p. 38.
Mazurki Chopina, suggests that the melody of

the middle section of op. 68, no. 3, resembles
one that would be played on a fujarka (a peasant flute), he gives no indication that Chopin's
melody is a direct folk borrowing.22Brown's
"OjMagdalino,"as the folk source for Chopin's
op. 68, no. 3, thus seems rather mysterious.23
But even putting aside the question of the tune's
origins for a moment, what does it have in
common with the poco pih)vivo section of op.
68, no. 3? Everything, and yet nothing. While
both melodies circle within a range of a fifth,
Chopin's also fills out an octave at its phrase
endings. And although both melodies consist
of two four-measure phrases, "Oj Magdalino"
has two distinct phrases while the poco pih)
vivo melody in op. 68, no. 3, has one phrase
that is repeated, its last measure slightly modified for harmonic closure during the repeat. In
fact, beyond Chopin's replication (twice) of the
melodic fragment in m. 6 of Brown's "Oj
Magdalino," no direct correlation exists be-
C is some sort of folk fife melody. The characteristic Lydian, augmented fourth appears in it. The
melody is made up of 5 pitches: b2-c3-d3-e3-f3 with endings in which Chopin's 'stylization' expands the scale of
this 5-pitch peasant flute to 3 lower pitches-a2, g2, f2-in
order to complete an octave scale for this most modest
instrument" (Janusz Miketta, Mazurki Chopina [Krak6w,
1949], p. 409).
230Of course the fact that the source for "Oj Magdalino"
has not yet been located does not prove that Brown's tune
is spurious. But also mysterious in terms of the supposed
folk source are the tune's Italian-language tempo marking,
"Tempo di oberek," and the editorially suggested Eis in
the first four-measure phrase, not to mention the fact that
this "folk-tune" appears textless. Noteworthy, too, is the
fact that Brown provides a "folk source" for only one other
Chopin composition in his index, the popular Polish Christmas carol, Lulajie Jezuniu, which has an often noted, but
highly questionable, relationship to Chopin's Scherzo No.
1 in B Minor, op. 20.
22"Statement
tween the tunes. Indeed, "Oj Magdalino" is so

generic that it might bear a resemblance to
virtually any simple (rustic) song or songlike
melody with repeated motives, a narrow melodic range, and clearly punctuated, four-measure phrases. In the end, Brown's comparison
boils down to an isolated measure.
What does, however, distinguish "Oj
Magdalino"from any other unremarkabletune
is the holupiec gesture found at the end of its
first and second phrases and at the beginning of
the second phrase. In an oberek (a quick tempo
variant of the folk mazur) this holupiec gesture-a measure of three eighth notes sung or
played on the same pitch in 8 meter-accompanies the heel stomping of dancersthat can mark
the beginning or ending of the dance. It is one
of the more recognizable features of indigenous
Polish music because it is inherently dramatic;
its three punctuated, repeated notes at the beginning of a dance signal the listeners and dancers to attention, while at the end of a dance
these same repeated notes articulate closure.
Such holupiec gestures are not only a characteristic feature of contemporary Polish folk
music, but also appear in the nineteenth-century dances collected by Kolbergand W6jcicki.
Ironically, op. 24, no. 2, is the only Chopin
mazurka that makes conspicuous use of this
gesture. It first appearsin the A section at mm.
16 and 20 as a closing figure (ex. 2a), then again
in mm. 48 and 52. Immediately thereafter (ex.
2b, mm. 53-56), Chopin uses the holupiec repeatedly-almost parodically-to signal the end
of the A section, with the repeating pitch cl as
a pivot tone between C major and the new key,
Db major, in which Chopin begins the B section, again using a holupiec. In this new section, Chopin plays up the gesture, repeating it
three more times (mm. 61, 65, and 69, each
119

19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
a. Mm. 16-20.
12
pi"o
"
"
18
b. Mm. 51-57.
51
ritenuto
>
>
a tempo
>
dolce
Example 2: Chopin, Mazurka, op. 24, no. 2.
time repeating the four-measure phrase for

which the holupiec is a beginning), now with a
forte marking on the first beat as well as the
staccato marking and accent on the second and
third beats. No less than fourteen repetitions of
this gesture sound by the end of op. 24, no. 2. If
"Oj Magdalino" shares an affinity with any of
Chopin's mazurkas, it seems to be with this
one and not with op. 68, no. 3.
But not a single scholar disputed the citation
of "Oj Magdalino." Instead, it was integrated
into the op. 68, no. 3, folk story, first by Paul
Hamburger in 1966. Here the tale with all of its
layers intact reached its climax. Hamburger
attempted to reconcile Brown's new finding,
the "proof" that could finally lend the story of
folk borrowings some serious weight, with
Bart6k's pronouncements on national music,
authenticity, and folklore. Without a trace of
irony, he incorporated two contradictory concepts-one intended to prove the folk authenticity of Chopin's mazurkas, the other, their
a single narrative.
artificiality-into
Most of Chopin's dances, to be sure, cannot be traced
to a single, definite folk-model, but arise from a
composite recollection of certain types of melodies

and rhythms, which are then given artistically valid
expression in one or more works. In this respect
Chopin's Polish-ness is ratherlike Dvofik's Czechness, and Bloch's Jewish-ness: all three composers
distil national flavours from material that is not
strictly folkloristic-in contradistinction to Bart6k,
Vaughan Williams, and the Spanish national school
who start off from genuine folklore. But in a few
cases a definite model is found to exist, such as the
folk-tune "OjMagdalino"which appearsin the Poco
piti vivo of the youthful Mazurkain F major, op. 68,
no. 3 (op. posth.), of 1829.... This example shows
why there are so few direct references to folklore in
Chopin's dances:special contexts as the above apart,
he felt hemmed in by the primitive rigidity of these
melodies in their entirety. On the other hand, he
readily let himself be inspiredby their elements: the
sharpened fourth, the drone bass, the sudden triplets, the frequent feminine endings, the repetition of
one-barmotifs.24
24Paul Hamburger, "Mazurkas, Waltzes, Polonaises,"
in
Frederic Chopin: Profiles of the Man and the Musician,

ed. Alan Walker (London, 1966), pp. 73-74 (Hamburger's
emphasis).
120

Almost thirty years later, in 1992, op. 68, no.

3, was again invoked as the classic example of
folk influence in Chopin's mazurkas, this time
by Adrian Thomas: "There can be little doubt
whence came the inspiration for the trio of the
Mazurka in F major, op. 68, no. 3, from 1830.
... A fujarkamelody over an open fifth drone,
it betrays its unadorned oberek origins with an
insouciant ease."25 Brown's folk trope did not
disappear either, at least not entirely. A reference to "Oj Magdalino," though not the music,
makes its way into one of Thomas's footnotes
intended to demonstrate the "unadornedoberek
origins" of op. 68, no. 3. Only in Jim Samson's
most recent publication, his 1996 Chopin, did
Brown's "Oj Magdalino" finally float off the
page. Its only trace is in Samson's mention of
Thomas's description of the op. 68, no. 3, trio,
which Samson uses to make the case for folk
influence in Chopin's music.26
Ultimately, however, op. 68, no. 3, betrays
something else: the regular impulse of writers
and scholars to seek out a national or indigenous source for Chopin's mazurkas as a means
of understanding both these works and their
composer. Perhaps more importantly, an examination of the writings on op. 68, no. 3,
reveals a change in interpretations over time.
While Liszt's metaphor of dancing Polish cavaliers and ladies was the first attempt to describe the musical matter of Chopin's mazurkas, Szulc later replacedLiszt's image with heelstomping peasants in order to bolster his claim
that folk music, not salon music, determined
the national character of these works. In doing
so, Szulc effectively shifted and redefined the
idea of what constituted native Polish music.
Subsequent writers and musicologists not only
maintained Szulc's argument of folk influence
but also came to hear an essential "folkness"
in Chopin's mazurkas. As a result, they became increasingly convinced of the possibility
of recovering an actual source that the com-
25Adrian Thomas, "Beyond the Dance," in The Cambridge

Companion to Chopin, ed. Jim Samson (1992; rpt. Cambridge, 1994), pp. 154-55.
26"As Adrian Thomas has indicated, a passage such as the
trio from op. 68, no. 3 'betrays its unadorned oberek origins with an insouciant ease"' (Jim Samson, Chopin [1996;
1st American edn. New York, 1997], p. 65).
poser presumably had heard in the countryside

and had borrowed for his high art creations.
Opus 68, no. 3, became the locus of these
evolving interpretations. But the source that
scholars searched for was-and remains-inherently irrecoverablebecause it in fact never
existed. The essential folkishness that listeners heard in Chopin's mazurkas was a fictional,
mythopoetic folk, animated by stock rustic musical tropes and placed against the backdropof
a national genre as it was reconceived by
Chopin. His was a construct that had much in
common with the folk image created by his
Romantic compatriots, an element I shall consider in the next section of this article.
What began, then, with Liszt as a Romantic
conceit was expanded over time into the positivist notion of a specific and identifiable folk
source. The longer that Chopin's mazurkas survived the immediate time and place of their
creation, the more resonant became the tale of
folk borrowing until, frustrated by the search,
one scholar eventually came to defend the myth
by inventing yet another: an improbable folk
source for op. 68, no. 3. Positivism had returned to Romanticism. As if in the spirit of
Chopin's own nineteenth-century Romantic
project, the interpreters of Chopin's mazurkas
in the twentieth century had created an essential construct, at the base of which was something fundamentally imaginary.
II
That critics have never been able to establish direct folk borrowing in Chopin's mazurkas does not mean that the composer was unacquainted with a "pure" indigenous practice.
Scant as they may be, Chopin's letters on the
subject make it clear that the composer did
have access to the music of the folk. Moreover,
even had not one of these accounts survived,
sociohistorical writings on early-nineteenthcentury Polish culture confirm that in all probability Chopin-like any other middle-classPole
of his time-would
have had at least a modicum of exposure to peasant traditions. The question that remains, then, is not whether Chopin
encountered folk music in its "native habitat,"
but how such an encounter may have shaped
his work. The answer is elusive, not least because critics, as we have seen, have interpreted
121

BARBARA
MILEWSKI
Chopin's
Mazurkas
the evidence of Chopin's contact with the folk

as proof of his intimate familiarity with and
CEMNUTSICRY
appreciation for an "authentic" rural practice,
thereby placing undue emphasis on the music
of the Polish countryside as the source for his
mazurkas and skewing the historical record.
Chopin's letters from Szafarnia, on which so
many claims have been staked, might more
strongly indicate something entirely different:
that the folk and its music were a novelty for
Chopin, something shocking, altogether unfamiliar, and for these reasons noteworthy.27Thus
to arrive at a better sense of the Polish traditions that may have given form to the mazurkas, we need to consider not only the surviving
impressions of early-nineteenth-century rural
musical practice but also the range of national
music that Chopin was hearing in his urban
venues. In other words, how did the broader
musical landscape of Chopin's Poland relate to
his mazurkas?
Among Chopin'sbiographers,Liszt may have
come closest to the principal inspiration for
the mazurkas with his ballroom scene of dancing Polish gentry. At the turn of the nineteenth
century, the "nation" (nardd)was a prominent
topic not only among diplomats and revolutionary leaders determined to restore Poland's
lost independence but also among those members of the middle and upper classes concerned
with preserving-or more accurately, constructing-a national identity for Poland through its
cultural heritage:its language,history, religion,
19TH
27The novelty of Chopin's encounters with folk culture is

suggested in part by the simple fact that he relates these
"colorful" experiences to his parents back in Warsaw, and
by the conservatory-style language he uses to describe peasant music-making, which ultimately betrays his point of
reference: "We were having dinner, eating our last course,
when from afar we could hear choirs of jarring discant,
now from old crones gabbling through their noses [crossedout word], now again from girls unmercifully squeaking a
semitone higher at the top of their lungs, to the accompaniment of one fiddle-a three-stringed one at that-which
answered every sung strophe in an alto voice from the
back. Abandoning our company, Domusz and I got up
from the table and ran outside. . . . Fryc's wife brought
over a double-bass even worse than the fiddle: it had only
one string. Grabbing the dusty bow, I started playing the
bass, scraping so forcefully that everyone gathered to see
the two Fryces-one sleepily [?] on the fiddle, the other on
the single-stringed, monochord-like, dusty [crossed-out
word] rasping bass" (Korespondencia Fryderyka Chopina z
rodzinQ, ed. Krystyna Kobylafiska, p. 42).
and customs. Warszawskie Towarzystwo

Przyjacidl Nauk (The Warsaw Society for the
Friends of Learning) played a leading role in
this cultural cause. Founded in 1800, the organization attracteda wide circle of distinguished
nobles, intellectuals, revolutionaries,poets, and
artists with its engagingprogramsand its promise of a mixed milieu (an appealing quality in
Warsaw's atmosphere of social transformation).28 It held meetings and musical soir6es
and sponsored lectures on a broadrange of subjects-from language, literature, and ethnography to geography and the natural sciencesdesigned to inform members of intellectual
achievements both Polish and European.
Beyond the general promotion of learning,
the Society was specifically concerned with the
cultivation and enrichment of the Polish language. Most importantly, it financed and published monumental works such as Samuel
BogumilLinde'ssix-volume dictionary,Slownik
jezyka polskiego (1807-14) and Feliks
Bentkowski's history of Polish literature,
Historia literatury polskiej (1814), initiating
what would become a comprehensive effort to
consolidate and standardizea national language
and literary canon. Some members, like
Chopin's music teacher J6zef Elsner and the
influential professor and poet Kazimierz
Brodzif ski, were strongly influenced by
Herder's writings and insisted that language
was the only true carrier of national identity.
In the realm of music they argued that Polishlanguage vocal composition was the most legitimate form of "national" music and thus
best suited to serving the Polish cause. Another member, the composer Karol Kurpifiski,
28The Society's formal organization grew out of the informal gatherings held in Stanislaw Soltyk's famous Warsaw
salon, where both reform-minded aristocrats and intellectuals from the middle class were welcome. A universalist
Enlightenment love of learning and liberty together with
the pursuit of romantic (national) identity rooted in a concept of the "folk" shaped the Society's work. For brief but
informative discussions of the WSFL, see Jan Prosnak,
"Srodowisko Warszawskie w zyciu i tw6rczogci Fryderyka
Chopina" (Warsaw's Role in the Life and Music of Fryderyk
Chopin), Kwartalnik Muzyczny 28 (October-December,
1949), pp. 25-29; and Igor Belza, Miedzy Ofwieceniem i
Romantyzmem: polska kultura muzyczna w poczgtkach
XIX wieku (Between the Enlightenment and Romanticism:
Polish Musical Culture at the Beginning of the 19th Century) (Krak6w, 1961), pp. 13-15.
122

who played a prominent role in Warsaw'soperatic life,29 offered the same prescription. In
TygodnikMuzyczny (MusicalWeekly), Poland's
first music journal, founded and edited by
himself, the composer devoted a sizSKurpinfski
able number of articles to opera and song, emphasizing their important place in the development of a distinctively Polish music. In at least
one article Kurpifski not only asserted that
song alone constituted a national music literature, but also underscored the positive influence that performing Polish vocal music had
on national morality. He even went so far as to
argue that the increasing number of piano students at the Warsaw School of Music and Dramatic Arts (laterthe WarsawConservatory)was
an undesirable trend for the country in general
and for the nation's morals in particular; the
piano, he contended, was only necessary for
the study of harmony and as an accompaniment to singing.30
29Kurpiriski was the most prolific opera composer in Poland during the first half of the nineteenth century as well
as the Warsaw opera's musical director for sixteen years
and its conductor for thirty.
30KarolKurpiniski, "Kr6tka wiadomo46 o muzyce w polsce"
(A Brief Report on Music in Poland), Tygodnik Muzyczny i
Dramatyczny 1,'no. 7 (February 1821), 25-28. The privileging of vocal over instrumental music as inherently more
national helps explain why many Polish patriots were conflicted about the merits of Chopin's piano compositions,
even as they celebrated him as Poland's most distinguished
and most "national" artist. For these Poles-among them
the most notorious was the poet Adam Mickiewicz-it
was inconceivable that such a nationally minded composer would not recognize his patriotic duty to compose a
Polish opera. Indeed, so unsettling was Chopin's textless
but otherwise "national" music that one poet, Kornel
Ujejski, endeavored to "translate" a selection of Chopin's
piano compositions into Polish verse in the late 1850s in
his Tlumaczenia Szopena (Translations of Chopin). Although admittedly speculative, one possible explanation
for Chopin's "avoidance" of operatic writing while he was
still in Warsaw could be Kurpifiski himself. In temperament the two composers could not have been more different, and Kurpinski's strong opinions and aggressive tactics
as the National Theater's director (which ultimately caused
his codirector, Elsner, to resign in 1824) may have been a
serious deterrent for the more refined Chopin. It is also
possible to glean from a number of Chopin's letters that
while he was able to appreciate Kurpiniski's moral crusade
on behalf of national art, he found the approach irritating,
philistine, and fundamentally self-serving. Regardless, what
truly distinguished Chopin from his musical compatriots
was not an ability to follow the aesthetic prescriptions of
the day (that is, music plus Polish texts equals Polish
made light of this idea of Polishness from
music-Chopin
the start) but rather his insistence that music could tran-
Kurpifiskiarticulated with respect to music

what the Society believed more broadly:that it
had a moral obligation-a cultural-nationalmission-to awaken patriotic feelings among Poles.
During Stanislaw Staszic's tenure as the
Society's president, it formulated the following
mission statement: "To rescue and perfect our
mother tongue; to preserve and scrupulously
document our nation's history; to acquaint ourselves with our native land; . . . to propagate
knowledge and art; to collect and save from

oblivion anything related to our nation; and
especially to awaken, maintain and spread an
affection for Poland among our countrymen."31
To this end, the Society's members embarked
on a "discovery"of popularpractice (defined as
"folk" practice) and strove to transform it into
a national tradition. The inspiration, as elsewhere in Europe, came largely from Herder,
but also from Rousseau, whose works were
well received among the Polish intelligentsia.
Convinced that the Polish peasant (both in his
rural and in his transplanted urban form) expressed a distinct national character through
song, dress, and custom, and that folk culture
could serve as an invaluable source for the creation of national music and literature, the Society championed the first efforts at folk-song
collection. It was these early effortsthat brought
new status and cultural meaning to the folk
song precisely (and by no means coincidentally) at a time when the Polish nation as a
concrete, political reality had vanished from
the map of Europe and patriots felt compelled
to affirm and define the substance of their nation. Thus folk songs and the people who created them were the palpable matter of nar6d,
the substance aroundwhich one could draw an
imaginary national line in place of the geographic boundaries that had been erased. For
this reason, homegrown genres such as the
mazur, oberek, kujawiak, polonez, and
krakowiak became extremely important for
scend the need for texts and still have national-cultural
meaning. For a look at the numerous suggestions made to
Chopin that he compose a Polish national opera, see
Ferdynand Hoesick, Chopin: zycie i tw6rczo?6, II, 106-09.
31Towarzystwo Naukowe Warszawskie (The Warsaw Educational Society) (Warsaw, 1932), p. 6, as cited in Prosnak,
"Srodowisko Warszawskie w zyciu i tw6rczoici Fryderyka
Chopina," p. 26.
123

BARBARA
MILEWSKI
Chopin's
Mazurkas
Poles, and Poland's cultural elite came to rely

on them as durable aesthetic "markers" for
CEMNTUCRY
national perpetuity.
Early activities in the folk-song enterprise
were varied. Hugo Kolltaj initiated a comprehensive plan to study folk culture, which was
announced at the WSFLin 1802 but never realized. In 1813 another member of the Society,
Zorian Dolga-Chodakowski, seriously began
collecting Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and
Belorussian folk-song texts, but the Polish folk
songs were virtually forgotten after the
collector's death and only publishedin the twentieth century.32While many members of the
Society, like JoachimLelewel, Tadeusz Czacki,
and Karol Kurpifski, collected their own folk
materialwhereverthey came upon it (frompeasants who worked as servants and laborers in
town, from farm hands in the neighboring villages of Warsawwhere most of Warsaw'swellto-do summered, and even from friends and
acquaintances associated with the WSFL), it
was not until 1833 that the first anthology of
Polish (andUkrainian) folk songs with musical
accompaniment was actually published. This
was Piesni polskie i ruskie ludu galicyiskiego
(Polish and Ruthenian Songs of the Galician
Folk), whose editor, Waclaw z Oleska (Waclaw
Zaleski) invited Karol LipifAskito create keyboard accompaniments to the melodies he had
collected so that the collection would have
popular appeal and widespread use.33 No one
19TH
whose given name was Adam

32Dolga-Chodakowski,
Czarnocki, was born to Polish parents in Belorussia in 1784
and changed his name sometime around 1813. He first
began taking ethnographic notes in the form of a personal
journal-diary, which he kept during his exile to Siberia in
1810. He titled his journal My Reluctant Journey [Bez checi
podr6z moja] and in it recorded features of various ethnic
groups such as the customs, language, and song that he
observed on his forced travel to Omsk. Russian authorities
ordered his exile when it was learned that he planned to
steal into what was then called the Congress Kingdom of
Poland in order to join the Polish army, something he
believed was his patriotic duty to do. He did get to Warsaw
and eventually fought alongside Polish troops, but after
Napol6on's defeat he returned to folk-song collecting,
finding active support for his work in the WSFL. For an
informative account of Dolga-Chodakowski's
fascinating
life, see Julian Mailanka, the introduction to Zorian DolgaChodakowski, Spiewy Slawianskie pod strzechQ wiejskQ
zebrane (Slavic Songs Gathered under the Village Thatched
Roof) (Warsaw, 1973), pp. 9-44.
33Waclaw z Oleska, Piesni polskie i ruskie ludu galicyiskiego (Lw6w, 1833).
seemed to object to Lipifski's artful harmonizations, but what the "purists" of that time did
find troubling was Waclaw z Oleska's inclusion of texts written by various minor contemporaryPolish poets, including those by the sentimental poet FranciszekKarpifski. Many such
poems became popular as songs, particularly
among the petty gentry, and in this form were
disseminated among the general public.34
Kazimierz Wladyslaw W6jcicki, in the preface
to his own collection of folk songs, Piesni ludu
Bialochrobat6w Mazurdw i Rusi znad Bugu
(Songs of the Bialochrobat, Mazur and
Ruthenian Folk from the BugRegion),published
just three years later in 1836, accused Waclaw
z Oleska of trying to enlargehis collection with
these "corrupting" urban songs, and of being
unacquainted with what W6jcicki believed to
be an "authentic" (i.e., rural) folk.35But while
W6jcicki earnestly and energetically set off
across the Congress Kingdom of Poland and
into Hungarian,Croatian,Moravian,and Czech
lands to expand his collection of "true" folk
songs, he too did not seem to mind simplifying
melodies and adding piano accompaniments to
the songs in his collection. Even OskarKolberg,
who spent a lifetime compiling Poland's first
systematic and theoreticallybased ethnographic
study, first published his earliest collected folk
songs with keyboard accompaniments, which
he himself composed. In all these cases, efforts
at folk-song collection were fairly unsystematic and still coupled with the conventions of
high art.
By 1842, when Kolberg's first anthology,
Piesni ludu polskiego (Songsof the Polish Folk),
with piano accompaniment was published, the
musical aspect of folk songs had come under
closer scrutiny, and critics claimed that the
compiler's harmonizations compromised the
34Karpifiski's poem B6g sie rodzi (God Is Born), which became popular as a Christmas carol and quickly lost its
association with the author, is but one example. See
Czeslaw Milosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983), pp. 185-86. Richard Taruskin
draws attention to a similar phenomenon of urban "literary" songs in late-eighteenth-century Russian musical culture. See Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically
(Princeton, N. J., 1997), pp. 19-20.
Piesni
ludu
35Kazimierz
Wladyslaw
W6jcicki,
Bialochrobatdw Mazurdw i Rusi znad Bugu, I, 7-12.
124

authenticity of the folk melodies.36 In a now

well-known letter to his family sent in 1847,
Chopin judged that "[Kolberg's]labor only distorts matters and makes work harder for the
genius who will one day disentangle the truth.
Until then, all these beautiful things remain
with their noses straightened, rouged, and their
legs chopped off or stuck on stilts, a laughingstock for those who do not take them seriously."37Unlike earlier enthusiasts, collectors,
and critics who saw folk-song collections primarily as a way of propagatinga patriotic sort
of domestic entertainment, Chopin and a handful of other critics had now come to view anthologized folk music as a cultural document,
something beautiful in its own right and without need of translation into high art music to
be comprehensible and valuable to the upper
classes. Chopin's commentary in particularsuggests that he found the arrangement of native
melodies with decorative piano accompaniments not only ill conceived but also uninspired. This is a significant point when one
considers the claim made by so many later
writers that the supposed presence of real folk
tunes in Chopin's mazurkas-not necessarily
the height of his style-distinguished his works
as more richly conceived and authentically Polish than those of his compatriots.
In response to the criticism of colleagues
and peers, Kolberg worked harder to cast his
expanding folk-song collection as a scientific
record of Poland's indigenous treasures.In 1857
he published a new collection of folk songs
under the same title, Piegni ludu polskiego, but
this time without piano accompaniments. For
the first time, Polish folk songs were presented
in a single-line melodic transcription format in
an attempt to reveal their "pure," unadulterated nature, and this would become Kolberg's
governing principle until the end of his life.
Moreover, Kolberg omitted Belorussian and
Ukrainian songs (not to mention Jewish songs,
which even the earliest collectors did not include)-songs
that existed alongside
Polish
36Ludwik Bielawski, "Oskar Kolberg" in Slownik muzykow

polskich (A Dictionary of Polish Musicians), 2 vols.
(Krak6w, 1964), I, 285.
37Kobylaniska, Korespondencja
Fryderyka Chopina z
rodzinq, p. 161.
musical traditions until the first half of the

twentieth century-thereby depicting Poland's
musical culture as much more homogeneous
than it was in reality.
Yet despite Kolberg's efforts to market an
ideal of Polish folk culture, his new anthology
could not help but be a true (if for him an
undesirable) record of Polish folk music in a
very inclusionary sense: a record of musical
practice spontaneously sharedby both city and
village. Along with the "pure"folk music that
Kolberg "discovered" in the countryside, he
encountered-and included in his 1857 collection-songs that had been broadly circulated
by the earlier,successful anthologies of Waclaw
z Oleska and W6jcicki, not to mention his own
original collection of 1842. These were songs
whose "essential folkishness" could not, and
cannot, be verified because we can never know
to what degree the pioneering Polish collectors
may have modified-or even created-the tunes
for the songs they collected.38
Example 3 offers a glimpse of one such song,
Stala nam si? nowina (Hear Ye! Hear Ye!), an
unsettling tale about a woman who murders
her husband and buries him beneath a garden
of meadow rue. The song was made enormously
popular not only by published folk-song collections but also by Adam Mickiewicz's earlier
poetic retelling of the tale.39Here we can trace
the folk song's journey from W6jcicki's version, where it is straightforwardlymatched up
with an accessible tonic-dominant accompaniment, to Kolberg'sslightly more inventive ren-
38This is to say nothing of the musically untrained song

collectors who, when they were interested in music at all,
relied on the intervention of professional composers to
compose folklike melodies and piano accompaniments (in
other words, classical renderings of "rustic" music) for the
texts they had collected.
39The folk song was reworked into a poem by Mickiewicz
in 1820 and published as Lilije (The Lilies) in 1822 in his
first book of poems, Ballady i romanse. While the tale's
action takes place in an unspecified time, Mickiewicz's
poem is set during the period of King Boleslaus the Brave's
successful campaign against Kiev in the early eleventh
century, with the effect that the tale seems at least that old.
This is no small thing if one considers the new emphasis
that Polish nationalists placed not only on the nation's
history, but also on the idea that that history had been
unwittingly preserved by the folk through their songs. The
poem is reprinted in Adam Mickiewicz, Wiersze (Poems),
vol. 1 (Warsaw, 1992), pp. 85-97.
125

BARBARA
MILEWSKI
Chopin's
Mazurkas
19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
a. W6jcicki's arrangementof Stala nam si? nowina (HearYe! Hear Ye!) (W6jcicki,Piesni ludu Bialochrobatdw
Mazur6w i Rusi znad Bugu [Warsaw,1836; rpt. Wroclaw, 1976], vol. 1, Ruta, p.115).
Andantino
Sta - Ta
nam
no
siq
wi
sta
na,
Ta
nam
siq
bi
no
wi
na,
of
pa
ni
pa
na
za
bi
fa
pa
ni
pa
na
za
ta.
F
Fine
Example 3
dering (among other things, he opts for
supertonic chords in mm. 6 and 7 at the dark
textual essence of the song, "a lady killed a
man," and uses open fifths as dominant harmonies, making the tune sound at once
coloristically "modern" and archaic), only to
see it stripped of its harmonic decoration in
Kolberg's1857 anthology in orderthat the tune
appearmore authentically folklike. If songs such
as Stala nam sie nowina remind us of the free
exchange between artistic and folk practices

characteristic of early-nineteenth-century Polish musical life, they also reveal the unfortunate makings of a utopian Polish folk-song "tradition" that decidedly separatedurban musical
creation from the folk.
What Kolbergalso found in the countryside
were songs that were urban inventions from
the start (ex. 4). Written by professional composers for operas,vaudevilles, and operettas and
intended to sound simple and folklike, these
songs had migrated to rural settings because of
their popularity in Warsaw.40Although a numthis context it is interesting to note the related phenomenon of the folk Mass. A number of such composi-
40In
ber of scholars have arguedthat Polish composers such as Jan Stefani and J6zef Elsner assidutions were written by Elsner and Kurpiiski during the
first half of the nineteenth century. Unlike stage compositions, which were intended for an urban audience and
only later migrated to rural localities, folk Masses were
written expressly for use in and by village parishes. Composed in a simplified style in order that they be "understood" by peasants, these folk Masses are perhaps some of
the finest examples of how Polish art-music composers of
this period endeavored to create (and determine) a folkmusic style. See Alina Nowak-Romanowicz,
"Poglgdy
estetyczno-muzyczne
J6zefa Elsnera," in PoglQdy na
muzyke kompozytordwpolskich doby przedchopinowskiej

("J6zef Elsner's Aesthetic-musical
Outlook" in Viewpoints
on the Music of Polish Composers in the Days before

Chopin) (Krak6w, 1960), p. 90.
It should also be noted that the creation of folk songs
was not limited to composers. Kazimierz Brodziiski published a number of "folk songs" in his classic 1818 treatise,
o klasycznosci i romantycznosci (On Classicism and Ro-
manticism), while Chopin's close friend Stefan Witwicki

wrote over fifty "rustic songs," which appeared in print sometime before 1827 as (straightforwardly enough) Piosnki
sielskie (Rustic Songs). A handful of these songs were set to
music by Chopin and published posthumously as part of the
seventeen songs of op. 74. Importantly, unlike Mickiewicz's
Lilies, these were not poetic reworkings of well-known folk
songs but rather poems written in what was thought to be a
folk-song style and on folk themes: sophisticated imitations
of folk songs akin to Macpherson's Ossian but without the
misleading pretense of "authenticity."
126

b. Kolberg's arrangement of Stala nam si? nowina (Kolberg, Pies'ni i melodie ludowe w opracowaniu
fortepianowym, vol. 67, pt. 1 of Dziela wszystkie [Krak6w,1986] no. 99, pp. 171-72) (first published as Piesni
ludu polskiego, 1842).
Andante quasi Adagio
[1.] Sta - fa
nam
accelerando
no
si?
wi
sta
na,
- fa
nam
si?
w calej Posce znana
no
wi
- na,
wa
- Ifa,
4
A?ia
accelerando
legatissimo
tempo I
pa
- ni
pa
- na
- fa,
bi
za
- ni
pa
- na
pa
bi
za
a.
go
scho
fa.
tempo I
accelerando
[2.] Wo - gr6 - dku
go
scho
wa
wo-
fa,
gr6 - dku
accelerando
ru
tV
nim
na
po
- fa,
sia
ru
tq
na
nim
po
sia
I
tempo
c. Stala nam sip nowina (Kolberg,Piesni ludu polskiego, vol. 1 of Dziela wszystkie [Krak6w,1961] no. 3a, p.
13) (first published in Warsaw, 1857).
Od Warszawy (powszechnie znana).
Sta - Ia
nam
no
siq
pa - ni
pa - na
za
pa
pa
za
- ni
- na
wi
bi -
bi
- Ia
na
sta
pa - ni
pa - na
pa
pa
- ni
na
- Ia
nam
za
bi
za
bi
siq
no
wi
- na
Ia.
Example 3 (continued)
127

BARBARA
MILEWSKI
Chopin's
Mazurkas
461
19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
Mazurek (Elsnera).
z Warszawy (znany powszechnie).
Dwie Ma - ry - sie,
DwieMa-ry - sie,
spo-tka--Ty
spo-tka-ITy
siq
siq
i m6-wi
i m6-wi
- Ty
- Ty
so
o
al - bo ty
mi
jak - to ko - wal
bie
t6m
Sta - sia od'- stqp

so - bq ru - cha
al - bo ja go
bi - je
kie-dy
to
bie.
mlo
tem.
462
z Warszawy.
8- -- - - - -- - - - -- - - - -- - - - -- - - 1-mo.
Mazuerk dla tancerkl Mierzyliskidj (Damsego).

2 -do
1-mo.
I i
Ie
2-do
1A-mo .
A2-do-M,
463
z Warszawy.
Mazur (Stefanlego).
*3
2-do
KI1-mo.
1 171'.
1-mo.
<oi
2-do
464
z Warszawy.
z Komedio-Opery: Nowy Rok (Damsego).
465
z Warszawy.
z Komdeio-Operay: Mlynarz i Kominiarz (Tarnowskiego).
Example 4: Music composed by professional composers included in Kolberg,Piedni ludu

polskiego, vol. 1 of Dziela wszystkie [Krak6w,1961], nos. 461-65, pp. 447-48.
128

ously collected these and other folk tunes from

peasants with an eye (or rather, ear) to authentically reproducing them in their stage works,
it is impossible to know how accurate they
were, since no transcriptions of the tunes exist
for comparison.41 Moreover, given even the
fairly common interaction between Polish gentry and folk in the rural backwater that was
Warsaw at the end of the eighteenth century,
and the growing interest in peasant culture at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is
unlikely that professional composers would
have engaged in the type of "scientific" documentation of folk music that these scholars
suggest. As we have already seen, methodical
preservationand concerns for authenticity were
simply not important until later in the nineteenth century. When these early professionals
did borrow tunes from the folk, it was to add
local color to their compositions and therefore
most likely to be approximate. Indeed, well
into the 1840s much of Poland's cultural and
artistic elite considered peasants less as the
bearers of great artistic truths than as national
subjects useful in spreadingPolish patriotism.
It is precisely in this fashion that representations of Polish peasants made their way onto
the public national stage at the end of the eighteenth century. The composer Jan Stefani together with Wojciech Boguslawski (noted actor, theater director, librettist, and leading advocate for Polish national opera)were the first
to present a theatrical portrait of Polish peasant life as the central theme in their renowned
1794 vaudeville, Cud mniemany, czyli
Krakowiacy i Gdrale (The Would-Be Miracle,
or the Cracovians and Highlanders).42At the
Sladami
polskiej
Mieczyslaw
Banaszyniski,
Terpsychory (In the Footsteps of the Polish Terpsichore)
(Krak6w, 1962), p. 90; Alina Nowak-Romanowicz, "Poglidy
estetyczno-muzyczne J6zefa Elsnera," pp. 86-90; Tadeusz
Strumillo, Szkice z polskiego zycia muzycznego XIX wieku
Polish Musical Life)
(Sketches of Nineteenth-Century
(Krak6w, 1954), pp. 81-87, 166-67.
42To be sure, there were Polish rustic operas that predated
Boguslawski and Stefani's Krakowiacy i Gdrale, appearing
as early as the 1770s. The most notable among them were
Maciej Kamiefiski and Wojciech Boguslawski's Nedza
uszczeliwiona (Misery Made Happy) of 1778 and Jan David
Holland's 1784 Agatka czyli Przyjazd pana (Agatha, or the
Master's Arrival). The role of the peasant in these stage
works, however, was circumscribed in order to feature the
benevolence of the country manor house lord and thus
41See
simplest level the work is a love story about

the young peasants Stach and Basia, set against
the larger backdrop of a longstanding quarrel
between villagers from the outskirts of Krak6w
and the mountain dwellers of the Tatras.Basia's
stepmother, who is in love with Stach, conspires to keep him for herself by promising her
stepdaughter's hand in marriage to the highlander Bryndas. When Basia rejects Bryndas,
however, the dignity of the highlanders is offended and they seek revenge. Differences are
eventually settled by Bardos, the enlightened
student from Warsaw,who by the "miracle" of
an electric machine manages to teach everyone
(in between lots of simple songs and dances)
the merits of putting old disputes aside and
getting along.
When it premiered at the National Theater
in 1794 on the eve of the Ko'ciuszko Uprising,
Polish audiences were quick to understand the
story's thinly veiled allusions to Poland's political situation.43Boguslawski, himself a conspiratorbehind the national insurrection, made
certain that the spectacle of a large mass of
peasants bravely poised to do battle appeared
on the stage just as Koiciuszko was forming his
peasant militia in Krak6w. There was little
else Poles could do but interpretthe many songs
with suggestive lyrics such as "We must now
was entirely within the scope of contemporary European

stage depictions of the folk. Agatka and Nedza were "national" only insofar as they localized Enlightenment-era,
aristocratic attitudes toward the peasantry in the Polish
countryside. Absent from these works is any attempt at a
realistic portrayal of peasant life as well as the sociomoral
and patriopolitical elements that decided Krakowiacy i
Gdrale's key position in the history of Polish national
opera. For an incisive analysis of these and other Polish
operas of the period, see Alina Nowak-Romanowicz,
Klasycyzm [Classicism], Historia Muzyki Polskiej, vol. 4
(Warsaw, 1995), pp. 123-96.
43After the second partition of Poland in 1793, Polish revolutionaries realized that nothing short of a total national
uprising could match Prussian and Russian forces determined to prevent Polish independence. Abandoning hopes
for peaceful reform, the revolutionary Tadeusz Ko'ciuszko
(whose commitment to the ideal of liberty had earlier led
him to fight in the American Revolution) launched a rebellion that united Polish legions with scythe-bearing peasants and led them in a gallant but ultimately unsuccessful
uprising that resulted in the third and final partition of
Poland in 1795. For an informative study of this turbulent
period in Polish history, see Norman Davies, God's Playground: A History of Poland, 2 vols. (New York, 1982), I,
511-46.
129

BARBARA
MILEWSKI
Chopin's
Mazurkas
19TH
CENTURY
bravely defend, Whether we win, or we die"

not as ruminations on stolen cattle and clan
infighting, but rather as a rallying cry for revolution, national unity, and independence.44Unfortunately,Russian authorities in Warsawwere
also wise to the work's revolutionary agenda,
and after just three performancesKrakowiacy i
Gdrale was removed from the theater's repertory. The ban hardly mattered; once the uprising broke out, songs from the show quickly
spread to the streets, most notably after the
battle at Raclawice when Polish peasants captured enemy guns and forced the Russians to
retreat. Although the insurrection was eventually suppressed, in the politically charged atmosphere of the capital it seemed as though
nothing short of a real miracle had occurred.
The vaudeville's scripted socionational fraternity had left the stage to be realized in the
Polish cities and provinces where the fighting
had broken out.
Beyond playing its propagandistpart in the
national revolution, Krakowiacy i Gdrale also
inadvertently gave birth to a revolution of a
cultural-artistic sort. The presentation of a collective folk as stage hero was unprecedented in
Poland. By abandoning scenes of the feudal
manor and its attendant gentry, and inflecting
the libretto with the speech patterns of a peasant dialect (albeit from Mazovia, the region
surrounding Warsaw, not from Krak6w or the
Highlands), Boguslawski made the concept and
image that much more striking. Indeed, the
only nonpeasant character depicted in
Krakowiacy i Gdrale is Bardos,the poor, altruistic urban intellectual who, in a surprising
reversal of roles for the late eighteenth century,
ends up serving the peasants. Moreover, while
Stefani's music owed much to the stock tropes
of contemporaryEuropeanmusical representations of rustic characters (for example, simple,
repeating, conjunct melodies arrangedin fourmeasure phrases and accompanied by straightforward,tonic and dominant harmonies), in the
tions of Polish folk music it also introduced the

accented rhythms, sharpenedfourths, and openfifth drones, which from that point on became
inextricably linked with the idea of Polish folk
music. Given the tremendous and lasting success of Krakowiacy i Gdrale, we can only guess
that such elements had their desired effect in
part because they resonated with the musical
experience of the Polish audience.
These accomplishments notwithstanding,
with much of its talent either in exile or imprisoned, the national stage remained dormant
until the beginning of the next century.
Boguslawski and his troupe were compelled to
leave Warsaw when the insurrection was suppressed in 1794 and did not return until five
years later after a relative calm had settled on
the devastated capital. A number of Poland's
leading writer-revolutionarieswere not as lucky
and suffered persecution at the hands of Russian authorities: for example, the poet and playwright Niemcewicz, who had served as aidede-camp to Koiciuszko, was taken prisoner and
deported to Russia, where he spent two years
in solitary confinement. On his release he left
directly for America, returning to Poland only
eleven years later, in 1807, after Napoleon
formed the Duchy of Warsaw.45
Although Warsaw's National Theater eventually did begin to recover from the upheaval,
at first by cautiously resigning itself to a repertory of foreign operas and unambitious
vaudevilles devoid of political overtones,
Poland'snationally minded composersnow also
shifted their activity to the less conspicuous
setting of the salon. It was in this more private
yet still public sphere that during the first two
decades of the nineteenth century both amateurs and professionals nurtured a national
musical style, primarily by composing a seemingly endless number of Polish dances for piano that were more or less based on the folk
music then gaining greater attention.46 And
attempt to reflect more realistically the tradi-
44Wojciech Boguslawski, Cud mniemany, czyli Krakowiacy

i Gdrale (Warsaw, 1952), p. 70. It might be worth noting
that the entire libretto is in rhymed couplets, serving, perhaps, to underscore the trivial nature of the narrative and
thereby concealing the revolutionary message of the texts.
45Milosz, The History of Polish Literature, pp. 172-73.

46Tomaszewski lists some 300 composers who published
approximately 1,500 mazurs or mazurkas and over 700
polonaises during this period: see Wojciech Tomaszewski,
Bibliografia warszawskich drukdwmuzycznych 1801-1850
(A Bibliography of Warsaw Musical Prints 1801-1850) (Warsaw, 1992).
130

BARBARA
MILEWSKI
Chopin's
Mazurkas
30
f
0
,|7
Example 5: Ogifiski, Mazur, around 1810, mm. 33-36.
while such adopted (and adapted)dances as the

mazur, polonez, krakowiak, kujawiak, and
oberek could be dismissed as merely functional
ballroom pieces (they were, after all, scarcely
more popular than the waltzes, quadrilles, and
contredanses also offeredfor the amusement of
the Polish aristocracy and expanding middle
class), during this period of political anxiety
and heavy-handed censorship they could not
help but also play the critical role of nationalcultural memory.
In the Polish parlor-now turned national
art-music laboratory-certain features of the
piano mazurka rapidly became conventionalized. What we now recognize as the mazurka
rhythm (shorter note values on the downbeat
followed by longer ones on the second and third
beats of a measure in triple meter) became the
most distinguishing feature of the dance. Further markers of the mazurka came to include
accents placed on any beat of a measure, and
cadences stressing the second beat. Occasionally folk-music gestures such as the holupiec
(as seen in the middle section of Oginfski's
Mazur, ca. 1810, ex. 5), however loosely interpreted, were intended to give an even greater
rustic cast to these urbanart pieces. More rarely
(but perhaps most interestingly), motivically
repetitive, spun-out melodies above a suggestion of open fifths in the accompaniment were
intended to evoke (without too much taint) the
"primitive" sounds of peasant fife and bagpipe,
thereby transforming the piano mazurka from
a stylized dance into a mimetic description of
presumptively folklike elements. Yet for all of
these novel native characteristics, Warsaw'spiano mazurkas were still recognizably of a lateeighteenth-century European Classical dance
tradition. They were most often in ternaryform
(or a modified version thereof), homophonic in

texture, introduced in the major mode, and
given a contrasting middle section often either
in the dominant or the relative or parallel minor.47
Only in 1816 did this ratherprovisional music-making give way to more daring flourishes
of national art. With the Congress of Vienna
having established a new and independent Kingdom of Poland a year earlier,a number of public
restrictions were lifted, including those imposed
on free speech. Emboldened by the political
changes and fueled by a renewed optimism, nationalist composers began creating overtly patriotic works for the Warsaw stage. In particular, historical operas about illustrious Polish
rulers proliferated. In time, however, the optimism proved unwarranted, since Russian censors, disturbed by the content and sheer number of such works, again introduced bans in the
early 1820s on what they deemed politically
dangerous material in the National Theater's
repertory.What proved to be the more sustaining contributionof the day was Kurpiftski's1816
comic opera, Zabobon, czyli Krakowiacy i
G6rale (Superstition, or the Cracovians and
Highlanders).
Instantly dubbed Nowe
Krakowiaki (The New Cracovians), the opera
appearedto be a fairly innocuous reworking of
Boguslawski and Stefani's 1794 vaudeville.
Kurpinfski'slibrettist Jan Kaminfskijettisoned
the worrisome subversive couplets that had
47Fora representative survey of nineteenth-century
Polish
mazurkas, see Mazurki kompozytorow polskich na

fortepian:Antologia ze zbiorow Biblioteki Narodowej/Piano Mazurkas of Polish Composers:Anthology from the
Collection of the National Library,ed. Elibieta Wasowska
(Warsaw, 1995).
131

19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
a. Overturefragments.
Andante
b. Overturefragments.
c. Obertas,act I, mm. 1-18.

Lento
ppp (strojenie skrzypiec)
D" -
13
n,
pp espress.
,nw
P
mezzo voce
KRAKOWIACY
dolce
poco pih vivo
Example 6: Kurpifiski,Zabobon, czyli Krakowiacy i G6rale.

given sociopolitical force to the original libretto
and instead underscored the satire of the
"would-bemiracle."Kurpifiskiforhis partchose
to give prominence to the musical "folkishness"
that had only been sprinkled throughout
Stefani's score, dramatically opening the very
first measures of the overture with a violin
melody featuringsharpenedfourths above a sustained open fifth in the cellos and basses, and
infusing the rest of the opera with simple, re-
peating melodies played over open-fifth drones

(ex. 6a, b, and c). Such musical material was
meant, at least in part, to evoke the sounds of
fife and bagpipe, musical instruments now
firmly associated with the Polish folk.
Far from being an innocent paraphrase of
Boguslawski and Stefani's 1794 original,
Kurpiiiski's New Cracovians picked up the national battle almost exactly where the old
Cracovians and Highlanders had left off. The
132

BARBARA
MILEWSKI
Chopin's
Mazurkas
ObertasApLI
>
>J-
8
16
A
>
>
16
4PS40
>
>
>
-AP
>
237
~I
opas
k~
i'
I
r-
-7
*
*J>-&
"-q
*
1.77.r=.
POPra
"--">--*f
_._.f
Example 7: Kurpifiski and Damse, Wesele w Ojcowie, Obertas, finale (without coda).
critical difference was that Kurpifiski offered

another undermining strategy for expressing
patriotic sentiment on the stage, one in which
national identity was articulated principally
through the music rather than the text. Folk
music was thereby converted into a coded language for national continuity that operated
much like the Polish parlor dances, but now in
the highly public setting of the theater. Thus
while Polish historical operas were regularly
derailed by the authorities on grounds of their
political content, Kurpinfski'scomic opera successfully advanceda nationalist agendain plain
view of the censors.
Following Kurpifiski's example, Polish musical stage works in the 1820s became increasingly saturated with folk music elements. But
it was the finale in Kurpinfskiand Damse's
fabulously successful 1823 ballet, Wesele w
Ojcowie (A Weddingin Ojc6w)48 (ex. 7) that
codified the musical elements of a Polish folk
48In the nineteenth century alone, the ballet saw more
than one thousand performances on virtually every Polish
stage. See Jan Cieplifiski, A History of Polish Ballet: 15181945, trans. Anna Ema Lesiecka (London, 1983). Like
Kurpinski's Zabobon, czyli Krakowiacy i G6rale, Wesele
w Ojcowie also derived from Boguslawski and Stefani's
1794 vaudeville.
133

19TH
CENTURY
mazurka to become the prototype for both contemporary and later Polish composers, including Chopin. Thereafter,what was considered a
"real" Polish folk dance for the stage, and referredto as either an obertas (avariant name for
oberek) or a mazur, would have all of the following elements: triple meter; mazurka
rhythms;sharpenedfourthsin the melody; openfifth drones in the bass; accents on any beat of a
measure; and repeating motives in a fairly restricted melodic range-in fact all of the very
features that critics have argued point to the
direct folk influence in Chopin's mazurkas.
III
Numerous scholars during the past one hundred and fifty years have invested heavily in
the idea that Chopin's mazurkas were born out
of an unmediated understanding of native (i.e.,
rural)Polish music.49The argument has served
49Aside from the already discussed, music-historical accounts that make this claim, a number of ethnomusicological, style-classification studies have used nineteenthcentury and twentieth-century ethnographic data on Polish folk music to demonstrate a folk influence on Chopin.
See, for example, Windakiewiczowa,
Wzory ludowej
muzyki polskiej w mazurkach Fryderyka Chopina;
Wiecyslaw Paschalow, Chopin a polska muzyka ludowa

(Chopin and Polish Folk Music) (Krak6w, 1951); and Polska
muzyka ludowa i jej problemy (Polish Folk Music and Its
Problems), ed. Jadwiga and Marian Sobiescy (Krak6w, 1973).
An interesting twist in the ethnomusicology/Chopin linkup is Ewa Dahlig's article, "Z badan nad rytmikg polskich
taiic6w ludowych: mazurek, kujawiak, chodzony a
'mazurki' Chopina," (Studies on Polish folk-dance rhythms:
mazurek, kujawiak, chodzony and Chopin's "mazurkas")
Muzyka 3 (1994), 105-30. Here Dahlig argues that her
statistical comparison of Polish folk-dance rhythms with
rhythms found in Chopin's mazurkas reveals that the
mazur elements in Chopin's piano pieces are typical of
the stylized mazurka dance and not rooted in the folk
mazur. But if Dahlig's findings are unremarkable, her approach to the data is not; by using the same twentiethcentury folk sources customarily employed by other scholars to show the connection between Polish folk dances
and Chopin's mazurkas, but to opposite ends, Dahlig dramatically calls into question the "scientific" legitimacy
that such studies claim. On another level, it is interesting
to consider the implications of separating Chopin creation
from folk traditions, as Dahlig does, in the context of a
post-Communist Poland. In this respect, it appears as
though Communism's fall a decade ago has also brought
an end to a certain emphasis on narodowok6, or "nationality," in Polish music scholarship. Narodowok6, as an element of both cultural identity and socialist realist aesthetics in Communist-ruled Poland, had sent many scholars running to the folk to emphasize Polish national distinctness, to buttress Marxist-style arguments, or both.
as an attempt to explain the unique nature of

his mazurkas, the quality that makes them
highly original, personal, and, ultimately, Polish. By playing up the role of authentic folk
music in these works, however, critics have
necessarily downplayed the influence that
Warsaw's musical life had on the composer.
Yet as I have tried to demonstrate, this too was
part of the national musical tradition out of
and against which Chopin createdhis own high
art. Like any talented and sensitive young Polish musician of the time, he could not have
ignored the provocative visual and aural images of the nation being offered in the city's
different musical venues.
By the 1820s of Chopin's youth, experiments
in folk evocation and the appropriationof folk
imagery-national-style art music for stage and
salon-had already been tried with great success by such Polish composers as Stefani,
Kurpiftski, Damse, and Szymanowska. Polish
operas, operettas, ballets, and vaudevilles, often on historical themes and infused with folk
dances and songs for national coloring, were
performed regularly at the National Theater.
An ever-expandingrepertoryof national dances
created for parlorpiano was likewise promoted
as a patriotic form of entertainment and a sign
of national continuity. Thus for Chopin to become intimately acquaintedwith folk elements
such as sharpened fourths, open-fifth bass
drones, or cadences stressing the second beat of
a measure, he needed to go no further than
Warsaw'sart-music offerings. Put another way,
while direct contact with a rural musical practice doubtlessly made an impression on the
young Chopin, it was not singularly defining
for his particular evocation of a Polish musical
landscape.50To recognize that the composer
sO1f course, this is not to say that Chopin was naively
content to absorb received musical traditions, folk or artistic. Jeffrey Kallberg has persuasively argued that Chopin's
persistent struggle with the problem of repetition and return specifically in the mazurkas suggests that the composer regularly sought compositional solutions that would
accommodate both the element of repetition essential to
the national dance and his own aesthetic concern for formal design and closure. By directing our attention away
from the usual discussions of melodic and harmonic substance and toward the issue of form, Kallberg brings us
closest to understanding the innovations that actually did
separate Chopin's mazurkas from those of other Polish
134

drew on and synthesized a variety of musical

experiences both rural and urban is not, however, to diminish his achievement in this genre.
composers of the day. See Jeffrey Kallberg, "The Problem
of Repetition and Return in Chopin's Mazurkas," in Chopin
Studies, ed. Jim Samson (1988; rpt. Cambridge, 1991), pp.
1-23.
Instead, it gives us a richer context for appreciating the level of inspiration he brought to his
sonic account of the nation. In the end, Chopin,
like so many of his musical compatriots, was
not interested in recovering rural truths, but in
bringing Poles of the urbanupper classes a little
bit closer to a highly constructed and
O
0
desirable idea of themselves.
IN OUR NEXT ISSUE(SPRING2000)

ARTICLES
MATTHEWHEAD:Music with "No Past"? Archaeologies of
JosephHaydn and The Creation

SUSANNA GARCIA:
Scriabin's Symbolist Plot Archetype
The "Dark Saying" of the Enigma:

Homoeroticism and the ElgarianParadox
BYRON ADAMS:
CHARLES MCGUIRE:
Elgar,Judas,and the Theology of Betrayal
135

BARBARA
MILEWSKI
Chopin's
Mazurkas

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Chopin's Mazurkas and the Myth of the Folk

Author(s): Barbara Milewski

This content downloaded from 35.8.11.3 on Mon, 19 Aug 2013 15:04:57 PM

In 1852 there appeared under Franz Liszt's name

19th-Century Music XXIII/2 (Fall 1999) ? by The Regents

and so widely differing emotions that excite the

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site directions, is drawn to a single couple, each of

ars to the present day. I then examine the types

4Marceli Antoni Szulc, Fryderyk Chopin i utwory jego

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was significant. By relocating the dance to the

first writer to apply a general concept of folk

This content downloaded from 35.8.11.3 on Mon, 19 Aug 2013 15:04:57 PM

authors repeated Szulc's bold contention that

ars of British musicology, this opinion carried

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choose to make direct use of folk themes in his own

13Hedley, Chopin, p. 166 (Hedley's emphasis).

sic and to study thoroughly this folk music's

This content downloaded from 35.8.11.3 on Mon, 19 Aug 2013 15:04:57 PM

folk story? At the time of his death in 1945,

20Maurice J. E. Brown, Chopin: An Index of His Works in

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Mazurki Chopina, suggests that the melody of

tween the tunes. Indeed, "Oj Magdalino" is so

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Example 2: Chopin, Mazurka, op. 24, no. 2.

time repeating the four-measure phrase for

composite recollection of certain types of melodies

24Paul Hamburger, "Mazurkas, Waltzes, Polonaises,"

Frederic Chopin: Profiles of the Man and the Musician,

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Almost thirty years later, in 1992, op. 68, no.

25Adrian Thomas, "Beyond the Dance," in The Cambridge

poser presumably had heard in the countryside

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the evidence of Chopin's contact with the folk

27The novelty of Chopin's encounters with folk culture is

and customs. Warszawskie Towarzystwo

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Kurpifiskiarticulated with respect to music

knowledge and art; to collect and save from

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Poles, and Poland's cultural elite came to rely

whose given name was Adam

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authenticity of the folk melodies.36 In a now

that existed alongside

36Ludwik Bielawski, "Oskar Kolberg" in Slownik muzykow

musical traditions until the first half of the

38This is to say nothing of the musically untrained song

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exchange between artistic and folk practices

muzyke kompozytordwpolskich doby przedchopinowskiej

on the Music of Polish Composers in the Days before

o klasycznosci i romantycznosci (On Classicism and Ro-

manticism), while Chopin's close friend Stefan Witwicki