Part 12: The Polonaises - Heroic Hymns of Battle (Ch. XII)

Part 12 of chopin-the-man-and-his-music (Chapter XII: The Polonaises - Heroic Hymns of Battle).

Question this unit answers

If critics claim Chopin’s music lacks manliness, how do the Polonaises — martial, violent, chordally massive — refute that charge? And what does the form itself (a sixteenth-century processional dance of Polish nobles) contribute to Chopin’s expression of national identity?

Key terms

• Polonaise — Polish processional dance in 3/4 with the accent on the second beat, feminine endings to principal cadences, simple binary form (ternary when a trio is added), bass rhythm rarely altered.
• Polonais — the form’s earlier, masculine-gendered name, despite the dance’s masculine character now carrying a feminine title.
• Dance political — Huneker’s term for what the Polonaise became: a dance with words set to it, named after patriots and composers (Kosciuszko, Oginski, Moniuszko, Kurpinski).
• Le Militaire — nickname of the A major Polonaise, op. 40 no. 1.
• Heroique / “Drum” Polonaise — the A flat major, op. 53; the second nickname reflects performance distortion by speed-driven virtuosi.
• Siberian / Revolt Polonaise — the E flat minor, op. 26 no. 2.
• Polonaise-Fantaisie — op. 61 in A flat, a late work whose plasticity resists the conventional Polonaise mould.
• Andante spianato — the unaccompanied G major introduction preceding the E flat Polonaise, op. 22.
• Nuanciren — German term Huneker borrows for expressive shading, applied to the mazurka episode in op. 44.
• Two groups of Polonaises — the objective/martial versus the moody, mournful and morose.

Propositions

1. The Polonaises are the decisive counter-evidence to Hadow’s charge that Chopin lacked “manliness, moral and intellectual”: they contain “the power, splendor and courage” that critics denied him (Ch. XII).
2. Chopin’s physical frailty and his psychological force were separate facts; “weak in physique, but he had the soul of a lion” (Ch. XII).
3. Because his education and temperament forbade scenes of violence, Chopin’s rage was diverted into composition — it “became psychical in its manifestations” (Ch. XII).
4. The Polonaises divide into two temperamental groups, objective/martial and moody/mournful, but the Polish element saturates both; after the mazurkas these are his most Polish works (Ch. XII).
5. Chopin idealized Poland’s wrongs “out of all proportion” — as a national poet a flattering idealist, as a personal poet an uncompromising realist (Niecks, quoted Ch. XII).
6. The F sharp minor, op. 44, is the supreme test for the poet-pianist and a document of pathological introspection rather than a battle picture (Ch. XII).
7. The A flat, op. 53, is by contrast purely objective — “no psychical presentation, but an objective picture of battle” (Ch. XII).
8. The Polonaise-Fantaisie, op. 61, was “music of the future” and is only now becoming intelligible; the chromatic idiom of the new century has caught up with it (Ch. XII).
9. Orchestration damages these works: op. 22’s orchestral part is superfluous, and op. 53 “becomes vapid and unheroic when transferred to the orchestra” (Ch. XII).
10. The juvenile and doubtful Polonaises (op. 71, the G sharp minor, the G flat major, op. 3) show the form being groped after, or not Chopin’s at all (Ch. XII).

Arguments

Against the “unmanly Chopin” thesis. Huneker argues by enumeration rather than abstraction: he simply lists the E flat minor, C minor, A major, F sharp minor and two A flat major Polonaises and challenges the reader to call them feminine hysteria — pointedly excluding the Ballades, Scherzi, Studies, Preludes and F minor Fantaisie from the tally, so the case rests on the Polonaises alone. The biographical support is testimony from friends and pupils who saw Chopin “wrestling with his wrath,” plus Ehlert’s comparison to Beethoven’s vehemence.

Form explains content. By recounting the dance’s origin (a measured procession of nobles, born at Henry of Anjou’s Polish court in 1574, hardened in a warlike atmosphere) Huneker makes the Polonaise inherently double: “at once the symbol of war and love.” That duality licenses his two-group taxonomy of Chopin’s examples and explains why the same form can hold both Le Militaire and the Siberian.

Liszt as authority, then as foil. Liszt’s long quotation supplies the nationalist reading — the Polonaise as “the true and purest type of Polish national character” — and even concedes Chopin learned the dance secondhand, supplementing report with “his fancy and his nationality.” But Huneker then turns on Liszt for dismissing the Polonaise-Fantaisie’s “deplorable visions,” attributing that verdict to an era “when art was aristocratic and excluded the ‘baser’ and more painful emotions.”

Interpretation as a critical problem. Repeatedly the argument is that performers falsify these pieces: the C sharp minor is “sentimentalized to death” despite an fff marking; op. 53 is rushed into the “Drum” Polonaise, its E major octaves “spun out as if speed were the sole idea.” Kleczynski’s advice — do not sacrifice the Polonaise to the octaves — is endorsed directly.

Evidence

• Op. 22 (Andante spianato and Polonaise in E flat): composed 1830, published July 1836, dedicated to the Baronne D’Est; premiered by Chopin at a Conservatoire benefit concert for Habeneck, 26 April 1835 — per Niecks the only time he played it with orchestra. Introduced to New York by Rafael Joseffy in 1879; Xaver Scharwenka’s reorchestration first played at a Seidl memorial concert, Chickering Hall, April 1898.
• Op. 26 (C sharp minor, E flat minor): published July 1836, dedicated to M. J. Dessauer.
• Op. 40 (A major, C minor): op. 40 composed or finished at Majorca; dedicated to J. Fontana, published November 1840. Rubinstein read the pair as Poland’s greatness and Poland’s downfall.
• The ghost-procession anecdote belongs to the A major, not the A flat — the painter Kwiatowski told Niecks so, against Karasowski and Kleczynski.
• Op. 44 (F sharp minor): published November 1841, dedicated to Princesse de Beauvau. Editorial variants: Kullak fills out an octave on the second beat of bar 18 (not in Klindworth or the original); Klindworth diverges from the original at bar 20.
• Op. 53 (A flat): published December 1843, dedicated to A. Leo; Karasowski dates composition to 1840 after the return from Majorca, and attaches the Nohant-tower vision legend, which Huneker says is disproved. Tausig’s performance called unapproachable by Joseffy and de Lenz.
• Op. 61 (Polonaise-Fantaisie in A flat): published September 1846, dedicated to Madame A. Veyret.
• Op. 71 (posthumous, issued by Julius Fontana): D minor published 1827, B flat major 1828, F minor 1829.
• Fifteen Polonaises in total, the authenticity of one in G flat major doubted by Niecks; the G flat (Schott) judged a possible compilation despite traces of the master in the E flat minor Trio.
• Posthumous G sharp minor: Huneker sides with Niecks against the Breitkopf & Härtel date of 1822.
• Warsaw “Echo Musicale,” October 1899 (fiftieth anniversary of Chopin’s death), printed a facsimile of an unpublished A flat Polonaise written at age eleven, plus a portrait of a farmer named Krysiak born 1810 — prompting Finck’s remark that this is not a case of survival of the fittest.
• Op. 3, Alla Polacca for piano and cello: composed 1829 during a visit to Prince Radziwill, dedicated to the cellist Joseph Merk; Chopin himself called it a brilliant salon piece.
• B flat minor Polonaise, 1826, written on departure for Reinerz, titled Adieu to Guillaume Kolberg, its D flat Trio drawn from an air in La Gazza Ladra; Kleczynski revised the Gebethner & Wolff edition.
• Other composers in the form: Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, Bach (B minor suite for strings and flute), Wagner (a student Polonaise for four hands in D), Schumann (Papillons), Rubinstein (E flat in Le Bal), Liszt — the most remarkable since Chopin, “but more Hungarian than Polish.”

Quotes

• “Here are the cannon buried in flowers of Robert Schumann” (Ch. XII).
• “Chopin was weak in physique, but he had the soul of a lion.” (Ch. XII)
• “He loved Poland, he hated her oppressors.” (Ch. XII)
• “Barring the mazurkas, these dances are the most Polish of his works.” (Ch. XII)
• “It is at once the symbol of war and love, a vivid pageant of martial splendor” (Ch. XII).
• “The Polonaise is the true and purest type of Polish national character” (Liszt, Ch. XII).
• “all ends in gloom and the impotent clanking of chains” (Ch. XII).
• “There is no greater test for the poet-pianist than the F sharp minor Polonaise.” (Ch. XII)
• “a flower between two abysses” (Ch. XII).
• “No ‘sabre dance’ this, but a confession from the dark depths of a self-tortured soul.” (Ch. XII)
• “ring of damascene blade and silver spur” (Ehlert, Ch. XII).
• “Chopin is still the captain of his soul—and Poland will be free!” (Ch. XII)

Tensions and links

• Direct rebuttal of Hadow. The chapter opens as a polemic against the “want of manliness” verdict, continuing the defence of Chopin’s stature that runs through the critical chapters of chopin-the-man-and-his-music.
• Mazurkas vs. Polonaises. Huneker ranks both as the most Polish works but treats the mazurkas as the more intimate national voice; the mazurka embedded in op. 44 makes the relation explicit and ironical.
• Liszt cited against himself. Liszt supplies the chapter’s grandest nationalist prose and also its worst critical misjudgment (op. 61 as a “deplorable vision”). Huneker excuses this as period taste rather than error of ear.
• Objective vs. psychical. Op. 53 is a battle picture with “concrete contours”; op. 44 is pathological introspection. The Polonaise-Fantaisie holds both at once — “the duality of Chopin the suffering man and Chopin the prophet of Poland.”
• Composer vs. executant. Huneker doubts Chopin could physically play op. 53 as written (“none but the heroes of the keyboard”), which sits against the portrait of Chopin’s own refined, small-toned playing given elsewhere in the book.
• Legends disputed. Karasowski’s Nohant-tower vision and the attribution of the ghost procession to op. 40 rather than op. 53 show Huneker actively arbitrating between Karasowski, Kleczynski, Niecks and Kwiatowski.

Open questions

• Who actually orchestrated op. 22? Huneker only reports “a rumor that Chopin cannot be held responsible for it.”
• If the F sharp minor’s obsessive return to its first theme “signifies a grave state,” is Huneker offering a clinical claim or a metaphor? He calls the work “perhaps pathologic” without committing.
• Is the A major intermezzo in op. 44 formally defensible, or only justified by the picture it completes? Huneker concedes it “is not easily defensible on the score of form.”
• How does the “unity in the composition” he asserts for op. 61 coexist with its monologues, cadenzas and improvised preludes? The claim is stated, not demonstrated.
• Was the G flat major Polonaise a compilation, and by whom? Only “vile progressions and an air of vulgarity” are offered as internal evidence.