Part 13: Mazurkas - Dances of the Soul (Ch. XIII)

Part 13 of chopin-the-man-and-his-music (Chapter XIII: Mazurkas - Dances of the Soul).

Question this unit answers

What makes Chopin’s fifty-six Mazurkas the most distinctively “Chopin-ish” part of his output, and how should the national dance rhythm — including the notorious rubato — actually be understood and played?

Key terms

• Mazurka / Mazurek — Slavonic dance from the province of Mazovia; 3/4 or 3/8 time with displaced accent, quicker notes usually in the first part of the bar. See dao-phach.
• Krakowiak — related Polish dance; Brodzinski held the primitive Mazurek was a less lively, less sautillant Krakowiak.
• Zal — untranslatable Polish quality: “a baleful compound of pain, sadness, secret rancor, revolt”; Huneker’s central interpretive key to Chopin.
• Tempo rubato — Chopin’s flexible phrasing over a strict left hand; the chapter’s polemical centre. See rubato-chopin.
• Drone / dominant pedal bass — rustic device Huneker repeatedly flags in the early Mazurkas (op. 6 No. 2, op. 6 No. 3).
• Augmented second (the “Hungarian”) — exotic scale colour in the Mazurkas, with skips of a third, augmented fourths, major sevenths.
• Displaced accent — the “usual displaced accent in music of Eastern origin.”
• Beautés sauvages / savage beauties — Niecks’ term for the spontaneity he finds up to op. 41 and misses afterwards.
• Programme music — Chopin disliked it; the chapter surveys and largely rejects the anecdotal programmes attached to individual Mazurkas (“The Little Jew,” “The Cuckoo,” “The Dragoon,” “Epitaph of the Idea”).

Propositions

1. The Mazurka is the feminine complement to the masculine, heroic Polonaise; Liszt’s rhapsodic essay on Polish dancing frames it that way (Ch. XIII).
2. Chopin took the framework of the national dance, “developed it, enlarged it and hung upon it his choicest melodies,” breaking the conventionalized rhythm “in a half hundred ways” without ever fully losing “the flavor of the soil” (Ch. XIII).
3. No compositions are so characteristically Chopin as the Mazurkas — “Ironical, sad, sweet, joyous, morbid, sour, sane and dreamy” (Ch. XIII).
4. Zal — a national melancholy compounded with rancor and revolt — is the very soil of Chopin’s nature; it gave his music a “morbid beauty,” present in some works and demonstrably absent in others (Ch. XIII).
5. The Mazurkas have ethnic value because they carry “the collective sorrow and tribal wrath of a down-trodden nation” (Ch. XIII).
6. The received idea of the Chopin rubato is a falsehood: rubato is “rhythm liberated from its scholastic bonds, but it does not mean anarchy, disorder” (Ch. XIII).
7. Chopin himself was “a very martinet with his pupils if too much license of tempo was taken”; the free style was exaggerated by pupils and imitators, not by Chopin (Ch. XIII).
8. Metronome and rubato are mutually exclusive; the Mazurkas are so capricious Chopin surely never played one twice alike (Ch. XIII).
9. There is a real stylistic divide around op. 41: later Mazurkas grow broader, more elaborate, more Weltschmerz-laden and at times impersonal, gaining universality at the cost of intimate Polish character (Ch. XIII).
10. Despite comprising a large and original portion of the output, the Mazurkas are the least known of Chopin’s works — “when they wander from the map of Poland they lose some of their native fragrance” (Ch. XIII).
11. Anecdotal programmes cannot fix musical content: “there is no predicating the content of music except in a general way; the mood key may be struck” (Ch. XIII).
12. Op. 68 No. 4 in F minor, said by Fontana to be Chopin’s last composition, is “full of the premonitions of decay” — a “veritable song of the tomb” (Ch. XIII).

Arguments

The rubato argument (the chapter’s polemic). Huneker builds it by stacking hostile and friendly testimony and then dissolving the contradiction. Berlioz and Meyerbeer said Chopin could not play in time; Hallé claimed to have proved Chopin was playing 4/4 in a mazurka, and Chopin laughingly called it a national trait. Against these, Huneker sets Mikuli (however free the right hand, “the left kept strict time”), Mozart’s dictum that the left hand should be the conductor, Kleczynski (via Chopin’s pupil Princess Marceline Czartoryska) insisting no phrase of Chopin’s is unanchored by “an anchor of rhythm and symmetry,” and Friederike Streicher née Müller, who reports Chopin “hated all lingering and lagging, misplaced rubatos, as well as exaggerated ritardandos.” The resolution: the classicists mistook flexible phrasing for a departure from the time beat; the modern error is the opposite exaggeration. Huneker’s tu quoque clinches it — Beethoven and Mozart symphonies are now conducted with fluctuating tempo, so “why then is Chopin singled out as the evil and solitary representative of a vicious time-beat?” The prescription is dual: “Play him as you play Mendelssohn and your Chopin has evaporated. Again play him lawlessly … he is no longer Chopin — his caricature only.”

The Zal argument. Huneker imports Liszt’s word to explain both Chopin’s biography and his style, and treats it as a diagnostic that can be tested piece by piece — it is in the B minor Scherzo but not the A flat Ballade, in the F minor Ballade and F sharp minor Polonaise but not the first Impromptu. The pearl analogy (“said to be a morbid secretion”) licenses the claim that a pathological trait produced genuine beauty. Zal also does double duty as ethnic explanation (“Do not accuse Chopin, for this is the sign-manual of his race”) and as physiological cause of Chopin’s irascibility and decline.

The anti-programme argument. Rather than refute the anecdotes, Huneker lets them collide. Szulc’s “Little Jew” story he calls “childish and commonplace”; Niecks reads the same A minor Mazurka as bleak and joyless with “jarring tones”; Huneker’s own reading is “hectic despair,” which he attributes to indeterminate, restless tonality — a musical rather than narrative cause. Conclusion: “I, too, can build you a programme as lofty or lowly as you please, but it will not be Chopin’s.”

Evidence

• Catalogue. Forty-one Mazurkas published in Chopin’s lifetime in eleven cahiers of three to five numbers: op. 6 and op. 7 (Dec 1832), op. 17 (May), op. 24 (Nov 1835), op. 30 (Dec 1837), op. 33 (Oct 1838), op. 41 (Dec 1840), op. 50 (Nov 1841), op. 56 (Aug 1844), op. 59 (Apr 1846, no dedication), op. 63 (Sep 1847). Plus op. 67 and 68 published posthumously by Fontana (eight Mazurkas), two in A minor, four others in G, B flat, D and C major — fifty-six in all.
• Dedicatees as a social index: Comtesse Pauline Plater, Mr. Johns, Madame Lina Freppa, Comte de Perthuis, Princesse Czartoryska, Comtesse Mostowska, E. Witwicki, Leon Szmitkowski, Mlle. C. Maberly, Comtesse Czosnowska.
• Chopin’s own letter to Fontana from Nohant, 1839, on op. 41: “You know I have four new Mazurkas, one from Palma, in E minor; three from here, in B major, A flat major and C sharp minor.”
• Contemporary hostile criticism. Rellstab on op. 7: “If Mr. Chopin had shown this composition to a master the latter would, it is to be hoped, have torn it and thrown it at his feet, which we hereby do symbolically.” Moscheles was jarred by the “hard, inartistic modulations.” Rellstab also printed a letter signed Chopin whose authenticity Niecks demonstrates to be false.
• The Meyerbeer quarrel (via de Lenz) over op. 33 No. 3 in C: Meyerbeer said “Two-four,” Chopin “Three-four” and played it himself; they parted coolly. Huneker adjudicates: “Meyerbeer was wrong … Though Chopin slurs the last beat, it is there, nevertheless.” Meyerbeer later told de Lenz he loved Chopin: “I know no pianist, no composer for the piano like him.”
• Attribution forgery. The F sharp Mazurka in Klindworth’s edition was traced by Ernst Pauer (via the London Musical Record, July 1, 1882) to Charles Mayer; Gotthard claimed to have bought the manuscript from an impoverished Polish countess. “It is, of course, a clear case of forgery.” See phe-phan-nguon-tu-lieu-am-nhac.
• Editorial variance used as evidence of interpretive latitude: Kullak notes a missing slur in op. 17 No. 2, bars 5-6, where Klindworth slurs but marks the B sforzando (“A slur on two notes of the same pitch with Chopin does not always mean a tie”); Klindworth uses variants in op. 24 No. 2; Mikuli’s metronome marks are too slow per Kullak; op. 50 No. 1 closes pianissimo in some editions; Klindworth and Kullak differ on the end of op. 68 No. 4.
• Dating disputes in op. 67: Klindworth dates No. 1 in G to 1849, Niecks to 1835 (Huneker sides with Niecks); the reverse for No. 2 in G minor, where Huneker suspects Klindworth “transposed his figures accidentally.”
• Third-party judgments quoted as corroboration: Schumann (“something new is to be found in each”; also his “small cohort” image); Hadow on op. 59 No. 2 in A flat as the most beautiful of all; Louis Ehlert on op. 63 No. 3 — “A more perfect canon in the octave could not have been written by one who had grown gray in the learned arts”; Karasowski on op. 56 No. 2; Rubinstein on the Mazurkas and Polonaises as Chopin’s only “Polish-reflective” music; Dr. J. Schucht — “In the minor key laughs and cries, dances and mourns the Slav.”
• Descriptive verdicts on individual pieces form the chapter’s second half: op. 6 No. 1 (opening triplet, country couples dancing); op. 6 No. 4 in E flat minor (first appearance of “incessant circling around one idea, as if obsessed by fixed grief” — see y-nghi-co-dinh); op. 7 No. 1 in B flat (best known, “expansive swing, a laissez-aller”); op. 24 No. 4 in B flat minor (“a gem,” last two bars “ineffable sighs”); op. 30 No. 4 in C sharp minor (one of the big Mazurkas, ending in bare fifths and sevenths); op. 30 No. 3 in D flat (epigrammatic ending Tschaikowsky borrowed for the Chinoise); op. 50 No. 3 in C sharp minor (de Lenz’s Bach-like opening, the E major to F major passage matching the Agatha aria in Freischütz); op. 56 No. 3 in C minor (“composed with the head, not the heart, nor yet the heels”); op. 59 No. 3 in F sharp minor (“Chopin is at the summit of his invention”); op. 68 No. 4 in F minor (the last composition).
• Two folk-narrative programmes relayed via Kleczynski: Zelenski’s humorous poem on op. 33 No. 4 (drunken peasant and abused wife, with the bass answering the treble), and Ujejeski’s “The Dragoon.”
• An English writer’s account of Mazurka dancing in St. Petersburg salons — spurred officers, clashing heels “punctuating the staccato of the music,” to Glinka or Tschaikowsky.

Quotes

• “Coquetries, vanities, fantasies, inclinations, elegies, vague emotions, passions, conquests, struggles … all meet in this dance.” (Ch. XIII) — Liszt
• “Of the Mazurkas, one must harness a new pianist of the first rank to each of them.” (Ch. XIII) — Liszt, via de Lenz
• “When he is happiest he sings his saddest, does the Pole.” (Ch. XIII)
• “A wind plays in the leaves, Life unfolds and develops beneath them, but the tree remains the same — that is the Chopin rubato.” (Ch. XIII) — Liszt
• “Chopin leans about freely within his bars.” (Ch. XIII) — an English critic
• “Chopin sentimentalized is Chopin butchered.” (Ch. XIII)
• “If you wish to play Chopin, play him in curves.” (Ch. XIII)
• “The Chopin rubato is rhythm liberated from its scholastic bonds, but it does not mean anarchy, disorder.” (Ch. XIII)
• “He required adherence to the strictest rhythm, hated all lingering and lagging, misplaced rubatos.” (Ch. XIII) — Friederike Streicher née Müller
• “Zal, a poisonous word, is a baleful compound of pain, sadness, secret rancor, revolt.” (Ch. XIII)
• “They are dancing preludes, and often tiny single poems of great poetic intensity.” (Ch. XIII)
• “Only some dance with the heart, others with the heels.” (Ch. XIII)
• “The Pole suffers in song the joy of his sorrow.” (Ch. XIII)

Tensions and links

• Strong agreement with rubato-chopin and the pupil testimony. Huneker’s whole polemic converges on what chopin-pianist-and-teacher-as-seen-by-his-pupils documents from primary sources: the melody floats freely while the left hand keeps time, and Chopin policed excess in lessons. Two witnesses overlap directly — Mikuli and Friederike Streicher née Müller — so this is not independent confirmation so much as the same evidence base reaching a critic writing in 1900. The added value here is (a) Kleczynski’s second volume via Princess Marceline Czartoryska, with its specific list of “freest” passages that nonetheless have fundamental rhythm (F minor Ballade, B flat minor Scherzo middle part, F minor Prelude, A flat Impromptu, F minor Concerto recitative), and (b) Chopin’s own prosaic definition: a piece lasts a given number of minutes overall, but “in detail deviations may differ.”
• New information relative to the pupils’ book. Huneker’s rubato-versus-metronome point (“metronome and rubato are … mutually exclusive”) sharpens the practical implication of the pupils’ testimony, and the Meyerbeer 2/4-vs-3/4 quarrel plus Hallé’s 4/4 claim give concrete cases where the displaced Mazurka accent was misheard as a change of metre. That is a rhythmic-notation problem, not a licence problem — worth distinguishing in dao-phach.
• Tension: was Chopin strict or was he unrepeatable? Huneker asserts both that Chopin was “a very martinet” about tempo licence and that “Chopin, I am sure, did not play any one of them twice alike.” These are reconcilable (strict skeleton, variable surface) but Huneker never does the reconciling; the pupils’ accounts of lesson discipline pull toward the first, his own rhapsodic criticism toward the second.
• Tension: Zal as explanation. The concept does heavy lifting — national character, personal temperament, aesthetic value, and physical decline all attributed to one untranslatable word borrowed from Liszt. Huneker treats it as falsifiable by piece-by-piece presence/absence, but the test is his own ear, and the racial framing (“the sign-manual of his race”) is period essentialism that should be read as 1900 criticism, not analysis. Relevant to chu-nghia-dan-toc-am-nhac.
• Tension: Liszt as witness. Huneker quotes Liszt’s ecstatic Mazurka prose at length and then undercuts him — Liszt told Niecks he “did not care much for Chopin’s Mazurkas,” and Huneker concludes he “is not always to be relied upon.” Yet the chapter’s central interpretive term (Zal) and its best rubato image both come from Liszt. A methodological inconsistency about source reliability; cf. phe-phan-nguon-tu-lieu-am-nhac.
• Tension with Niecks on the post-op. 41 works. Niecks misses “savage beauties” after op. 41 but finds a return of early freshness in op. 63; Huneker partly agrees (op. 56 No. 3 “composed with the head”), partly dissents (op. 59 No. 3 is “far loftier in conception and execution than op. 6”). The disagreement is really about whether growth in craft compensates for loss of folk immediacy.
• Parallel with the Polonaise chapter. “As was the case with the Polonaise, Chopin took the framework of the national dance” — the idealization-of-dance argument is structurally identical, and the gendered pairing (Mazurka feminine / Polonaise masculine) comes from Liszt, not from the music.
• Anti-programme stance links to the aesthetic question of what music can denote; cf. am-nhac-tuyet-doi. Huneker’s position is that mood is communicable, narrative is not — “the mood key may be struck, but in Chopin’s case this is by no means infallible.”

Open questions

• Kleczynski’s list of “freest” passages is a testable claim about notated rhythm. Do those passages (F minor Ballade, B flat minor Scherzo trio, F minor Prelude, A flat Impromptu) in fact reduce to a regular underlying pulse?
• Was Hallé’s 4/4 observation about op. 6 or another Mazurka, and is the phenomenon a triplet-accent illusion or genuine metric ambiguity in Chopin’s writing?
• Huneker says the Mazurkas are “the only out-of-doors music Chopin ever made” — does any other source support that framing, or is it his own image?
• The claim that “Pianists of Slavic descent alone understand the secret of the tempo rubato” is untestable as stated but has a real question inside it: is the displaced Mazurka accent learnable from notation alone?
• Which of the fifty-six does Huneker actually consider first-rank? He praises op. 24 No. 4, op. 30 No. 1 and No. 4, op. 41 No. 1, op. 50 No. 2, op. 59 No. 3, op. 63 No. 3 — worth checking against modern canon.
• Rubinstein’s claim that only the Mazurkas and Polonaises are “Polish-reflective” conflicts with his own following sentence that all Chopin’s compositions mourn Poland. Which did he mean?