Here we have a polonaise both earthy and invincible, with its midmost section, a mazurka, suddenly appearing from out almost vacuous thoughts, impetuously ricocheted, as if to infuse their malice with the majesty of hope and reconciliation.
We learn from the fragmentary journal of Andre Gide that Montesquieu - a French jurist and man of letters - in his observations on natural history, was curious about the formation of the moss and mistletoe which he gathered from tree-trunks. He refused to believe that both growths sprung from seeds. If one may use such an observation metaphorically, as indeed Andre Gide himself has done, then here, from out the moss covered branches of Chopin's leafy muse has grown some mistletoe - a mazurka - as tender as might be the kiss of its finder, in the words of James Huneker : "profoundly ironical; a flower between two abysses."
Dedicated to Mme. La Princesse Charles de Beauvau, this heroically overwhelming outpouring appeared at a time when heroism was no less on the minds of others. In 1841, Carlyle's "One Heroes and Hero-worship " had also been published.
Chopin himself had tabulated his nationalism: "I am a Mazur, body and soul."
For me, the very imagery of James Joyce's I HEAR AN ARMY from CHAMBER MUSIC comes to mind as the opening measures - like muffled drums - crescendo near:
I hear an army charging upon the land
and the thunder of horses plunging,
foam about their knees
.......and once this introduction has reached its climactic point, we are met with the roar of rebellion:
Arrogant, in black armour, behind
them stand,
disdaining the reins, with fluttering
whips, the charioteers.
This polonaise is Chopin at his most militant, his mind deranged with overtones of battle:
They cry unto the night their battlename:
I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a binding
flame,
clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.
Two pages of echoic eeriness hold in check the body of forces and then comes the mazurka.
Of it, Liszt said that "so far from effacing the memory of the deep grief which has gone before, serves by the bitter irony of contrast to augment our painful emotions." Here there is expressed by more idyllic means a melancholic sympathy for the dead.
Then comes the charge again, and we are hurled headlong back into the empty-eyed skirmishings and blood-splattered mess of war.
The music dies away - ritenuto, dim, pp - but to end with one convulsionary and mighty ocatve, as pathological as it is shattering.
James Huneker believed there was no greater test for the poet-pianist than this polonaise; "To me the piece far surpasses in grandeur all of Chopin's polonaises, with its thunderous cannon and rattling of horses hooves. It may be morbid, but it is alos magnificent."
PHILLIP WILCHER
September 2002
