M a z u r k a !  L i n e r  N o t e s

Liner notes

When Frédéric Chopin arrived in Paris in 1831, he entered a city already saturated with extremely talented musicians, especially pianist-composers.  These flamboyant performers had conquered the city from the concert stage; it is all the more impressive, then, that Chopin, who felt extremely uncomfortable performing in public, pushed himself to the fore of this battalion of pianists by performing in late night salons hosted by the cultural elite.  By 1838, a critic exclaimed: “Who is Europe’s first pianist – Thalberg or Liszt? – let all the world reply…Chopin!” 

Chopin captivated Parisian society with a variety of new and unique forms:   his nocturnes, études and preludes offered a departure from the showpieces performed on a regular basis in the concert halls.  But it was with the unusual and strangely beautiful mazurkas that he made his deepest and most personal expressions.  The mazurka was folk dance music that Chopin had learned first hand during his early travels through rural Poland.  Many local composers wrote stylizations of the dance before Chopin, in a lighter, more galant style for entertainment purposes.  Tad Szulc describes how Chopin absorbed this national music and transformed it into something more deeply personal:

"What he took from the Polish villages were the rhythms, the accents of joy, hope, wistfulness, sadness, and defiance, and he molded them with his artistry into forms of pure or abstract music.  In so doing, he filtered them through his own personality, which, indeed, was the sum of all these feelings and their extremes" (Chopin in Paris, p. 115).

Chopin had come to Paris to escape the turmoil in Poland brought on by the Russian takeover; the mazurka was a vehicle for him not only to develop a unique artistic voice but to express pride in his heritage. 

Paris was the destination of many artists experiencing political difficulties.  The Spanish guitarist Fernando Sor had allied himself with the occupying Napoleonic government, as had many Spanish artists and intellectuals.  The Spaniards were unexpectedly successful in overthrowing the French, and Sor was obliged to leave the country.  He traveled through Poland and Russia before arriving in Paris in 1826.  On these travels, he became familiar with both the original dance and the local stylizations, and his mazurkas reflect these sensuously lighthearted models.  They were published immediately upon his arrival in Paris, presumably having been written during his travels, and years before he could have met Chopin. 

The Hungarian guitarist Johann Kaspar Mertz had also traveled through Poland, and became familiar with the same local stylizations.  While his mazurka displays the simplicity and grace of these early models, it was not written until 1851 – more than a year after Chopin’s death.  Mertz, who based many of his compositions on the Romantic piano miniatures of Mendelssohn and Schumann, apparently chose not to imitate Chopin’s highly personal style in the mazurka.

The rest of the composers represented here owe a much larger debt to Chopin and his style.  The French guitarist Napoléon Coste lived in Paris where he had studied with Sor, and was surrounded by the Chopin legacy.  His Minuetto alla mazourka is particularly ‘Chopinesque,’ while the mazurka, Op. 33 displays stark alternations between the early salon style and more Romantic statements. 

Francisco Tárrega, Julio Sagreras, Agustín Barrios, and Antonio Manjón, living much later, would develop more of a spiritual link with Chopin’s persona as performer-composers.  Chopin’s music played a major role in all of these guitarists’ programming and compositional styles.  Tárrega and Barrios both arranged many of Chopin’s pieces, the Nocturne, Op. 9 No. 2 becoming a staple of Barrios’s programs.  Chopin’s ability to make the piano sing with its own natural voice is the quality for which he is perhaps best known.  This aspect of his writing had far-reaching effects on the guitarist-composers of the early 20^th-century.  Barrios was perhaps the most successful at writing music that was idiomatically fitted to the instrument without sacrificing musical quality, the most convincing argument being his Mazurka Apasionata.    

After Chopin, there were more mazurkas written for the guitar than for the piano.  This should perhaps come as no surprise, pianist-composers undoubtedly being hesitant to tread on this ‘territory’ so strongly associated with Chopin.  Manuel de Falla, Claude Debussy and Enrique Granados composed only one each, artfully fusing what they learned from Chopin with their own personal and national styles.  Granados’s mazurka adapts particularly well to the guitar, once transposed from the original key of B-flat minor! 

To sum up the character of the mazurka is difficult, so varied and changeable are the moods and emotions they convey.  Liszt suggests that one must have seen the mazurka danced in Poland to fully appreciate Chopin’s art.   Lacking that, we can be grateful for this characteristically rhapsodic passage from his biography of Chopin.  Liszt paints a literary portrait of a dance hall where attention has been drawn to a single couple, which will essentially perform the mazurka for the “surrounding throng.”

"The man chosen by his partner proudly claims her like a conquest and presents her for his rivals’ admiration before whisking her away in a whirling voluptuous embrace that conceals neither the defiant expression of the victor nor the blushing vanity of the prize…. The cavalier at first accentuates his steps as if hurling a challenge, parts company from his companion for a moment as if to view her better, closes with her at once with passionate eagerness, or even turns full circle as if suddenly giddy and mad with joy!"

~Matthew Ardizzone

Links

Chopin links:
www.chopinsociety.org
www.chopin.org

Sor links:
www.tecla.com

Granados:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrique_Granados

Barrios:
http://www.agustin-barrios.com/

Manjon:
http://www.finefretted.com/html/antonio_j__manjon.html