The Influence of the Mazur and Maria Szymanowska on Chopin’s Mazurka

Frédéric Chopin, inspired by the compositions of Maria Szymanowska, transformed traditional Polish folk music into over forty Mazurkas that today make up a significant portion of the enduring music from the Romantic era. The original folk mazurka is a combination of three dances played in sequence as a unit called a “round dance”: a slow kujawiak, a moderately paced mazur, and a faster oberek. Each of the dances differ greatly in character, tempo and rhythm. The Mazur’s origin is from the province surrounding Warsaw named Mazovia. The inhabitants of Mazovia are called Mazurs: hence the name of their native dance--mazur, or mazurek. It originated as a peasant dance and it is noted that Chopin would often visit the countryside and took great pains to write down the folk songs he heard there, which he would have undoubtedly drawn upon in many of his later works. From a humble beginning, the Mazur was embellished into an intricate swift moving elegant dance, became cherished by the social elite and eventually was made the Polish National Anthem.

The Mazur has a varied rhythmic structure with frequent dotted rhythm and irregular accents which can fall on any beat, usually on weak beats of the triple meter. Its melody has frequent leaps and, at the end of a phrase an accented note on the second beat. The general instrumentation included accordion, violoncello, and sometimes bagpipes. One of the most significant features of the Polish folk music is its rubato. The term originates from the Italian rubare -- to rob or steal -- referring to "stolen" tempo. Rubato is executed by arbitrarily shortening and lengthening notes without losing a singular basic tempo that made it very simple to dance to. The dancers maintain an erect posture and their movements are reminiscent of those of a horse rider. They stamp their feet, in an imitation of the sound of horse hoofs, with the accented beats of the music. The music was generally monothematic with changes of key signature essentially being the only change in melody or harmony. Interestingly enough, a Mazur would often deviate between major and minor modes, uncharacteristic of other music at the time. The theme would fall into repetitive units of two or four measures. There was very minimal dynamic contrast in comparison to Chopin and other composers/performers of the Romantic Era.

Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831) was born in Warsaw, Poland into a prosperous Polish family. She is believed to have studied piano with virtuosic performers Antoni Lisowski and Tomasz Gremm as well as composition with the great musical minds Franciszek Lessel and Józef Elsner. Her professional piano career began in 1815, including a tour of Western Europe from 1823 to 1826, including both public and private performances. A number of these performances were given for royalty. She would later move and serve as the court pianist to Alexander I, the tsar of St. Petersburgh, Russia. Szymanowska’s impact was immense during a time of intense strife among the Polish intellectuals and the throne, as her active participation in the court-sponsored public concerts helped elevate Russian music to a higher level and disseminated their piano repertoire across much of Europe. Her playing was very well received by critics and audiences alike, garnering her a reputation for a delicate tone, lyrical sense of virtuosity, and operatic freedom. She was one of the first professional piano virtuosos in 19th-century Europe and one of the first pianists to perform memorized repertoire in public, a decade ahead of Franz Liszt and Clara Wieck-Schumann. Her work is typically labeled, stylistically, as part of the pre-romantic period stile brillant and of Polish Sentimentalism. Szymanowska's Mazurkas represent one of the first attempts at stylization of the traditional folk dance. Her career as a pianist and composer strikingly foreshadows Chopin’s, as well as the broader trend in 19th-century Europe of the virtuoso pianist/composer, whose abilities as a performer expanded her technical possibilities as a composer. After her performing career, she became a very successful private instructor teaching the younger generation of Russian aristocrats, the newly-noble, and the newly-wealthy as they sought to acquire the ability to play the piano, one of the traits that came to symbolize wealth in European society.

After careful analysis of her composition Mazurek No. 13, certain stylistic characteristics are recognized. Some of them appear to have derived from the Mazur Polish folk dance and others she seems to have added, drawing from her own musical ingenuity. Although this paper is not on Maria Szymanowska, it is important to identify some of the more defining features typical of her compositions while using this exemplary piece to demonstrate some of her musical repertoire. This is a piano solo unaccompanied by vocals or other instrumentation. It takes place in triple meter with an emphasis coming on beat 3, via accentuation. Mazurek No. 13 has dramatic changes in tempo and dynamics, utilizing rubato to close out sections and then returning to the a tempo. The form is AA |:BA :|. There is a lovely, cantabile section (A) that is repeated throughout the piece but unlike in the traditional folk music, she introduces a second section (B) that expands upon the melody staying in the same key signature. This is doubled with standard harmonic progressions in the left hand of the piano. The work clearly has a homophonic texture, where there is a very distinct melody and chords supporting it. Similar to Polish folk music, there is rhythmic simplicity based off of solely 2 eighth note, 4 sixteenth note and 3 triplet note patterns in the right hand and ALWAYS three quarter notes in the left hand accompaniment.

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) was born in in Zelazowa Wola near Warsaw, Poland. He spent half of his life among the small nobility and peasants of the neighboring province Mazowsze (Mazovia). Thus, the Mazur is most likely the dance that had the greatest impact on young Chopin. Unfortunately, his youth was marked by difficult times for Poland which was partitioned by three powerful neighbors: Russia, Prussia and Austria. Nicolas I, the tsar of Russia at the time, passed unpopular decrees in 1830 and armed warfare broke out between the Poles and Russians. A year later the Poles were finally defeated and were under strict regulation and censorship by the tsar, all but eliminating their personal freedoms. As a result, the music in Poland was impoverished. Chopin was smart and fled prior to the full-scale revolution, declaring himself a political exile, in order to pursue his ambitions to become a well-renown composer and performer to Paris, France. This city had a flourishing musical scene at the time and the operatic works of Berlioz were starting to thrive. He took his love for his homeland and nationality with him and expressed the rebellion, anger, frustrations and hopes of the Poland of his days through his Mazurkas and Polonaise. He soon became well known in Parisian society, while his music quickly became widely recognized by the French people. Despite Chopin’s success, he rarely performed in concert halls, preferring the more intimate salon halls. This choice of performance venue was decided primarily due to his personality, which wasn’t overly flamboyant or showy, in complete contrast to later Romantic performers such as Liszt. He clearly supported the proposition that the composer had the ultimate responsibility of portraying the “Will”, and the performer of the piece simply transformed what was written into a depiction of the unknown and the unfathomable that could only be described through music. This is not to say he wasn’t successful, because in fact he welcomed calls to perform in order to achieve financial stability through his masterful compositions. However, it is true that he preferred to not be set in the middle of the spotlight with lots of eyes centered on him, and therefore it is widely believed that he suffered from performance anxiety. It is easy to draw the conclusion that Maria Szymanowska was the more willing public performer of the two, however their music is very comparable.

There are certain schools of thought, particularly in France and Germany, which hold that Chopin’s work has much more in common with music of Western Europe than with Poland. It is argued that, although there certainly are some token elements of Polish styles in his music, the majority of his works were much more influence by music that he heard in the aristocratic salons while living in Paris. It is true that Chopin cannot have helped but have been influenced by the music he heard in Paris. Additionally, although he had a Polish mother and was raised in Poland, his father was French. His father, Nicolas, was an academic tutor to the aristocratic Skarbek family, played the flute and violin, and was his first music teacher. Known to few however is the fact that Chopin's father was assimilated into the local culture, and Polish was the main language spoken at home. Furthermore, he was trained almost exclusively in the conventional music styles of Western Europe when growing up in Poland. It is thus understandable that at first glance some would see the Polish influence on Chopin’s music as trivial but upon further investigation it becomes clear that elements of Polish music have the predominant influence on a large proportion of his music, namely his nationalistic Mazurkas.

Mazurka No. 5 in Bb Major is an exemplary piece demonstrating the stylistic elements typical of Chopin’s mazurkas. Similar to Szymanowska’s Mazurek No. 13, this is a piano solo. Structured much like a minuet and trio, the overall form is AA|: BA:| |: CA:|. The periods fall into 4 measure units, a trait noticeably remaining from the Mazur. The A period is a wide ranging melody that is literally repeated. It can be heard throughout the duration of the composition and is always accompanied by an a tempo marking upon its reintroduction. A new eight-measure melody expands upon Period A before another return of the main theme; this pair of themes is then repeated, as in the second half of a minuet. Notice that like Szymanowska, Chopin’s Mazurkas are polythematic. The trio section of Mazurka No. 5 in Bb Major Op. 7, No. 1. As in the opens with a new theme and closes with a return of the main theme, ending abruptly without any closing embellishment.

The A period begins on the dominant. Meanwhile, both the B and C periods end on the dominant; therefore the return of A period serves as an appropriate closing for both. Mazurka No. 5 in Bb Major Op. 7 No. 1 takes place in simple triple meter but utilizes variant tempo markings to emphasize its freely moving nature, similarly to Szymanowska. Chopin implicitly writes stretto into measure 29 of the score, indicating that he wants the last 4 measures of the B period to be played faster. Non-coincidentally this change in tempo is tied to a change in articulation, with these measures lacking the slur markers found throughout the rest of the piece. He also implicitly calls for rubato in measure 49 to indicate that he wants the last 4 measures of the C period to be played loosely connected to tempo and a rallentando in measure 52 in preparation for the reintroduction of the A period and a tempo in measure 53. In addition to these absolute markings, the entire piece is performed in a generally uneven tempo in an attempt to simulate the traditional dance from which it was derived.

There is an intricate and ornate rhythm in the right hand with pick-up notes often falling on the last sixteenth of a beat. However, the rhythm in the left hand mimics, for the most part, the “oom-pah-pah” rhythm characteristic of Szymanowska’s mazurkas. The one exception to this is in measures twenty-eight to thirty-two where Chopin seems to transition to an “oom-pah” duple feel temporarily enhancing the feeling of those measures pushing forward. Additionally, he retains the homophonic texture in which the left hand is setting down the chords for the right hand to play the melody upon. Dissimilar to European “artistic” composers, he uses stylistic harmonic sequences, often employing folk scales, particularly the Lydian and Phrygian. He also utilizes dramatically contrasting dynamics with crescendos and decrescendos found throughout helping to shape phrases.

Additionally, Chopin exercises some music strategies of his own to enhance the expressiveness of the piece, truly pushing it into the Romantic genre. He uses grace notes that leap/skip to the main note, rather than simply using step-wise motion which was the custom in pre-Romantic music. This is exemplified in measures four through ten, where the first beat of the measure is continuously preceded by grace notes with differing intervallic skips and leaps. Another interesting abnormality is his use of an open-fifth drone in the melody on G flat and D flat, notes whose sudden appearance in B flat major add to the exotic atmosphere created by the persistent raised fourth scale degree (E natural), occurring in measures forty-five through fifty-one. This seems to imitate the bagpipe drones of the Mazur-dances, an ingenious method to tie in his understanding of traditional Polish instrumentation and recreate a similar sound. Additionally in measure forty-five, he uses an augmented second which becomes a popular chord in the Romantic period of music.

In effect, these characteristics of excessive ornamentation, rubato and pick-up notes make the Mazurka No. 5 in Bb major difficult to dance to, which coincides with Chopin’s general regard that his Mazurkas were to be played but not danced to. His expanded repertoire of harmonic chords, composition of non-lyrical melodies and creation of music hardly representing clarity and restraint helps to further separates it from Classical musical. This contrast also makes the musical experience more intense, rewarding and complete for the audience. They are able to recreate the “Will” of Chopin in their minds.

Why was this piece chosen to represent Chopin’s vast collection of over 40 mazurkas? The most obvious answer is its use of rubato tempo, but it also utilizes contrasting dynamics and chromaticism/ornamentation (with use of grace notes, passing tones and pedals) representative of Chopin’s expansive artistic palate and the general style of his mazurkas. Additionally, consistent amongst his mazurkas is the fact that his is a non-programmatic piece. This denotes that form plays an integral role in audience recognition of the piece and fills them in with the aforementioned historical significance of mazurka style works. However, even more importantly than all these perfectly viable reasons to select this piece, it is fun and whimsical, with an upbeat and ceremonious feel to it.

Three different theories claim the truth as to Chopin's use of the Polish folklore. The first of these theories, proposed by Hanns Schimmerling, argues that "the mazurkas are composed of the pure mazur section plus sections of an oberek and a kujawiak." Contrastingly, Lichtentritt maintains that "the whole mazurka represents only one of the three types of mazurkas." This assumption argues that Chopin’s mazurkas are composed of one particular style of traditional mazurkas and it rules out the possibility of having more than one combination of musical elements in them. The third theory proposed by Arthur Hedley contends that Chopin’s mazurkas are not based on real Polish works. This assumption contends that Chopin did not produced authentic mazurkas but that he produced just a representation of these works. There may be a bit of truth in every one of these theories, but most musicians today, right or wrong, tend to agree with Hedley. Chopin called his mazurkas "Little Pictures", meaning visualizations of the folk dances that inspired them. But later, away from Poland, they became a symbol of his beloved homeland. Whatever the theories, there is no doubt that Chopin sought his inspiration in the Polish folklore, and that it had a profound influence on his work. His genius allowed him to incorporate the most important characteristics of the folk music in his art. The understanding of this fact is of particular importance to the interpreters of Chopin's mazurkas. Analysis of compositions is, of course, of great importance to the pianist's intellectual work. But it is the comprehension of the composer's inspirational experience that helps develop the player's musical intuition. And it is the intuition that, in the final analysis, supersedes everything else.

Biography:

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