hat I have said, although they
are chosen with a view rather to illustrate Chopin's indebtedness to
Polish folk-music than Polish folk-music itself:--

[11 music score excerpts illustrated here]

Chopin, while piquantly and daringly varying the tonality prevailing in
art-music, hardly ever departs from it altogether--he keeps at least in
contact with it, however light that contact may be now and then in the
mazurkas.

[FOOTNOTE: One of the most decided exceptions is the Mazurka, Op.
24, No. 2, of which only the A fiat major part adheres frankly to our
tonality. The portion beginning with the twenty-first bar and extending
over that and the next fifteen bars displays, on the other hand, the
purest Lydian, while the other portions, although less definite as
regards tonality, keep in closer touch with the mediaeval church smode
[sic: mode] than with our major and minor.]

Further, he adopted only some of the striking peculiarities of the
national music, and added to them others which were individual. These
individual characteristics--those audacities of rhythm, melody,
and harmony (in progressions and modulations, as well as in single
chords)--may, however, be said to have been fathered by the national
ones. As to the predominating chromaticism of his style, it is not to be
found in Polish folk-music; although slight rudiments are discoverable
(see Nos. 6-12 of the musical illustrations). Of course, no one would
seek there his indescribably-exquisite and highly-elaborate workmanship,
which alone enabled him to give expression to the finest shades and most
sudden changes of gentle feelings and turbulent passions. Indeed, as I
have already said, it is rather the national spirit than the form which
manifests itself in Chopin's music. The writer of the article on Polish
music in Mendel's Conversations-Lexikon remarks:--

What Chopin has written remains for all times the highest
ideal of Polish music. Although it would be impossible to
point out in a single bar a vulgar utilisation of a national
theme, or a Slavonic aping of it, there yet hovers over the
whole the spirit of Polish melody, with its chivalrous, proud,
and dreamy accents; yea, even the spirit of the Polish
language is so pregnantly reproduced in the musical diction as
perhaps in no composition of any of his countrymen; unless it
be that Prince Oginski with his polonaises and Dobrzynski in
his happiest moments have approached him.

Liszt