urope.

Absolutely Slavonic, though a local dance of the province of Mazovia,
the Mazurek or Mazurka, is written in three-four time, with the usual
displaced accent in music of Eastern origin. Brodzinski is quoted as
saying that in its primitive form the Mazurek is only a kind of
Krakowiak, "less lively, less sautillant." At its best it is a dancing
anecdote, a story told in a charming variety of steps and gestures. It
is intoxicating, rude, humorous, poetic, above all melancholy. When he
is happiest he sings his saddest, does the Pole. Hence his predilection
for minor modes. The Mazurka is in three-four or three-eight time.
Sometimes the accent is dotted, but this is by no means absolute. Here
is the rhythm most frequently encountered, although Chopin employs
variants and modifications. The first part of the bar has usually the
quicker notes.

The scale is a mixture of major and minor--melodies are encountered
that grew out of a scale shorn of a degree. Occasionally the augmented
second, the Hungarian, is encountered, and skips of a third are of
frequent occurrence. This, with progressions of augmented fourths and
major sevenths, gives to the Mazurkas of Chopin an exotic character
apart from their novel and original content. As was the case with the
Polonaise, Chopin took the framework of the national dance, developed
it, enlarged it and hung upon it his choicest melodies, his most
piquant harmonies. He breaks and varies the conventionalized rhythm in
a half hundred ways, lifting to the plane of a poem the heavy hoofed
peasant dance. But in this idealization he never robs it altogether of
the flavor of the soil. It is, in all its wayward disguises, the Polish
Mazurka, and is with the Polonaise, according to Rubinstein, the only
Polish-reflective music he has made, although "in all of his
compositions we hear him relate rejoicingly of Poland's vanished
greatness, singing, mourning, weeping over Poland's downfall and all
that, in the most beautiful, the most musical, way." Besides the "hard,
inartistic modulations, the startling progressions and abrupt changes
of mood" that jarred on the old-fashioned Moscheles, and dipped in
vitriol the pen of Rellstab, there is in the Mazurkas the greatest
stumbling block of all, the much exploited rubato. Berlioz swore that
Chopin could not play in time--which was not true--and later we shall
see that Meyerbeer thought the same. What to the sensitive critic is a
charming wavering an