Język Polski
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Walor narodowości w dziełach Chopina z okresu paryskiego
Irena Poniatowska
Abstract
Nationality is a fundamental category of Chopin’s music, not just in typically Polish dance genres like the mazurka and polonaise, but also, as Franz Liszt stated in his monograph of Chopin from 1852, for conveying in music ‘the poetical sense of the nation’. Only once did the young Chopin verbalise his attitude, in a letter of 25 December 1831: ‘I partly succeeded in sensing our national music’. He remained faithful to that sentiment, to the ideals he brought from Poland, until the end of his life, even though in Paris he encountered other philosophical and Romantic ideas. He forged a ‘self-contained’ national style, a style that grew out of the ‘Polish soil’, as we read in literature and poetry devoted to Chopin. Roman Brandstaetter places on the composer’s lips the words: ‘I love this land / in this land I am’. The question of the nationality of Chopin’s works is discussed here on the basis of three fantasias: the Fantasy on Polish Airs, Op. 13, which is a kind of potpourri of popular and traditional Polish themes, the Fantasy in F minor, with its free, complex and at the same time improvised form and its reminiscences of Karol Kurpiński’s song ‘Litwinka’ [Song of Lithuania], and the Polonaise-Fantasy, Op. 61. This last work crowns the polonaise and fantasy genres in Chopin’s oeuvre in a poetical, synthesising way (echoes of the mazurka and the nocturne), ending with a triumphal coda which heralds the victory not just of the musical form, but also of the ‘Polish question’, as the ideological bedrock of Chopin’s music.
Keywords:
Chopin, nationality, fantasy, potpourriMost read articles by the same author(s)
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