Chopin and the "Polish Race" - National Ideologies and Chopin Reception, Part III (Vol. 5, No. 6)

Portrayals of Szopen and Nationalism in Independent Poland

           

After Poland was restored as a sovereign country in 1918, arguments drawn to prove the intensity of Chopin’s Polishness continued to include the fusion of the psychological makeup of one individual, i.e. Chopin himself, and that of a whole nation.  Not surprisingly, the emphasis on the physicality of the connections of his music to the land somewhat diminished: Polish countryside, now within borders of an independent Poland, did not need to be worshiped and idealized.  Simultaneously, sorrow ceased to remain a central feature after its main cause (i.e. grief over Poland’s deprivation of statehood) was removed by the creation of an independent country, Chopin’s purported psychological characteristics became more complex and less unified.  Charles Phillips welcomed the creation of The New Poland with a pean to the virtues of “the Pole himself . . . a puzzling mixture of human contradictions” best exemplified by the personality of Chopin who was “truly and typically Polish,” with the coexistence of “the brilliance, the tragedy, the delicacy, the tęsknota” and the virtues of “a power of concentration, a capacity for tireless work, for infinite painstaking, for detail and sustained effort, unsurpassed in the history of any other artist.”  Similarly to Phillips (and his predecessors, Przybyszewski and Paderewski), Stanisław Niewiadomski described Polish character traits as based on the “opposition of extremes,” swinging back and forth between tragedy and optimism.  In a 1932 essay dedicated to the subject of  “Chopin and Poland,” Niewiadomski regarded Chopin’s music as the sonorous embodiment of these national contradictions. 

            In another article (“Spelling Identity: Ch or Sz?”), Niewiadomski took a lot of trouble to argue away any suspicion of Chopin’s non-Polishness, starting from the spelling of his name (Biographic Criterion 1: name). Actually, his article was a late contribution to a debate about “Szopen” and “Chopin” that erupted in the late 19th century.  At that time, musical periodicals, Echo Muzyczne and Kurier Codzienny, published several polemical articles about the spelling of Chopin’s name. Niewiadomski joined the ranks of those in favor of its Polonization and claimed that foreigners were neither able to understand, nor maintain any interest in Chopin’s life and music: “For whom do we write and discuss Szopen?  Who reads the monographs of Hoesick, Opieński, Jachimecki, and others—foreigners or locals [swoi]?  This is why we should have preserved the Polish spelling. . . Szopen’s music is something as Polish as one can imagine.”  While discussing the connection of the composer to his home country, Niewiadomski mentioned and dismissed some of the composer’s Parisian friends in order to claim Chopin’s whole person as belonging to Poland .  Even the second half of his life was connected less to France, the country of his residence, than to Poland: Chopin was bound to his native land “through ties of love, longing, and duty.”  Niewiadomski’s survey of Chopin’s abundant links to Poland concluded with a statement that, to the composer, “the past, the present, and the future of Poland were not only sacred, but simply part of his flesh and blood.”  Therefore, Chopin’s compositions bear “profoundly prophetic and national features, in which almost every note repeats: ‘Poland, Poland, Poland....’”

            Here, the nationalistic fervor is unmistakable.  It could seem innocuous if we left unexamined its political context.  Perhaps we may see Niewiadomski’s whole-scale Polonization of Chopin it in a different light when knowing that the composer-writer’s relative, Eligiusz Niewiadomski, a fanatical right-wing painter and writer, murdered the first democratically elected president of Poland, Gabriel Narutowicz (1865-1922).  Narutowicz’s 1922 election was supported by the votes of ethnic and religious minorities and strongly opposed by Polish nationalist right-wing parties, such as Roman Dmowski’s Endecja (National Democrats, founded in 1897).  The National Democrats wanted to unify the narrowly-defined Polish nation by drawing their criteria from personal ethnic heritage, especially by excluding Polish Jews; the Christian Democratic Party added Catholicism to this nationalistic equation.  Dmowski’s National-Democratic brand of “enlightened and progressive” (though markedly anti-Semitic) nationalism found ample support among Polish intelligentsia.  In this political option, only Catholics and Slavs could be patriotic Poles and God Save Poland should become the national anthem.  However, as Norman Davies writes in God’s Playground, nationalism was not limited to the right-wing National Democrats: “The political stance of the leading circles was unashamedly nationalist.  Polishness became the touchstone of respectability.... The fires of Polish nationalism were fueled by the fact that the ethnic minorities were so large.”  Therefore, the nationalist fervor was partly based on fear of Otherness; its expressions in music aesthetics do have a disquieting political dimension.

            For right-wing groups, Chopin had to be completely Polonized in order to become a perfect representative of the “Polish race.”  The thicker the nexus of connections between the composer and his country, its landscape, folklore, people and their national character, the more exclusive and racially-oriented definition of Chopin’s personal Polishness.  At first seen just as a “singer of Polish fields and meadows” (Noskowski), Chopin was later transformed into a paragon of Polish ethnicity.  Nationally-inspired writers disregarded and marginalized his French heritage in order to claim—as Niewiadomski did in “Chopin and Poland”—that Poland was enshrined in “Chopin’s flesh and blood.”  These terms were understood literally by those who wished to present the composer as a nationalist composer.

            Niewiadomski worked as a music critic for a newspaper Rzeczpospolita, published by the right-wing Christian Democratic Party [Stronnictwo Chrześcijańsko-Narodowe].  Nonetheless, his concern with defining Chopin as a true Pole and his attempts at describing the essence of the national spirit in music were not as radical as the chauvinistic pronouncements of his younger colleague, Piotr Rytel (1884-1970).  The latter, in his capacity of a music critic for the right-wing daily published by Dmowski’s National Democrats, Gazeta Warszawska, frequently denounced the harmful effects of Jewish-French-Russian modernism on the future of music, an art that—as he believed— should instead return to its roots in the German heritage.  Rytel’s musical xenophobia, while excluding Germans and Italians whom he approved of, extended to other musical traditions.  His statements about national spirit in Poland emphasized the need of its independence of foreign influences, especially of Russian origin: “Polish music should be an expression of the collective Polish soul.  Its liberation from the foreign chains will happen automatically, at a moment when the soul of the nation fully develops.”  Both critics, Niewiadomski and Rytel, were of conservative musical tastes and engaged in vitriolic polemics with the progressive Karol Szymanowski.  It might be surprising, therefore, that the strongest statements about Chopin’s music and the “Polish race” came from the pen of the latter composer, who himself was a frequent object of the critics’ attacks as a radical modernist.  Conservative critics saw Szymanowski as a supposedly crucial element in the Polish expansion of the “international-Jewish-masonic-conspiracy.”  In this context, it may be regarded as a paradox that Szymanowski himself envisioned Chopin as an exemplar of the pure “Polish race” that he defined in opposition to the corrupt and cosmopolitan musical Jewishness.

           

Chopin evokes memories of Poland by Jan Styka. Vintage Postcard.

Szymanowski’s Chopin and the “Polish Race”

            In Karol Szymanowski’s texts about music, the terms rasa [race] or rasowy [racial] appear 28 times—according to the number of entries in the index in Karol Michałowski’s critical edition of Szymanowski’s writings. Usually the context is national and includes references to either Chopin, or folk music, or both.  Even the music of Igor Stravinsky is seen through the lenses of race: according to Szymanowski, Stravinsky resembled Chopin in an effort to draw from musical “racial features that have been accumulating through the genetic inheritance for generations.”  In dealing with the Bartokian approach to using folk music as a source of material for modernist compositions, Szymanowski defined folk music as “supra-historical and the most direct expression of the spiritual properties of a race.”  The composer concluded this essay about relationships between folklore and contemporary music with opinions about the inherent Polishness of all of Chopin’s music.  Here, Szymanowski claims that these “racial” subtleties are “far easier to understand by us, Poles, than by foreigners.  This perhaps explains why the Polishness of Chopin is not properly understood even by his greatest enthusiasts abroad.”  This trope of Poles alone being able to properly understand Polish music (Musical Criterion 7: community belonging) is strongly articulated in articles about Chopin by Paderewski and Niewiadomski.

            In Szymanowski’s first article published after his return to Poland in 1919, “Remarks Concerning the Contemporary Musical Opinion in Poland,” Chopin becomes an essential Polish composer who created “great, Polish, national music” permeated with expressions of the “soul of the nation [lud], in its fathomless racial depth.”  During World War I Szymanowski rejected his earlier lack of interest in national issues and musical patriotism; he started composing songs for the Polish troops and thinking about expressions of Polish identity in music.  The turn to the figure of Fryderyk Chopin as a model was a natural choice.  In the important and often reprinted essay on Fryderyk Chopin (written in 1922 and first published in 1923) Szymanowski discusses the Polishness of Chopin as transcending the choice of the forms of the polonaise and mazurka or the representation of national events and personages: “As a Pole he did not aim to reflect the tragic events in the history of his nation, but, instinctively, sought to express the supra-historical essence of his race which lies beyond national history.”  In another Chopin-themed article of 1924, “Fryderyka Chopina mit o duszy polskiej” [Chopin’s myth about the Polish soul] celebrating the 75th anniversary of Chopin’s death, Szymanowski used even more florid and lofty language to express his views on Chopin’s relationship to Polish identity.  The text centers on a thesis that Chopin dealt in his music with “the power and profundity of the Polish Soul” and that his works bear the traits of an “unchangeable Polishness.”  According to Szymanowski, Chopin’s found himself at the apex of national identity because “in tranquility and concentration he listened to the mysterious whisper reaching him from the profound and bottomless soul of the nation.”  In the manuscript, the “soul of the nation” is a later replacement of the original expression, “the abyss of race” [otchłań rasy].  Therefore, for Szymanowski, these terms were synonymous.  The replacement of the one by the other in 1924 does not mean that Szymanowski abandoned racial vocabulary in his later essays.  The term “race” returns in 1930 in Szymanowski’s lecture on Chopin where the composer’s Polish identity is described as “joyous, proud, invincible” while his music, based on folksong, is a harmonious “expression of race.”  Notice the absence of morbid melancholy in this description of uplifting national characteristics.  In a 1930 essay about “Fryderyk Chopin and Contemporary Music” Szymanowski claimed that Chopin should serve as an excellent, unsurpassed model for creating the new musical style, a “faithful reflection of racial characteristics and distinguishing traits.”  Other texts by Szymanowski include references to the “creative genius of our race” [le génie créateur de notre race], i.e. the Polish nation (1931), or the “racial properties of a given nation” (1930), or the “racial features of other national groups” that have to be lifted to the highest spiritual level of musical values (1927).

            Thus, references to racial traits and characteristics abound in Szymanowski’s musical texts until his death (including those in German and French); the majority of them appear in the context of defining Chopin as a national composer.  A different aspect of the theory of Chopin’s racial Polishness emerges from Szymanowski’s self-definition as a Polish composer, triggered by a 1922 incident when his name appeared in a review of a new music concert held in New York.  In this review, published in The New York Tribune, the influential critic Henry E. Krehbiel listed Szymanowski among Polish Jews who—along with Russians—were transforming the image of contemporary music.  The composer was disturbed by this reassignment of his identity and wrote a letter to the critic explaining his purely Polish heritage.  This mistake, as well as later attacks by Polish radical nationalists of conservative musical tastes (Niewiadomski and Rytel cited above) equating Futurism and Modernism with Jewish influences in music, put Szymanowski on a path towards defining Chopin’s Polish identity in terms of the “Polish race.”  According to Kornel Michałowski, first drafts of his earliest and most extensive text about Chopin were probably written during his stay in New York (two trips in 1921 and 1922).  At the same time, Szymanowski worked on versions of “The Question of Jewry” that contained disturbingly anti-Semitic ideas.  The character of his unfinished essay can be gauged from the first sentence in the notebook: “If the Jews did not so mercilessly hate us, Aryans, and if they did not fill their lives to the brim with this hatred —they would probably die of disgust with themselves.”  The earlier draft includes further speculations about “Pan-Semitic” and “Pan-Aryan” worlds that are irreconcilably separated and opposed, and a peculiar criticism of Mahler, whom Szymanowski construed as an exemplar of a melancholy, amoral musical Jewishness.  Finally, he defended modern music from charges of its close connection to Jewish composers by accusing them of a lack of a true creative spirit: “Futurism is a purely Aryan invention.  It is a manifestation of an Aryan genius—that always casts itself with courage into yet unexplored domains; [these domains are] later exploited in a more or less honorable fashion by the Semitic talent.”  The vehemence of anti-Semitic sentiments in this essay is especially startling in context of Szymanowski’s life at the time: his travels to New York were organized and sponsored by his friends, pianist Artur Rubinstein and violinist Paweł Kochański, both Polish Jews.  In other writings, diaries and letters, Szymanowski praised musical talents of both performers and enjoyed their company, yet he was able to condemn all of their compatriots.  Obviously, in a twisted manner, emblematic of those who embrace racial ideologies, he differentiated between the despised race and its individual members.

            The simultaneous emergence of the incomplete and unpublished text of “The Question of Jewry” and the first in a series of essays on “Fryderyk Chopin” in which the concept of the “Polish race” plays an important role, provides a proper—if disturbing—context for Szymanowski’s ideas about Polish racial nationality.  His attitude towards Jews was both anti-Semitic (general, towards the whole race) and philo-Semitic (personal, towards eminent individuals).  The negativity has been downplayed in scholarly interpretations of his views, for instance by Teresa Chylińska and Zofia Helman,with the rationale provided by later, much milder references to Jews in Szymanowski’s texts.  In 1930s the composer left his Viennese publisher, Universal Edition; at the same time he started to jokingly describe himself as being supported by “the international Jewish masonry.”  By doing so he parodied his critics of a right-wing nationalistic orientation who used such arguments to attack this Modernist composer.  With the rise of Nazi ideology, Szymanowski moved away from speculations about the “Polish race” and the concept of race-as-nation; in an essay about the future of music he ironically pointed out that even Beethoven was not of a “pure race.”  Yet, the depth of his earlier involvement with this subject needs to be noted as it reveals the pervasiveness of racial concepts of national identity in inter-war Europe. 

Chopin beyond the Polish Spirit and Race

            The range of arguments put forward in order to claim Chopin’s music for Poland is simply astounding.  The definitions based on musical criteria of genre, quotation, style, or content have been well known and researched by numerous scholars.  I gathered the most significant points in an introductory overview in order to reveal the antecedents of the racial concept of Polish identity applied to Chopin’s music and person.  With a French last name, French father, and a French city of residence for most of his adult life, Chopin’s personal identity posed an obstacle for those who assumed that only someone born Polish could be Polish and create music fully expressing the “Polish spirit” or the “supra-historical essence of the race”—to borrow a phrase from Karol Szymanowski.  Hence, writers of a nationalist orientation engaged in efforts to rename Chopin—Szopen, to reclaim and rewrite his past by adding a Polish Szop to his French ancestors, and to suffuse his whole world and personality with the traits of the “Polish race.” 

            The particular characteristics of the supposedly eternal national spirit changed according to the political and ideological needs of a time: from sorrow and melancholy (in late Romantic texts, e.g. by Noskowski), to arrhythmia and spontaneity of a nation that lives in tempo rubato (in Paderewski), to the “vitality, joy and pride” (in Szymanowski).  The constant elements in the evolving definitions were Chopin himself and the Polish nation, into the history of which he has been so inseparably inscribed.  In the process, the concept of the “Polish race” was introduced and rejected.  Composers and musicologists stopped discussing aesthetic issues in terms of genetically inherited racial features (Szymanowski) or “the voice of our race” (Paderewski).  The cultural insecurity that had required the introduction of a Polish spelling of the composer’s name or the affirmations that “the past, the present, and the future of Poland were not only sacred, but simply part of his flesh and blood” (Niewiadomski) was replaced by a fuller awareness of Chopin’s lasting and undisputable presence in Polish culture.  The nationalist speculations about the nature of the Polish spirit and Chopin’s embodiment and expression of it have been abandoned for the sake of comprehensive historical and aesthetic studies of his involvement in, and influence upon, Polish music. 

            The twin notions of the “Polish spirit” rooted in Herder’s Volksgeist, and the “Polish race” shaped under the influence of Taine’s philosophy belong among categories of nationalist discourse that outlived their usefulness.  I, like the philosopher of culture, Julia Kristeva, “am among those who dread and reject the notion of Volksgeist, ‘spirit of the people’ which stems from a line of thinkers that includes Herder and Hegel” and that results in the emergence of a repressive and exclusive nationalism (“a repressive force aimed at other peoples and extolling one’s own”)—the source of murderous ethnic conflicts in the late 20th century.  Kristeva’s misgivings about Volksgeist-nationalism provide a useful insight for the analysis of attempts to Polonize or nationalize Chopin.  The questions of “how Polish was Chopin” and how useful his music could be for defining Polish racial identity stemming from common genetic heritage and national character traits reflect a tainted framework of 19^th-century racial and nationalistic ideologies.  Such issues are best supplanted by the question of “how great was Chopin” as an individual of a unique, complex background and talent.

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This text is an abridged version of a chapter in Halina Goldberg, ed. The Age of Chopin (Indiana University Press, 2004).

Chopin and the "Polish Race" - National Ideologies and Chopin Reception, Part II (Vol. 5, No. 5)

Chopin’s Music and Traits of the Polish Spirit

(Continued, second part of an abridged version of an article published in Halina Golberg, ed., The Age of Chopin, 2004).

In an essay welcoming the publication of Chopin’s posthumous works in 1856, Józef Kenig (1821-1900) lauded Chopin’s music for its the contribution of the distinct Polish voice to the “concert of the nations.” The composer himself was seen as the founder of the future national school of music, and a musician-poet who may be compared to “an Aeolian harp on which the nation plays, breathing all of its sorrows, all of its delights; at times [he is] the tool of Providence, suitable for moaning only.” The emphasis on sorrowful aspects of the Polish national spirit was politically motivated since it reflected the emotional response to the plight of the nation without a state. Over the course of the century, the definitions of the Polish spirit connected to Chopin’s music acquired an increasingly negative valence, shifting from the domain of nobility, energy and spontaneity, to the melancholy realms of sorrow, longing, and despair. The pivotal text in this regard was Chopin’s biography by Franz Liszt, first published in 1852. Liszt’s book—filled with so many factual errors that, according to a comment by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, its title should be changed to “Fantaisie brillante”—established the trope of żal or żałość [sorrow] as the principal characteristic permeating Chopin’s personality, his music, and Polish identity in general.

Despite the growing acceptance of Liszt’s idea, the focus on the sorrowful aspects of Polish national identity was neither obvious not universal. Kraszewski, for instance, considered the melancholy of Chopin’s music as a reflection of his personal painful history, his lost battle with illness, his exile, homesickness and longing. The nostalgia was Chopin’s own and it did not articulate any traits of the national spirit. In fact, according to Kraszewski, it did the opposite: its presence in the mazurkas destroyed the genre’s identity by diffusing the national charactertistics of a “noble strength and energy.” Similarly to Kraszewski’s, the definition of the “Polish type” (i.e. the exemplary personality of the nation) by Jan Kleczynski included an array of positive features: “warmth, zest, politeness, goodness, boisterousness, compassion, naturalness, generosity, elegance.” The writer claimed that these traits permeated Chopin’s polonaises and mazurkas, thus connecting the “genre” and “spiritual content” criteria of Polish identity (Musical Criteria 2 and 6). In addition to this range of national features noted in reference to Chopin’s works, Kleczyński speculated about the general Slavic traits of Chopin’s musical personality, singling out rzewność [tenderness] as the main Slavic characteristic.

The melancholy spirit returned in other studies; for instance Maurycy Karasowski’s monograph of 1882 emphasized the saturation of Chopin’s music with sorrow and nostalgia, which he described as prime features of Polish Romantic poetry. In 1899, composer Władysław Żeleński defined this sorrowful quality as tęskna nuta [a longing tone] and noticed its paucity among Chopin’s predecessors. To him Chopin was the first to use folklore quotation and stylization (Musical Criteria 3 and 4) as well as find a true Polish character (Musical Criterion 6), because he was neither a foreigner, nor a follower of alien inspirations, remaining instead a true, native son of the Polish soil (Biographic Criteria 2, 3, 4). Thus, the purity of the national expression in Chopin’s music is linked to the purity of Chopin’s personal identity as a Pole—both inherited and consciously cultivated. Zygmunt Noskowski concurred with the view of his predecessors that Chopin’s works revealed “the distinct mood, representative only of our people.” Citing Liszt as his inspiration, Noskowski proceeded to identify this national mood as żal [sorrow] and pointed out the purposeful and self-defined aspect of the expression of the Polish spirit in Chopin’s music. The predominant sorrowful mood of Chopin’s pieces—though different from pain, longing, pensiveness, or complaint—was an expression of emotional experiences that the composer cultivated and dwelled upon. In this account, the feeling of sorrow was one of the markers of national identity, differentiating true Poles from foreigners. In addition, Noskowski maintained that Chopin personally was a representative of the suffering Polish nation: “his path of life, i.e., his mental and physical suffering, still amplified this sensitivity which necessarily had to be reflected in his works.”

While the presence of sorrow, nostalgia, and melancholy in Chopin’s music was seen in Poland as a manifestation of its purely Polish character, the same traits were construed abroad as expressions of a more general, human quality. It is interesting to note that these Polish (or Slavic) traits of melancholy and over-sensitivity appear as defining features of the most Romantic among the “representative men” described by Hyppolyte Taine, in his Philosophy of Art. Taine envisioned the modern man of the 19th century as being primarily melancholic and considered melancholy to be the main characteristics of the whole period. The “representative man” of the late 19th century was, according to Taine, “the melancholy insatiable Faust or Werther,” who “entertains a horror of cheerful music” and who “will enjoy only the music of Chopin and the poetry of Lamartine or Heine.” According to Taine’s theory, all the arts of a given time embody or portray the main characteristics of their period; sorrow—the emotion of the times—was also the hallmark of the Romantic arts in general. Perhaps for this reason, sorrowful Poland, a nation languishing without sovereignty throughout the century, became such a cause celebré in Romantic Europe: it was a paradigmatic national example of the main personality feature permeating the whole European culture.

“Racial” Nationhood and Art According to Taine

Taine’s thinking about the representative man of the times seems to diffuse the clarity of arguments presenting melancholy as an exclusively Polish or Slavic trait. In contrast, his ideas about inherited national character, based on the notion of ethnicity-as-race, have shaped the conceptual frameworks of art history and aesthetics. His books were translated into many languages and repeatedly reprinted in Europe and North America during the 1870s – 1910s; his theories also reached Poland. Taine’s philosophy emphasizes the primordial unity of ethnic groups, shaped by their genetic kinship, their natural environment, and their location in historical time. The culture of different nations, e.g. ancient Greeks or 17th-century Dutchmen, was supposed to be predetermined by their inherent, genetic characteristics, historical milieu, and the climate and geographic features of their countries. The three interrelated sources of identity included racial background, natural environment, and cultural experiences accumulated over the centuries. Inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Taine proposed a kind of environmental determinism based on the notion of the essential character of a country, from which “spring an infinity of peculiarities, summing up the entire nature of the country, not only its physical outlines, what it is in itself, but again the intellectual, moral and physical qualities of its inhabitants, and of their works.

For instance, the essential character of the Netherlands was that of “alluvial plains” and the abundance of agricultural produce made available by the rich soil resulted in the affluence of human life that found its most perfect expression in the paintings of Rubens. Similarly, ancient Greeks made art that possessed a certain quality because they were all “men of the same race, the same education, the same language . . . a remarkably handsome, intelligent race, viewing life in quite a new way.” In addition to these three general characteristics, defining the whole culture of a given nation, Taine discussed the factors that influence an individual artwork that should be never seen in isolation, but always in its proper context. These factors formed three aggregates: of the artist’s own works, the ideas of his colleagues, and the context of the contemporaneous world. This conceptual background surrounds each work of art with a unique aura and predetermines the artistic modes of expression. Simultaneously, it needs to be purposefully addressed and presented.

 The main task of the artist, according to Taine, is to capture and portray the essential character of an object or country. In this activity, however, the artist is constrained by the particular manifestations of the national character. Therefore, “the social medium, that is to say, the general state of mind and manners, determines the species of works of art in suffering only those which are in harmony with it, and in suppressing other species, through a series of obstacles interposed, and a series of attacks renewed, at every step of their development.” Taine’s speculations about the origins of aesthetic traits of a national art in that nation’s racial heritage and geographic-climactic conditions were not questioned by Polish writers who embraced his holistic and simplistic explanations of national identity and extended his ideas into the domain of music.

 In the first half of the 20th century, Taine’s racial terminology, so jarring today, was used without remorse or apology by Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Karol Szymanowski, Stanisław Niewiadomski, Piotr Rytel, and Mieczysław Gliński. Szymanowski’s search for “the deepest and most essential aspect of Polish soul, national soul, or the depth of the race” discussed in the closing segment of this chapter indicates an awareness of Taine’s ideas of the essential character of a nation, based on inborn “racial” characteristics that distinguish one nation from another. The presence of racial terminology in musical studies from the first half of the 20th century discussed in the remainder of this article highlights a disquieting connection of music aesthetics to the most extreme form of racial nationalism. While the intentions of Polish composers turning to race in their nationalist project could be described as noble, rather than criminal (as had been Hitler’s), the results had harmful ramifications for the definitions of national identity and acceptance of ethnic minorities within the Polish nation.

Towards the all-Polish Chopin: Przybyszewski, Zielinski and Paderewski

In the process of asserting Chopin’s Polish identity at the beginning of the 20th century, an awareness of his double cultural and personal background was replaced by a belief in his fully Polish origins. This transformation may be perceived with the greatest clarity in two texts about Chopin by a fin-de-siecle writer, known for his charismatic personality, Stanisław Przybyszewski (1868-1927).

Przybyszewski’s first study of Chopin and Nietzsche (1892) placed the composer half-way between Polish and French cultures, emphasizing the presence of both heritages in his personality and musical output. In this text, Przybyszewski considered Chopin as an exemplar of a Nietzschean super-hero and described the composer’s personality as “a product of an crossing of two races and two cultures—Slavic and Gallic.” According to Przybyszewski’s interpretation of Chopin’s psychosomatic and emotional identities (Biographic Criteria 3, 4) the composer’s Slavic features included: a delicacy of feeling, refinement, inclination to alternate between the extremes of contrasting emotional states, melancholy, and “a sublimated egotism” that reduces all experiences to a focus on oneself. Gallic traits in Chopin’s personality included a certain light-mindedness, seductiveness and feminine characteristics, as well as a joy of life and the emphasis on reason. Already in this text, however, Przybyszewski gave a priority to Chopin’s Polish heritage and claimed that the composer’s personality revealed a predominance of a “Slavic inclination to morbidity.”

In order to transform Chopin into an unambiguously national composer his background had to be rewritten and the Latin element removed. Chopin’s music could fully epitomize the Polish nation if he were completely a part of it in his body and soul. This transformation took place in Przybyszewski’s second essay on the subject, Chopin and Nation (1910). Here, Przybyszewski returned to the theory of one predominant characteristic of the national spirit introduced by Taine and applied to Polish music by Żeleński and Noskowski (Musical Criterion 6: spiritual content). This tone, “the most primal unit in the makeup of the soul. . . colors all the feelings, impressions, experiences, with all of his characteristics.” In accordance with Taine’s thesis about the three defining factors of national identity in art and the significance of geographic milieu for the structuring of national traits, Przybyszewski maintained that the Polish soul was united with the native landscape of Mazowsze: “broad plains” filled with the “blossoming rye” and the mournful sounds of “the wind wailing in the bare steppe.” For the writer, the Polish spirit was suffused by “the tone of insufferable despair” and “filled with curses and mutiny.” Since there are no steppes in the densely populated Mazovia, Przybyszewski’s description would have been more appropriate for the barren Russian landscape. Similarly, the endless despair and darkness of Przybyszewski’s typical Pole better suits the stereotypes of the nostalgic Russian soul, not the Polish one. While emphasizing the melancholic morbidity of Chopin personality (Biographic Criteria 3 and 4: psychosomatic and emotional identities), Przybyszewski describes a dire, soulful landscape that finds a perfect musical expression in Chopin’s music (Musical Criteria 5 and 6: content and spiritual content).

The transformation of Chopin into an “all-Polish” composer and a national symbol in person required the Polonization of his whole family. This step was taken in a legend about Chopin’s French forefathers as actually being Polish, introduced by Oskar Kolberg and reported by Marceli Szulc (1873), Maurycy Karasowski (1882), and Ferdinand Hoesick (1904), as well as Jaroslaw de Zielinski in 1902. Zelinski was commissioned by Ignacy Jan Paderewski to write an article on “The Poles in Music” for The Century Library of Music, edited by the Polish pianist. The “Chopin” section of Zielinski’s study is dedicated in its entirety to proving that Chopin, indeed, was an all-Polish composer (Biographic Criterion 2: family-of-origin). Here, instead of summarizing the nature of Chopin’s contribution to Polish music—the topic of entries on all the remaining composers—Zielinski cites a fictitious genealogy provided by Oskar Kolberg and meant to dispel any doubts that Chopin was a real Pole. According to this account, Chopin’s French forefathers included the descendants of courtiers of the Polish king Stanisław Leszczyński, who left Poland after a reign of five years (1704-1709) and settled in the duchy of Lorraine, France. Apparently, Leszczyński’s courtiers included two “natives of Kalisz, Jean Kowalski and Nicholas Szop” whoc changed the names to “Ferrand and Chopin” and settled at Nancy in Lorraine. Nicholas’s son, Jean Jacques, marrie a widow Desmarets (or Desmarais) and became a teacher; of their four children the youngest, Nicholas, moved back to Poland to become the father of Frédéric.

In the article, Zielinski described a set of musical characteristics that he defined as typically Polish, or “characteristic of the Slavonic type” and including: the common occurrence of “forbidden progressions of intervals, such as augmented seconds, diminished thirds, augmented fourths, diminished sevenths, minor ninths, etc.,” harmony with “successions of chords presenting no logical contradiction, and yet at variance with established usage,” melodic features “exactly the reverse of that practised in other lands” and a general trait of “a freedom of form and variety of rhythm exclusively Slavonic and particularly Polish.” The rationale for this creative freedom stemmed from personality characteristics, as Zielinski claimed “the temperament of the Slav does not tolerate oppression nor even constraint.” It would be impossible to locate a profusion of harmonic means listed by Zielinski in the national operas by Karol Kurpiński, Józef Elsner, or Stanisław Moniuszko. In fact, of the Romantic composers, only Chopin fits the pattern of “freedom of form” and harmony filled with “forbidden progressions’”—his unique approach to chromaticism and harmony has often been commented upon, for instance by Ludwik Bronarski and Maciej Gołąb.

 Thus, it appears that Zielinski derived his list of Polish musical characteristics from the oeuvre of one composer who—due to his French family background—was not even fully Polish. The fanciful Polish genealogy of Chopin’s family was meant to solve that problem. A focus on Chopin’s whole oeuvre as a repository of the “Polish spirit” and on Chopin himself as an ideal Pole, permeates texts by pianist-composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941), especially his speech on the occasion of 100th anniversary of Chopin’s birth, given in 1910 during a festival in Lviv (then known as Lemberg) and published in English translation in 1911 as Chopin: A Discourse. The speech articulates the existence of a strong link between the country, the “Polish race” and Chopin’s art. Paderewski envisions Chopin’s music as a true expression of the Polish spirit (Musical Criterion 6), claiming that in his works one may hear “the voice of every generation, the voice of a whole race, and the voice of the very earth which brought them forth.” This statement directly reflects the three criteria of musical identity provided by Taine: race, history, and milieu. Paderewski’s text features other, well-known Romantic interpretative tropes, as it associates Chopin’s music with the evocations of the heroic, mythical past and the images of Polish nobility (some of these associations have been mentioned earlier). Moreover, Chopin’s music is supposedly filled with a pastoral imagery of the Polish fields, forests, rivers; it depicts a peaceful landscape, sorrowful in the fall, joyous in the spring, a musical countryside that is permeated by the sounds of folk music and Nature (Musical Criteria 3-5: quotation, style, content). In contrast to Przybyszewski’s preoccupation with bleak landscapes as signs of Polish despair and morbidity (and similarly to Noskowski’s idyllic vision), Paderewski portrays Chopin’s works as evocations of Poland’s idealized past, replete with festive celebrations and pastoral scenery.


This music, tender and tempestuous, tranquil and passionate, heart-reaching, potent, overwhelming: this music which eludes metrical discipline, rejects the fetters of rhythmic rule, and refuses submission to the metronome as if it were the yoke of some hated government: this music bids us hear, know, and realise that our nation, our land, the whole of Poland, lives, feels, and moves, “in Tempo Rubato.”

Paderewski’s claim about Polishness of Chopin’s music was supported by detailed claims of a full congruence between the “national spirit” and the stylistic and spiritual properties of Chopin’s music (Musical Criterion 6: spiritual content). He also used an argument based on Musical Criterion 7 (performance context): Chopin’s music is all-Polish because his Polish listener understands it as such, “he understands all, feels all, because it is all his, all Polish...” A Polish listener hears in Chopin’s music “the voice of his whole race,” because Chopin himself, “by the grace of God, was spokesman of the Polish race.” Nonetheless, for Paderewski “Polish” was not equivalent to “Catholic.” In contrast to writers who wished to inseparably connect the Polish spirit and imagery of Chopin’s music to Catholicism (see Noskowski above), Paderewski referred to a variety of Slavic, pagan deities evoked in Chopin’s works: “the wild frolics of demi-god and goddess” in the Scherzos, the “deathless song” of the Queen of Love, Dziedzila and the thunderous voice of the mighty Perun in fast, dramatic movements.

Similarly to de Zielinski who struggled to exclude the Russian “Muscovite” from the Slavic family of nations, Paderewski contrasted the Polish spirit of Chopin (“his grace and charm, his wealth of colour, of lights and shades”) with the “somber and monotonous although clever Russian muse” which reflected the “withering despair which blows towards us as a blast frost-laden, across steppes immeasurable, boundless, hopeless…” It is interesting to note that, for Paderewski’s contemporary Przybyszewski, such boundless despair and steppes were the hallmarks of Chopin’s Polish identity. In constructing this image, Przybyszewski accepted negative German stereotyping of Poles-as-Slavs that Paderewski rejected.

Paderewski’s concept of the “Polish race” was not elucidated in any more detail in other texts. Nonetheless, the scope of his ideas of Polish nationhood may be gleaned from his speeches given during a campaign for Poland’s independence that he undertook during the World War I, touring the U.S. with Chopin recitals and patriotic appeals. The composer sought to recreate Poland as a great, multinational country, modeled upon the U.S. and called “The United States of Poland.” The homeland that Paderewski wanted to resurrect would guarantee freedoms to all its inhabitants; his conception of Polish statehood was not based on racial exclusivity and hatred. Yet, the invocations to the Polish race and the mysterious, timeless national spirit that permeate Paderewski’s Chopin lecture were absent from his speeches and appeals directed at non-Polish audiences in America. Thus it seems clear that the narrowly nationalist rhetoric of Chopin and the “Polish race” could only be accepted by those preoccupied with ethnically exclusive definitions of Polish identity.

The tone of narratives about Chopin’s Polishness changed after the country regained its independence. The emphasis on the all-encompassing expression of sorrow disappeared and so did the focus on the musical evocations of the Polish land. Of prime importance in the new country was the independence of spirit, heroism, creativity and strength of character of its citizens. During the inter-war period Stanisław Niewiadomski and Karol Szymanowski provided new interpretations of Chopin’s relationship to the “Polish race.” The review of their ideas will bring this study to the brink of World War II and the demise of the notion of “Polish race” that created room for modern concepts of Polish identity and Chopin’s relationship to it.

(.... to be continued)

__________________________

This text is an abridged version of a chapter in Halina Goldberg, ed. The Age of Chopin (Indiana University Press, 2004).

Chopin and the "Polish Race" - National Ideologies and Chopin Reception, Part I (Vol. 5, No. 4)

The focus of Chopin’s followers and devotees in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rested on his usefulness for their causes, not on a full understanding of his musical achievements.  Thus, Fryderyk Chopin held an elevated position in the national pantheon as a poet-prophet [wieszcz] whose musical statements equaled in significance the poetic proclamations of Adam Mickiewicz, expressing the true spirit of the nation.  Jan Kleczyński (1837-1895), Zygmunt Noskowski (1846-1909), Władysław Żeleński (1837-1921), Stanisław Przybyszewski (1868-1927), Jarosław de Zielinski (1847-1922), Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941), Stanisław Niewiadomski (1859-1936), and Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) were preoccupied with demonstrating the ways that identified Chopin and his oeuvre as truly and fully Polish.  Their essays contributed to a Polish tradition of constructing Chopin’s identity, a tradition that evolved through distinct stages of Polonizing the composer, based on shifting definitions of the essence of nationality.

In this essay I will trace the evolution of nationalist views of Chopin’s musical and personal Polishness, views of an increasingly all-embracing nature, connected to the Romantic idea of the “Polish spirit” (primarily expressed in Chopin’s music) and to the notion of the “Polish race” (exemplified by Chopin himself).  The conceptual background for this evolution is provided by ideas put forward by such European writers on nationhood and the arts as a German Romantic philosopher and critic, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), whose well-known idea of the “spirit of the people” i.e. Volksgeist, influenced the texts by Kleczyński, Noskowski and Żeleński; and a French philosopher and historian of social-Darwinist orientation, Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893), whose theories of artistic expressions of the nation-race had an impact on writings by Przybyszewski, Niewiadomski, Zielinski, Paderewski, and Szymanowski.  The gradual replacement of the older German notion of the “national spirit” (Herder) with the more modern notion of the “national race and milieu” (Taine) is evident in the argumentation used in texts about Chopin’s place in Polish musical culture until the outbreak of World War II.

 Defining National Traits

In the process of depicting Chopin as Poland’s paradigmatic national composer, his followers expressed their beliefs about national messages that Chopin supposedly conveyed in his music.  Initially, their definitions of national identity, inspired by Herder’s notion of the Volksgeist, envisioned it as a spiritual phenomenon, centered on the experiences and productions of the Folk, i.e. the inhabitants of the countryside enjoying spontaneously creative lives in a close connection to nature, the pristine and enchanting fields and meadows of Poland.  In this interpretative tradition, Chopin’s music was valued not in and of itself; instead, its quality was construed as stemming from its closeness to Polish folk song and the landscape.  The Chopin essays, however, feature a wider variety of arguments while explaining the composer’s Polish identity and his significance for Polish culture.  It will be informative to briefly review the main criteria, or markers, for ethnic/national identity that recur in Polish writings addressing the national identity of Chopin and other composers and might be relevant to our discussion.

Selected Criteria for Defining the Polish Identity of Composers

A. Biographic Criteria (personal identity, background, and choices, defined by self and others)

1) “name”  – Polish forms of the first and last name 2) “family-of-origin” – Polish family background, typically patrilineal and at times connected to the notion of the “Polish race” 3) “psychosomatic identity” – being the embodiment of Polish traits in the whole person, body and spirit (given, not self-defined) 4) “emotional and patriotic identity” – having a “Polish heart” and displaying a deep attachment to Poland (chosen, self-defined) 5) “official identity” – with a Polish national identity and citizenship 6) “native language” – using Polish as the native language 7) “community” – engaged in the Polish community, through the place of residence, membership in organizations, and charitable activities for Polish causes

B. Musical Criteria (traits chosen by the composers or ascribed to their works by others)

1) “language” – the use of Polish texts and titles in works 2) “genre” – the use of Polish genres, e.g. the mazurka or polonaise 3) “quotation” – citing from Polish folk music, national songs or anthems 4) “style” – the presence of various melodic and rhythmic elements definable as ‘Polish’, especially originating from Polish dances 5) “content” – Polish subjects in explicit (defined by the composer) or implicit forms, the latter ‘heard’ by reviewers; themes borrowed from Poland’s history, mythology, literature, religion and customs, climate and geography, etc. 6) “spiritual content” – expressions of the “Polish spirit” in general terms, or in the form of a predominant character trait ascribed to the whole nation, such as “sorrow” [żal], or “arrhythmia” 7) “music community” – Polish performance and programming contexts, e.g. festivals of Polish music, concerts for Polish causes; the music being understood by Poles alone

 Both categories of this list include issues that composers have a degree of control over by consciously choosing to be Polish and compose Polish music filled with national traits.  Simultaneously, the list of biographic criteria includes characteristics that pre-date the composers’ birth and pre-define their identity as Poles in ways transcending the intentions of the composers’ themselves.  Furthermore, the composers’ lives and music may be depicted as far more Polish than those originally intended, especially when viewed from a posthumous perspective of “late grandchildren” who have the freedom of interpreting the composers’ biographical background and achievements without taking into account their wishes.  This openness to fanciful and arbitrary interpretations characterizes particularly the criteria of family-of-origin, psychosomatic identity and community in the area of biography, and the criteria of style, community, content, and spiritual content in the domain of music.  

 

The essays about Chopin have provided partial and contradictory answers to the following questions: Was Chopin a Polish composer?  Was Chopin a purely Polish composer, without a trace of French identity?  Was Chopin’s music entirely Polish and if so, why?  What Polish traits did Chopin capture and express?  What is the definition of being Polish in music?  Numerous thematic threads have been intertwined in these texts that could be given a collective subtitle of “How Polish was Chopin?” On the basis of scattered references in Chopin’s letters we might note that the composer’s self-definition during his years in Paris was as an exiled Pole.  Moreover, Chopin seemed to believe in distinct national emotional and personality traits, pointing to the essential character differences separating a Slav from a Scandinavian or a Spaniard.  

Yet, Chopin’s personal beliefs in this matter were immaterial for the authors of texts about him, texts that straddle the areas of music aesthetics, music biography and national ideology.  These narratives follow a twisted path through the list of criteria: the issue of Polonizing Chopin’s name came to the forefront of discussions in the 1930s (though it was initiated at the end of the 19th century; see the comments on Niewiadomski’s essays), while the awareness of the presence of a vaguely defined “Polish spirit” in Chopin’s music permeated the literature of this subject from its inception (see my comments about essays by Przybyszewski, Noskowski, and Paderewski, and chapter 10 in this collection).  Relying on the criteria described above to provide a general framework for conceptualizing the Polishness of Chopin’s music, I will follow a roughly chronological trajectory.  This approach will allow me to highlight the appearance of significant concepts and interpretations, in particular, the charged notion of the “Polish race.”

The Rise and Fall of the “Polish Race”

The tendency to circumscribe the national identity to common genetic origin and shared personality traits and define art as an expression of such narrowly described features increased in the Western world towards the end of the 19th century.  Europeans and Americans habitually described spiritual essences of their nations in terms of their shared genetic heritage.  Such descriptions permeate the aesthetic writings of Hyppolyte Taine which greatly influenced generations of Polish music critics and historians.  The concept of race itself was developed much earlier in Germany (by Johan Blumenbach, 1752-1840) and France (by Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, 1816-1862).  From its inception, it served to provide arguments about the supposed inequality of the world’s peoples and the superiority of Europeans, or, in particular, the French or the Germans.  Different genealogies were compiled for various national races and their hierarchies reflected the nationalistic and political views of the writers.  

The term “Polish race” referred to people of inherited Polish ethnicity, i.e. those who were born to Polish parents, who, in turn, were children of Polish parents, etc.  The chain of origin extended indefinitely back in time to the nation’s mythical birth from several Slavonic tribes who “dwelt from time immemorial” on the vast plain “between the Baltic sea and the Carpathian mountains.”  One could be Polish only when sharing the Polish genes; this heritage was thought to engender common psychological and spiritual traits of the Polish nation.  These racial definitions of Polishness were found in self-definitions proclaimed in Poland and abroad, as well as in descriptions offered by outsiders.   Jakob Riis saw “the thrifty Polish race” (1890) among impoverished emigrants to America; James W. Gerard mused about the great future of “the splendid Polish race” in its own, independent country (1918).

 A fascinating genealogy of the “Slavic or Slavonic race” precedes an account of musical achievements of the “Polish race” in a 1902 essay by an émigré composer and pianist, Jaroslaw de Zielinski (1847-1922).  The Slavic race includes Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Servians, Croatians, Carinthians, Illyrians, and Vends, but excludes the “Muscovites,” who claim to be Great Russians but—according to Zielinski—in reality are a Tartar race.  In this narrative, the Slavs’ history unfolds as a struggle against their neighbors in the south—Byzantine, and the west—Germanic.  The Germans, in addition to frequent military confrontations, crowded Poland as craftsmen, merchants, and teachers, thus having the opportunity to wreak havoc with national identity by prejudicing “their pupils against the Polish language.”  The theory that Poland had two enemies, Russians and Germans, stemming from the historical facts of Poland’s partitions by Russia, Prussia and Austria at the end of the 18^th-century, is given here a racial justification.  Similarly to Zielinski, Charles Phillips (1923) rhapsodized about the perennial “racial competition”—based on the principle of the “survival of the fittest”—between the races of the German (i.e. Teuton who was “steady, powerful, ponderous, self-righteous, self-satisfied, static”) and the Pole (“dynamic, flexible, un-self-satisfied, self-critical, idealistic and tenacious of his ideal”).

The notion of the “Polish race” appeared in various Polish-American writings; for instance in the amended 1914 Charter of a para-military youth association, The Polish Falcons of America whose main objective was “to regenerate the Polish race in body and spirit and create of the immigrant a National asset, for the purpose of exerting every possible influence towards attaining political independence of the fatherland.”  While the unabashed patriotism of the Polish Falcons seems praiseworthy, their goal of renewing and unifying the nation through strengthening its youth resembles the objectives of totalitarian organizations in various (actual or imagined) political systems, from Plato's Republic to Nazi Germany.  In this context, it is important to note that the concept of the “Polish race” found its demise at the outset of World War II, when the hard-won sovereignty of Poland was again under attack from Germany seeking to expand its territories.  On August 22, 1939, a week before the invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II, Hitler addressed his military commanders ordering them “to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language.” Therefore, the term acquired a genocidal connotation which rendered the notion of the “Polish race” unacceptable, banishing it from respectable nation-building discourse.

Before it disappeared, though, the “Polish race” played an increasingly more prominent role in constructing the Polish identity of Chopin and his music.  In 1923 Charles Phillips ended his list of positive characteristics of the “dynamic and idealistic” Pole: “Chopin is an example.”  Let us begin the examination of this topic with a review of national traits associated with Chopin’s music.

Musical Evocations of Polish History and Landscape

The quest for Polish subjects in Chopin’s solo piano works (Musical Criterion 5: content) is a recurring topos in 19^th-century responses to his music.  Romantic writers provided fantastic descriptions of historical subjects hidden in purely instrumental compositions.  For instance, Marceli Antoni Szulc envisioned the Polonaise Op. 53 in A-flat major as an image of a national procession of hetmans and voivodas, colorfully costumed in precious garb of Polish 17^th-century noblemen (see also Kleczyński’s interpretation of this piece in chapter 10).  Writing in this vein, Stanisław Tarnowski (1837-1871) sought a connection between Chopin’s compositions and Polish poetry.  Not surprisingly, he found a direct patriotic inspiration in numerous pieces, including the Preludes Op. 24, many Mazurkas, and the Funeral March from the Sonata in B-flat minor.  Tarnowski saw the latter work as a “funereal conduct of the whole nation watching its own funeral.”  

A similar patriotic vision is captured on a late 19th-century postcard depicting pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski—a foremost Chopin interpreter of his time (see Figure 1).  Here, a solemn procession of Polish kings and noblemen arises above bluish light emanating from the keyboard; Paderewski’s outstretched hands and intensely focused face indicate that these great heroes of the past have been brought to life by his music.  This image reveals the role that music played in the cultivation of Polish culture and identity after Poland’s loss of sovereignty.  The postcard also illustrates a statement from Ignacy Jan Paderewski’s famous speech of 1910 that Chopin’s compositions truly contain “the spirit of the land of his fathers, the spirit of his nation."  Paderewski thus described a ghost-filled scene evoked by Chopin’s music: “Finally . . . spectres fulfill their shadowy rights. What ghost was that?  Whose spirit there went past?  Was this Żółkiewski?  Or Czarniecki’s noble shade?”

 While the Polish character of Polish dance genres, such as mazurkas and polonaises, could not be doubted (Musical Criterion 2: genre), these works themselves have been taken to a second level of Polishness by being read as programmatic representations of Polish landscape and village scenes (Musical Criterion 5: content).  Fifty years after the composer’s death, Zygmunt Noskowski took for granted a thesis that “Chopin’s melodies are poetic transformations of the sights that the master absorbed in his youth . . . From many a mazurka one can guess the color and light filling a landscape that the master saw with the eyes of his soul while writing his beautiful poem.”  Noskowski proceeded to associate particular images with individual mazurkas, impromptus, sonatas, and ballades.  The Impromptu in F-sharp Major was assigned the most elaborate program.  Noskowski interpreted this work as an extended “Sunday-in-a-village” scene, replete with “the voices of church bells calling to the service” over summer fields “covered with newly ripened wheat, gently swaying under a slight breeze.”  The commentator concluded: “Nature in its entirety is praying in this moment... and the holiday sentiment pervades everything.”  Thus, in Noskowski’s nationalistic/religious interpretation of Chopin’s piano compositions, a pastoral idyll arises from the music that perfectly captures the serenity of a people united with their land.  The music is important—and Polish—because it portrays the landscape of Poland and the religious moods associated with it.

The language of description used by Polish composers and music critics in the 19th and early 20th centuries often employs figures of speech equating folk song with field flowers.  The trope that Chopin’s folk-inspired music is, as it were, permeated with “the fragrances of delicate flowers of Polish meadows” first appears in Józef Sikorski’s article of 1849.  Sikorski discussed the national traits of Chopin music (seen in the use of genre, style and quotation; Musical Criteria 2-4) and his inspiration with Polish folk songs.  For Sikorski, these songs were elevated, charming and simple, while remaining as fleeting and ineffable as the “fragrance of a violet.”  This synaesthetic reference articulates a widespread belief that folk music belonged to the utopia of cultivated nature, the idyllic and serene “national garden of Eden.” 

Similarly, Cyprian Kamil Norwid (1821-1883), characterized Chopin (“a Varsovian by birth, a Pole by heart, and a citizen of the world by talent”) as someone who “knew how to gather field flowers, without shaking off even a slightest drop of dew, or a smallest speck of dust from them.” Norwid’s reference to folksong as “field flowers” articulates the connection between the beauty of Polish countryside and the music created by its inhabitants.  The association of Chopin with the lost paradise of the native country recurred in an essay by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski (1812-1887) where Chopin himself (not just his music, but the whole person) became a “phenomenon, as it were, straight from our fields and meadows, those of old, those that blessed our evenings with a marvelous fragrance of the breath of our beloved soil.”  Zygmunt Noskowski also penned a noteworthy passage equating folksong with field flowers and describing Chopin as someone who “brought a breeze of fresh air” to the “atmosphere of exotic fragrances” of the Romantic salon.  The freshness and originality of Chopin’s music stemmed from his closeness to Nature, “his first mistress [whose] brilliance and beauty entranced him and left their traces deep in the soul.”  Finding inspiration in folk music, like painting landscapes outdoors, meant choosing the natural over the artificial.

Folk art as nature might be an environmental trope, rather than a national one, however in the Polish context it has strong nationalistic overtones.  Through the 19th century Poles were a nation without sovereignty over its territory, a nation reduced to the status of an ethnic minority in three different countries.  Since they lived under a constant threat from the occupying nations and struggled to regain ownership and control of their land (the Prussians being particularly eager to remove Poles from their farms and/or Germanize them), their attachment to the ancestral land was an expression of their patriotism.  These difficult circumstances engendered the myth-making process that transformed Chopin into “a singer of Polish fields and meadows” praised by Noskowski for the accuracy and authenticity of his musical landscape depictions.  The ecological nationalism of most “flower”-references reveals a dependency on Herder-sanctioned connection of a people to the land they inhabit.  In this style of nationalistic readings of Chopin’s music, both Polish folk song and Chopin’s music based on it have a straightforward link to the benevolent and nurturing Nature.

In other nationalistic interpretations, the same music may be seen as vehicle for conveying the national spirit and expressing the traits of the nation’s personality (Musical Criterion 6).  Arguments used in this area increasingly take Chopin’s personal characteristics and heritage into account (Biographic Criteria 2-4, pertaining to the family of origin, psychosomatic identity, and emotional identity of the composer).  Thus, through the 19^th century, nationalistic writers gradually shift their attention from generalized and colorful rhapsodizing about the Polish content of Chopin’s music (Musical Criteria 5-6) toward statements about his personal relationship to the “Polish race” and its musical manifestations.  Let us first examine the varieties of musical expressions of the Polish spirit.

............... to be continued

Excerpts from Maja Trochimczyk, "Chopin and the Polish Race" 

chapter in Halina Goldberg, ed.  The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004, 278-313.