Posted on 03/02/2010 1:57:44 PM PST by lizol
In Poland, Chopin's music defines a nation
By Bernard Osser (AFP)
WARSAW — Tsarist Russia berated it as subversive, Nazi Germany banned it outright and to this day, for Poles, the cascading notes of Frederic Chopin still symbolise their country's long struggle for independence.
After hearing Chopin's quintessentially Polish "Mazurkas" and his "Revolutionary Etude", Robert Schuman, a German and like Chopin a renowned 19th-century composer, understood, describing the music of his Franco-Polish contemporary as "cannons hidden among blossoms".
Chopin wrote the powerful and turbulent "Revolutionary Etude" as an expat in his father's native France, where he landed after an 1830-31 uprising of Polish insurgents against the 1795 partition of Poland by Russia, Prussia and Austria.
Having refused to take a Russian passport, Chopin was never able to set foot on his and his mother's native soil again after the doomed insurrection.
Schuman showed ironic foresight when he said of Tsar Nicholas I, if "this powerful and autocratic monarch of the north knew the danger of the enemy he has in the works of Chopin (...) he would ban his music."
As indeed, after the 19th-century partition of Poland the tsar censured public performances of Chopin's music as dangerous.
In 1863, Russian troops even destroyed the piano Chopin had played as a child prodigy in Warsaw, throwing it out the second storey of a building in symbolic revenge for a failed assassination attempt against the Russian governor of Poland.
No one before nor anyone since Chopin "has been able to create a sonic universe from the melodies and rhythms surrounding Poles," said Stainslaw Leszczynski, deputy director of Poland's Chopin Institute in Warsaw. "He delved into folklore and created music that has become folklore."
Chopin's music "is intuitively Polish, even if this in itself is difficult to define," Leszczynski told AFP.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
Didn’t Polish radio repeatedly play the great Polannaise to inspire it’s populace during the Nazi invasion of 1939?
Is that the so-called Military Polonaise? I saw a clip of a British military band playing it during the Phony War of
‘39-’40.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.