It is of heart-rending sadness, and
exquisite pathos. Perhaps it was a patriotic rather than an aesthetic
feeling which led him thus to favor the mazurka. His love for his
country was exceeded only by his devotion to his art. "Oh, how sad it
must be to die in a foreign country," he wrote to a friend in 1830;
and when, soon afterward, he left home he took along a handful of
Polish soil which he kept for nineteen years. Shortly before his death
he expressed a wish that it should be strewn in his coffin--a wish
which was fulfilled; so that his body rested on Polish soil even in
Paris.
A countless number of exquisite melodic rhythmic and harmonic details
in the mazurkas might be dwelt upon in this place, but I will only
call attention to the inexhaustible variety of ideas which makes each
of them so unique, notwithstanding their strong family likeness. They
are like fantastic orchids, or like the countless varieties of humming
birds, those "winged poems of the air," of which no two are alike
while all resemble each other.
The nocturnes represent the dreamy side of Chopin's genius.
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