Polonaises

Abstract

Few composers can have begun, or ended, their careers more fittingly or prophetically than Chopin, whose creative life is framed, respectively, by a polonaise and a mazurka. Without his extraordinarily original and poetic contributions to both genres, these Polish dances might seem to us today almost as arcane and exotic as the Rumanian briul or the Spanish zarabanda (a far cry from the courtly centrepiece of Baroque suites). Not that he was alone or unprecedented in cultivating either: the mazurka, urbanised from rustic roots, was a popular diversion in the royal courts of eighteenth-century Europe, and the polonaise was fashionable enough in the same era to elicit examples from J.S., WE and C.P.E. Bach, Handel, Telemann, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, to name only a generous handful. There is a rather pleasing irony in the fact that Poland's most famous and patriotic dance, like her most famous and patriotic composer, bears a French name. The composer, in keeping with time-honoured if sexist tradition, got his from his father, the dance, in its modern manifestation, from its godmothers: three French princesses of the seventeenth-century who married successive Polish kings. From that time to the present, the polonaise has been widely accepted as a purely instrumental dance of impeccably aristocratic (though nationally impure) lineage. In common with many a latter-day aristocrat, however, it came from humble origins. Like the mazurka, it spent its earliest youth amongst the peasantry and was Polish to its figurative fingertips. Like the mazurka too, it was originally a sung dance, or rather a whole family of them. Contrary to popular belief, which would have these ancient forebears buried in the mists of time, a great many have been preserved and are still in use at various popular ceremonies and festivities, most notably at weddings, where their measured and dignified triple metre is deemed particularly appropriate. Still another similarity with the elders of the mazurka family is an indeterminate modality neither major nor minor but rather pentatonic. Ambiguity is not a quality one generally associates with Chopin's use of the f< >nn, but it surfaces in his last, subdest, and .nguabh his greatest polonaise (of which nunc anon) like some spiritual obeisance to its distant and still purely Polish ancestors. By the late sixteenth-century the polonaii had found its way into neighbouring countries and became particularly popular in Scandinavia, where it sired the p< >lska, ironically destined, despite its name and origin, to become the most markedly nation folk dance of Sweden.