STEPHEN ARON: My Favorite Chopin Mazurkas

Stephen Aron

My Favorite Chopin Mazurkas

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-While at first, the very notion of playing an entire CD of this music on the solo guitar seems unlikely, close scrutiny reveals in these works an astonishingly rich resource for the guitarist. Mine is not, of course, the first effort to arrange these pieces. Many guitarists over the years, including Chopin’s contemporary and compatriot, Jan N. de Brobrowicz, and the legendary Spanish master, Francisco Tarrega, have produced versions of isolated selections. In fact, Chopin’s music is among the most frequently chosen source material by the guitarist-arranger. This is certainly, though, the first such exhaustive exploration of the genre for solo guitar.

Of all of Chopin’s works, the Mazurkas are unique in several ways. It is the only form he embraced literally throughout his lifetime; he wrote more of them than of any other form; and they feature his most chromatic and exotic-sounding passages. It is his unique and at time daring harmonic language, and this very exoticism that drew me to the pieces initially. Upon closer examination, I found a remarkably varied collection of works only some of which directly referenced the exuberant physicality of the original dance. Chopin’s frequent use of mode (Especially phrygian and lydian) and frequent tonal ambiguity added to their allure. I was hooked.

In preparing the arrangements, I decided at the outset to choose keys which comfortably accommodated the guitar. Occasionally, unusual tunings were employed to facilitate the disparate key areas so common in the Mazurkas (and so atypical of guitar music from the same period). In the end, the physical execution of Chopin’s scores proved an easier task than that of developing stylistically appropriate interpretations. There is little in the guitar repertoire to prepare the guitarist for the style of performance represented by these pieces. It was my desire to create for them a new (parallel) existence as guitar pieces, albeit unusually good guitar pieces.

There is no other comparable body of literature for solo guitar. Consequently, there is little frame of reference for this recording; the listening experience is a unique one. I hope you enjoy the journey.


-The Mazurkas of Chopin by Brooks Toliver

The Mazurkas of Frédéric Chopin (1810-49) are important from many angles: as representative of his entire professional life (from op. 6, published at the age of 22, to op. 63 of 1847, two years before his death), they are critical to an understanding of his development; as works of a Polish expatriate (op. 6 was composed in Vienna, the other sets in Paris), they invite political readings; as the first--and really the only--canonized mazurkas, they belong in any history of the development of piano literature in general and the character piece in particular; finally, as great music, they demand our consideration from a purely aesthetic perspective. One could generalize that Chopin grew up understanding two fundamentally different varieties of mazurka. One was the traditional, folk mazurka, which he absorbed in village festivals outside of Warsaw in the province of Mazovia. The three principal manifestations of this genre--the mazur, oberek, and kujawiak--would all resonate in Chopin's own mazurkas (it has become something of a connoisseur's game to identify these specific shadings in individual works).

The other mazurka tradition familiar to Chopin, that emanating from the parlors of Warsaw, likely supplied Chopin with a valuable aesthetic precedent: these "city mazurkas" were stylizations of their country relatives, and Chopin may have owed to them the inspiration of writing not merely mazurkas, but works about the mazurka. While there are surely other aspects of the urban tradition integral to our understanding of Chopin, none can be more important than this.

A key historical issue relevant to Chopin's mazurkas is the political environment of contemporary Poland. By the late eighteenth century the nation had ceased to exist, technically speaking, having been partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Modern events have shown us to what degree such effacements prompt nationalistic counter-movements, and "Polishness" in the early nineteenth century proves no exception. On one hand, the connection of these developments to Chopin and the mazurkas is not as simple as it has traditionally been construed. On the other, it is fair to say that many in and since Chopin's time have read political sentiments into his mazurkas. The tendency was encouraged by Chopin's status as an émigré (read: "exile"), which to some personified the state of the Polish nation as a whole. Furthermore, the exodus of fellow Poles to Chopin's adopted home of Paris in 1830-31 (after an unsuccessful coup d'état against Russian occupiers) resulted in an ever greater proportion of his audience reading a nationalist agenda into his most Polish of compositions.

Western critics initially found no nationalist messages in the mazurkas, but, by the mid 1830s, had also gravitated toward the political readings that have prevailed to this day. Robert Schumann's comment in 1836 demonstrates this shift:

"If the mighty autocratic monarch of the north knew what a dangerous enemy threatened him in Chopin's works, in the simple tunes of his mazurkas, he would forbid this music. Chopin's works are cannons buried in flowers."

Schumann's reference to canons makes sense in light of political nationalism; but what are we to make of the flowers? They apparently evoke femininity, a quality more than one writer has attached to the mazurkas. No less than Franz Liszt spelled it out repeatedly:

"...the mazurkas give a higher rank to the feminine element [than the polonaises]. Woman appears not as a protected figure but as queen."

"No longer is the feminine and effeminate element driven back into shadowy recess [in the mazurkas]. On the contrary, it is brought out in the boldest relief, nay, it is brought into such prominent importance that all else disappears, or, at most, serves only as its accompaniment..."

While references to femininity in the mazurkas may make aural sense (meaning that many of us would confess to hear it), they raise a conceptual problem: what are feminine undertones doing in nineteenth-century nationalistic music? Certainly countries are commonly referred to as the "motherland," but is nationalism really the root of femininity in Chopin's mazurkas? It would appear not: femininity is more a cross stream that mingles with nationalism, creating a rich interplay of varied meanings in the process. What is more, this stream has more than a single source. One of those sources is simply the social environment of the traditional mazurka: elsewhere Liszt made clear that he was thinking of the prominent role of women in the actual dance.

A more elusive source of feminine connotations has to do with the tradition of the salon. "Salon" refers both to the room in upper-class (and upper-middle-class) homes where performances would take place, and, more loosely, to the social institution of hosting musical events, which included inviting noted musicians and cultured friends, discussing the arts, and so forth. Such is the environment in which Chopin made a living throughout his years in Paris, and in this sense, the mazurkas, along with most of his works, can be labelled "salon music." The social context of salon music accounts for the latter's stigma of flash-without-substance, an artistic death sentence strong enough to have prompted generations of writers to "save" Chopin's music from the association through various distancing strategies.

Be that as it may, the salon origins of Chopin's music have shaped our understanding of it, and this leads to the point of this discussion: salons were generally the woman's domain. Men naturally attended them; but women organized them, and this has undoubtedly encouraged the tradition of hearing feminine character in the mazurkas.

Scholars have recently begun to reconstruct a third musical tradition (after the concert hall and the salon), that of the parlor. If the salon involved well known composers and virtuosi in house concerts, the parlor belonged to solidly middle-class (or "bourgeois") citizens bent on acquiring the sheen of culture through family music-making. The parlor, as captured by innumerable nineteenth-century artists and writers, was the very emblem of domestic bliss; common to that picture was an upright piano (whose popularity soared from the nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries) played by a daughter or two. The latter detail is crucial: amateur music-making in the home was seen as the province of women, and specifically of daughters, who cultured" themselves partly as bait for potential spouses.

What does this picture have to do with Chopin? Perhaps very little, given that his music is seldom linked to the parlor tradition. But that link, which is denied to many of his works on account of their technical difficulty, remains a possibility in the case of the mazurkas: most of them, like Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte, lay within the abilities of the nineteenth-century daughter-pianist. While I know of no history tying the mazurkas to femininity via the parlor, history has shown us that widely held impressions can have roots in the least tenable--and often submerged--associations. Such is the case in one last source of the feminine connotation, which takes the form of a biographical anecdote: Chopin's long relationship with the trouser-wearing, cigar-smoking George Sand has surely "feminized" his music much in the same way that his sickness and early death have accentuated its lugubrious quality.


I close these notes with two performance-related questions that have recently occupied Chopin-historians: should individual opus numbers be performed in their entirety, and is there a single, authoritative edition of the mazurkas?

We know as well that Chopin himself--not his publishers--determined the ordering of mazurkas within each set. This information implies that the composer envisioned the opus numbers as unified wholes, which in turn would argue for performing entire sets, rather than isolated mazurkas.


Against this view stands the actual performance history as we know it: there is no record of Chopin himself having played a set in its entirety, nor of his ever having recommended the practice. To the contrary, he evidently conceived of the mazurkas as "detachable"; surviving accounts of his performances suggest that he offered up selected mazurkas from different sets, as was his custom with other genres. This apparent contradiction of facts reflects less Chopin's era than our own: we tend to look for single, authoritative performance traditions, whereas the historical reality is more fluid; Chopin and his contemporaries allowed for a wide range of performance possibilities, in other words. In the realm of the mazurkas, this takes shape in an ideological coexistence of what Kallberg calls unity and compatibility: individual mazurkas are unified in the sense of being complete entities to be performed in their entirety. Complete opus numbers, on the other hand, consist of compatible mazurkas: if played as a set, they go well together.

To insist on a more specific performance-prescription is to misread Chopin's musical environment and create anachronistic scholarly "problems."


The same danger hovers over the question of an authoritative edition. The concept of a single, correct text, while traditionally dear to the musicologist, is not relevant to every musical tradition. It is certainly out of place in regard to Chopin, who knowingly sent contrasting versions of works to his French, English, and German publishers. Kallberg notes one case where Chopin sent out three different "final drafts" of one nocturne on the same day!

Kallberg attributes this in part to Chopin's personal proclivity for rewriting: the composer simply could not copy a score without changing it. But Chopin's practices also point to the larger circumstance of a flexible musical tradition, one in which scores represented moments in an ongoing process, rather than final destinations. Indeed, the favoring of Chopin's last known revision of a given piece, while obviously a worthy pursuit, can mislead in implying a linear compositional progress that Chopin himself likely would not have recognized. This general picture does not mean that anything goes, editorially speaking. Rather, it encourages us to learn more about the background and genesis of individual works, as well as the social environment in which Chopin composed and published.

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