ExclusiveChopin: Mazurka in G major, Op. 50 no.3

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Frédéric Chopin: Mazurka in G major, Op. 50 no. 3. This beautiful piece was played by Christoph Zbinden. It has common licence (CC BY 3.0 Attribution 3.0 Unported), and is provided through musopen.org.

Chopin’s mazurkas have the reputation of being connoisseurs’ music, an acquired taste for sophisticates. But there is no particular reason why this should be so, since their charms and profundities reveal themselves just as directly as is the case for his apparently more ‘accessible’ genres like the nocturnes or ballades. Doubtless the misconceptions that surround Chopin’s mazurkas have to do with their evident ‘exoticism’, for listeners are commonly informed that the genre arose directly from the Polish people, that it blended characteristics of three distinct triple-metre folk dances (the mazur, the oberek and the kujawiak) in order to reveal something essential about the Polish music soul.

But these are essentialist myths. Chopin did not approach the mazurka as a kind of ethnographer. Though as a youth he did come across some mazurkas played by country folk, his knowledge of the genre was largely informed by urban dance culture: any city-dwelling Pole in the first third of the nineteenth century would have encountered danced mazurkas in all manner of social settings. Published scores of these danced mazurkas reveal simple, diatonic works, which gives the lie to the notion that the complexities of Chopin’s mazurkas somehow reflect their exotic Polish origins. Chopin in his mazurkas did not imitate a Polish sound; he created this sound. That Chopin invented a musical image of Poland is an idea altogether more impressive than any portrayal of him as a dutiful stenographer of a putative folk original.

Chopin’s mazurkas were by no means the first such works published for piano, but they were the first to offer up to a wider European audience an imaginary recreation of the idea of Poland in sound.

Source: hyperion-records.co.uk

This video was filmed by Christian Schlegel in the garden of our daughter in Switzerland. The video was edited by Wenjing Ma.






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