How to Analyze Chopin – The Mazurka

Introduction

In this article I will try to introduce you in the most practical way possible to one of the most interpreted forms of the piano repertoire: the Mazurka. Today you can’t talk about Mazurka without talking about F. Chopin: Let’s find out why.

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Origins

Chopin began to write using the form of the Mazurka when he was just fifteen years old, he was then attending the Lyceum in Warsaw, capital of Poland, and a place where in 1825 there were not the discos of today but several dance halls where we entertained ourselves in society with various forms of dance including the Mazurka. The name of this dance, which the Polish is Mazurek or simply Mazur, probably derives from the mazur tribe that once inhabited the Mazovia. Mazurek is also the name of a village near Warsaw from which the original core of this dance seems to have come. Already by the eighteenth century this form had opposed the Polish, which the people considered the dance of the aristocrats. Certainly at this time in Chopin’s life it was not yet clear that Mazurkas and Polacches would become his most characteristic and most famous compositions!

Brief History Of Mazurka

If the Polish, as a compositional form, had existed for some time in musical literature (not only piano) and was included in the works of illustrious composers already in the eighteenth century, for example among the compositions of the sons of J. S. Bach, the Mazurka had not been particularly considered by composers being confined to the sphere of popular music. The Mazurka was in fact used more for consumption than for anything else: you would not have seen at the time of Chopin people absorbed and very interested in listening to a Mazurka, but more than anything else you would have seen them dancing and living life in society with this music only in the background.

Franz Liszt And Frédéric Chopin

The great pianist Franz Liszt (who you absolutely must know if you play piano because he is the inventor of piano recital, that is the form of performance that all pianists still use today) wrote an opera, actually written in part by his partner, entitled Life of Chopin. In this work Liszt explained that to dance the Mazurka it must be the lady who chooses her own knight, and added that the latter is proud of the one whose preference he has been able to obtain: after the choice of the knight, the couples take each other by the hand and form a large circle; at this point, I ask you to imagine what I am about to tell you because in this section of the book we find a very vivid description of this moment of the dance, which does more or less like this:

The women weave a garland where each lady is a flower, unique of its kind, and of which similar to a gloomy foliage the uniform dress of the men makes the various colors stand out.

Life of Chopin, F. Liszt

The Rondo

At this point in the dance begins a rondo, a type of dance held by a circle of couples that proceeds clockwise with the men outside. The knight with his right hand holds the left hand of the lady in a high position, W-shaped, and immediately after the general rondo begins a large parade in which the attention is focused on a single couple. At a certain point in the book this moment of revelation of the protagonists of the dance is described, the two “most beautiful of the evening” so to speak. Imagine what we read in the book:

The woman advances first and swings like a bird that is about to fly, touches the floor like a skater sliding on one foot, then suddenly leaps: her eyelids open wide and like a Greek goddess, with a straight forehead and swollen breasts with elastic jumps cleaves the air as the boat cuts the waves, and seems to play in space. Then she resumes flirtatious sliding, observes the spectators, throws a smile, a word with the favorites, stretches out her beautiful arms to the knight who reaches her to resume her nervous dance steps and walk the room from one end to the other with prodigious rapidity. She slips, runs, flies: the reddened cheeks, the shiny look, the inclined torso, the increasingly slow steps until the moment when exhausted and frantic she falls softly into the arms of the knight who grabs her vigorously and lifts her a moment in the air before concluding the intoxicating vortex. Every Polish woman possesses innate the science of this dance, which is a chaste dance of love.

Life of Chopin, F. Liszt

After this wonderful description, it’s time to get the Music talking. I mention a Mazurka at the piano, you can find it below. This is the Mazurka Op. 17 Number 4 in A Minor: Try to close your eyes to let all the traits of the dance we have talked about so far be evoked in your mind by the music, and try to understand at what time of the song they take place. I advise you to turn up the volume a lot before listening, because it is a song with very fine nuances.

You can buy the Score of the Mazurka that I just played you in the edition that I recommend below: if you do it from the banner below, a small part of your purchase will go to support this blog.

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Chopin’s Mazurkas

Now, putting aside this wonderful text by Franz Liszt and returning to Chopin, we still do not know how many Mazurke he composed. Many were published following the composer’s death: for example, Gastone Belotti, a Chopinian biographer, published one in 1977. In his Mazurkas, which Chopin loved to play in those halls of which we have just been able to breathe the atmosphere with our imagination, today we can not only breathe the popular air of the Mazurka of the origins, but also and above all that of the salons that we have described so far, of the good society of Warsaw. With this work of re-stylization of a compositional form, Chopin welcomed into European cultured music an absolutely new element compared to the tradition of the most widespread compositional forms.

The Compositional Structure

Those who study piano benefit enormously from the structural knowledge of this form, because when they then go to study it to the instrument they start with a very precise and defined general scheme of study. Its structure is very simple, it is of ternary rhythm and in most cases it has a tripartite structure of this type:

In

B

A’

Sometimes a small Tail is added to this basic structure. The emphasis is on the second and third half, which together with its slower pace differentiates it a lot from the Waltz, in which it is generally only the first half that is marked. Waltz and Mazurka are therefore two compositional forms generally ternary but with a substantial difference in the organization of accents. The development of the themes follows in most cases the musical rhetoric of which we have already spoken in the article on the Sonata Form and on that concerning the Fugue: the only peculiarity of the Mazurka is to present in most cases themes formed by cells of two measures that end on the weak tempo of the second of the two bars. Chopin’s custom, in particular, is to present the theme exposed in section A to his enharmonic in section B: this procedure can be exemplified in the table below.

Section	In	B
Theme Tones	C Sharp Minor	D flat Major

From the compositional point of view it should not be frightening the use of the augmented fourth interval, a tritone that Chopin faithfully draws from popular tradition, or the use of modal scales in the frequent repetition of melodic or rhythmic recordings.

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Conclusions

On mazurka is everything, I invite you as always to continue to follow us so as not to miss the further insights on the subject, which you will find in the following articles. See you in tomorrow’s daily article!

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