Stanisław Przybyszewski

“ Through the sorrowful psalmody of the scherzo the approaching trample of horses can be heard afar off,—and somewhere afar off a final, a bloody contest is panting, an indistinct echo from the heroic troop's dance of death resounds softly across,—the troop which had wedged itself into the superior numbers of the enemy and at the cross-roads of the nation, which has wandered from the track, which has fallen a prey to destruction, which is doomed to ruin, its soul sobs and laments. ”

“ It is that heroic overwhelming tone of martyrdom, which upon the deadly field of Maciejowice [5] sobbed for mercy in crazed prayers, the tone of despair, whose death-rattle resounds amid throes of torment, filled with the breath of revolt and curses and revilings and shrill outcry to God: "O thou, who through so many centuries hast arrayed Poland in splendour and glory!" [6] —the despairing outcry to which God remained deaf—a screech of the nation which breathed its last in deadly combat upon the ramparts of Praga [7] . ”

“ For the grave could not be filled in,—endlessly, endlessly, masses of earth, soaked by holy blood of martyrs, rolled upon the coffin, and yet the grave remained open,—the lid of the coffin trembles, quivers, opens, burst by the giant breast, which is still alive and teeming with strength,—and the bells boom and boom, flung to and fro by the tempest of vengeance, of requital, of a distant hope fervid with victory. ”

“ The kingdom of earth bas been entwined with heaven by invisible strings, invisible hands are straying mournfully upon this celestial harp, and they weep and lament with the woeful moaning of those daughters of Jerusalem, to whom the Redeemer exclaimed in supremest scorn of death. "Weep not for me, but for you and your children"—and yet they weep and lament, despondently, not divining that the tomb will open and from the dark vault, the spirit of the nation in new splendour and victorious magnificence, will soar aloft to a new life. ”

“ Love for this land throve in Chopin's soul, till it became his most exalted creed, and thus it is, that a foreign nation cannot understand him, even in the remotest, as the Pole does—to the subtlest, the most fervent vibrations in Chopin's soul, the foreigner is deaf, precisely where the strongest echo is engendered in the Polish spirit. ”

“ The rhythm of this part represents the mood of the terror-stricken nation who, upon the ramparts where it has wandered to rejoice at the certain victory below in the plain, now in the face of defeat, surges back in a panic to the city, throngs the streets to overflowing, is crushed to death in the open squares, bursts the walls of churches, ends with a crazed stammering of despairing prayers, in the sobbing and groaning of helpless torment. ”

“ And the centre of equilibrium around which every happening in his soul oscillates, that is the land which bore him, the land with its sadness and its quiet melancholy rapture, its sombre tragicness and its blood-red destiny, the land, an isle yearned for with the greater anguish, as it slipped away in ever remoter perspectives and began to vanish from the gaze, the promised land upon which all yearning and striving centred, and which might never again be viewed with one's own eyes—the land, not as an ordinary reality, but rather as a Platonic anamnesis ”

“ The polonaise in A flat major is an overwhelming and truly exalted "Danse macabre" of that nation which, ever afresh, was condemned to death, and ever afresh broke the coffin-lid—and this, its magnificent clinging to life, its uniquely stubborn affirmation of life, has nowhere been revealed in Polish art so potently, so grimly, and so majestically as in this heroic dance. ”

“ Only now and then a lurking stillness, as if invisible hands were uplifting the holy monstrance above the whole nation and the whole globe, but only for an instant,—once more a pall of deadly anguish heaves across the whole sky, the air thrills with shrieks of the slain and the murdered, and above the city pillars of fire blaze high up in a tornado, burst in the middle, writhe along the ground, and with greedy tongues of flame lick up pools of blood. ”

“ And now the boom of heavy bells, but not those which in Beethoven, with impressive, majestical solemnity, hail the victorious hero upon the threshold of an immortal Walhalla, but those despairing, those uncalmable in their grief, those dull and anguished, when mourners cast a handful of earth upon the coffin, and from the spades of the grave-diggers the black, blood-soaked earth sinks into the dark pit. ”

“ And God knows whence came this wild joy, this craving for mighty gratification reaching from one end of the earth to the other; of themselves the feet stamp to the rhythm of a crazed dance, wild sounds burst louder and louder from the throat, the dance-tune rages in eddying leaps, in a rumbling bass—but this morbid wish to daze the senses is in vain, cowering grief creeps forth guilefully, slowly in an indistinct, dusk-shrouded memory. ”

“ And at once, at the same time, the hands are folded in devout contrition, a prayer arises, a fervid cry for grace and forgiveness—the turmoil is still astir, but already it is dying away as the wearied head despairingly sways to and fro, while the arms droop powerlessly and the soul is sunk in dull brooding. ”

“ Above the frowning abyss of despair, above the dark streams of tears and blood, above the broad-boughed willows, which weep by the graves of heroes and enclose an immeasurable graveyard, the king-spirit of the nation whose gaze is fixed rigidly upon its resurrection, gloomily broods in proud and sombre power. ”

“ And in the sallow moonlight the cross-roads are ghastly with the wide-opened arms of crosses, the swamps are haunted by the flickering souls of the damned, around stretch the bare fields of stubble, and in the slender poplars which form the framework of some isolated grave, the wind sings the dismal ballad of the mistress who slew the master ”

“ And Chopin died neither too early nor too late; in this brief individual life the entire folk-soul was enabled to give itself complete utterance in richer measure than almost any other. Indeed, there is hardly another artist, the events of whose life are of so little interest as in the case of Chopin. ”

“ But he did not forget what he owed to the original, naive folk-tunes; for the deepest impressions of his own soul he clad in the form of the Mazurek, [2] and within the compass of these few primordial notes the mighty artist aroused the Polish soul from its very depths to a potent and sorrowful vitality. The frame within which I am dealing with the most significant revelations of the Polish spirit, does not permit me to enter upon a thorough analysis of Chopin's production. I will draw attention only to those works in which the Chopin-race, the Chopin-land attain their clearest utterance. ”

“ With the loss of its sound value, the word has by no means lost its emotional value, but this has become deposited, has, so to speak, separated itself from the word, and has created in music its own form of being, independent from the word. ”

“ The rhythm of the first part is the raging pace of a stallion of hell bespattered with bloody froth, tearing across graves and fields of corpses, and upon its back carrying a mad horseman, an ill-starred herald of defeat and collapse. ”

“ And thus it comes about, that the innermost spiritual development of a nation can be investigated only in its music. And every nation possesses a specific tone, to which its whole spirit is attuned. This tone is quite different in the soul of the Germanic or Latin peoples, and a quite peculiar one, entirely different from every other, among the Slavonic peoples. ”

“ And from afar there comes a sound like the confused din of battle,—muffled roaring of cannon, the clatter of fire-arms, the rumble of the earth beneath the hoofs of raging horses,—prayers for the dying can be heard, beseeching pleas to the guider of battles, the chaos and the anguish and the wrath of the fight move farther and farther away ”

“ Schumann wrote of Chopin's mazureks, that if the ruler of the north knew what foes he had in these modest melodies, he would infallibly forbid this music;—what, then, shall be said of this polonaise in A flat major, which signifies a thunderous, stubborn, unyielding manifesto of those who will not allow themselves to be buried alive?
And there came that time when the soul of the mighty seer surged up amid the martyrdom of his nation to the power of one who could compare himself with God and with frenzied hands beats upon the portals of destiny with the despairing cry: "Wherefore? ”

“ To grasp the specific value of this mysterious tone in its whole range, to possess the power of harmonically attuning all other tones to this basic dominant,—herein lies the power of every artist and, at the same time, is afforded the standard as to how far an artist belongs to his own race or not. ”

“ The contest which has long since ebbed away upon earth, is continued somewhere in superearthly spaces in a savage hurricane, which may well have once heralded the entire creation, and the chaos of the finale which really signifies a prelude, seems to give birth to new stars. ”

“ Chopin's Mazurek is not to be confused with the dance-tune of the Mazurka. ↑ Z is pronounced like a French j ↑ Confederation of Targowica, at which the last Polish King agreed to the first partition of Poland. ↑ At the end of the first Polish revolt ↑ First line of the Polish National Hymn. ↑ A suburb of Warsaw, where in 1831 the Russians perpetrated a massacre of the most inhuman description. More than 12,000 people—men, women and children—were slaughtered without mercy. ”