[Musical score excerpts]

The A flat Polonaise, op. 53, was published December, 1843, and is said by Karasowski to have been composed in 1840, after Chopin’s return from Majorca.  It is dedicated to A. Leo.  This is the one Karasowski calls the story of Chopin’s vision of the antique dead in an isolated tower of Madame Sand’s chateau at Nohant.  We have seen this legend disproved by one who knows.  This Polonaise is not as feverish and as exalted as the previous one.  It is, as Kleczynski writes, “the type of a war song.”  Named the Heroique, one hears in it Ehlert’s “ring of damascene blade and silver spur.”  There is imaginative splendor in this thrilling work, with its thunder of horses’ hoofs and fierce challengings.  What fire, what sword thrusts and smoke and clash of mortal conflict!  Here is no psychical presentation, but an objective picture of battle, of concrete contours, and with a cleaving brilliancy that excites the blood to boiling pitch.  That Chopin ever played it as intended is incredible; none but the heroes of the keyboard may grasp its dense chordal masses, its fiery projectiles of tone.  But there is something disturbing, even ghostly, in the strange intermezzo that separates the trio from the polonaise.  Both mist and starlight are in it.  Yet the work is played too fast, and has been nicknamed the “Drum” Polonaise, losing in majesty and force because of the vanity of virtuosi.  The octaves in E major are spun out as if speed were the sole idea of this episode.  Follow Kleczynski’s advice and do not sacrifice the Polonaise to the octaves.  Karl Tausig, so Joseffy and de Lenz assert, played this Polonaise in an unapproachable manner.  Powerful battle tableau as it is, it may still be presented so as not to shock one’s sense of the euphonious, of the limitations of the instrument.  This work becomes vapid and unheroic when transferred to the orchestra.

The Polonaise-Fantaisie in A flat, op. 61, given to the world September, 1846, is dedicated to Madame A. Veyret.  One of three great Polonaises, it is just beginning to be understood, having been derided as amorphous, febrile, of little musical moment, even Liszt declaring that “such pictures possess but little real value to art. ...  Deplorable visions which the artist should admit with extreme circumspection within the graceful circle of his charmed realm.”  This was written in the old-fashioned days, when art was aristocratic and excluded the “baser” and more painful emotions.  For a generation accustomed to the realism of Richard Strauss, the Fantaisie-Polonaise seems vaporous and idealistic, withal new.  It recalls one of those enchanted flasks of the magii from which on opening smoke exhales that gradually shapes itself into fantastic and fearsome figures.  This Polonaise at no time exhibits the solidity of its two predecessors; its plasticity defies the imprint of the conventional Polonaise, though we ever feel its rhythms.  It may be full of monologues, interspersed