Niecks quotes Mme. Friederike Stretcher, nee Muller, a pupil, who wrote of her master:  “He required adherence to the strictest rhythm, hated all lingering and lagging, misplaced rubatos, as well as exaggerated ritardandos.  ‘Je vous prie de vous asseoir,’ he said, on such an occasion, with gentle mockery.  And it is just in this respect that people make such terrible mistakes in the execution of his works.”

And now to the Mazurkas, which de Lenz said were Heinrich Heine’s songs on the piano.  “Chopin was a phoenix of intimacy with the piano.  In his nocturnes and mazurkas he is unrivalled, downright fabulous.”

No compositions are so Chopin-ish as the Mazurkas.  Ironical, sad, sweet, joyous, morbid, sour, sane and dreamy, they illustrate what was said of their composer—­“his heart is sad, his mind is gay.”  That subtle quality, for an Occidental, enigmatic, which the Poles call Zal, is in some of them; in others the fun is almost rough and roaring.  Zal, a poisonous word, is a baleful compound of pain, sadness, secret rancor, revolt.  It is a Polish quality and is in the Celtic peoples.  Oppressed nations with a tendency to mad lyrism develop this mental secretion of the spleen.  Liszt writes that “the Zal colors with a reflection now argent, now ardent the whole of Chopin’s works.  “This sorrow is the very soil of Chopin’s nature.  He so confessed when questioned by Comtesse d’Agoult.  Liszt further explains that the strange word includes in its meanings—­for it seems packed with them—­ “all the tenderness, all the humility of a regret borne with resignation and without a murmur;” it also signifies “excitement, agitation, rancor, revolt full of reproach, premeditated vengeance, menace never ceasing to threaten if retaliation should ever become possible, feeding itself meanwhile with a bitter if sterile hatred.”

Sterile indeed must be such a consuming passion.  Even where his patriotism became a lyric cry, this Zal tainted the source of Chopin’s joy.  It made him irascible, and with his powers of repression, this smouldering, smothered rage must have well nigh suffocated him, and in the end proved harmful alike to his person and to his art.  As in certain phases of disease it heightened the beauty of his later work, unhealthy, feverish, yet beauty without doubt.  The pearl is said to be a morbid secretion, so the spiritual ferment called Zal gave to Chopin’s music its morbid beauty.  It is in the B minor Scherzo but not in the A flat Ballade.  The F minor Ballade overflows with it, and so does the F sharp minor Polonaise, but not the first Impromptu.  Its dark introspection colors many of the preludes and mazurkas, and in the C sharp minor Scherzo it is in acrid flowering—­truly fleurs du mal.  Heine and Baudelaire, two poets far removed from the Slavic, show traces of the terrible drowsy Zal in their poetry.  It is the collective sorrow and tribal wrath of a down-trodden nation, and the mazurkas for that reason have ethnic value.  As concise, even as curt as the Preludes, they are for the most part highly polished.  They are dancing preludes, and often tiny single poems of great poetic intensity and passionate plaint.