Then her husband shouts:  “Be quiet, old vixen.”  This is given in the octaves, a genuine dialogue, the wife tartly answering:  “Shan’t be quiet.”  The gruff grumbling in the bass is heard, an imitation of the above, when suddenly the man cries out, the last eight bars of the composition:  “Kitty, Kitty come—­do come here, I forgive you,” which is decidedly masculine in its magnanimity.

If one does not care for the rather coarse realism of this reading Kleczynski offers the poem of Ujejeski, called The Dragoon.  A soldier flatters a girl at the inn.  She flies from him, and her lover, believing she has deceived him, despairingly drowns himself.  The ending, with its “Ring, ring, ring the bell there!  Horses carry me to the depths,” has more poetic contour than the other.  Without grafting any libretto on it, this Mazurka is a beautiful tone-piece in itself.  Its theme is delicately mournful and the subject, in B major, simply entrancing in its broad, flowing melody.

In C sharp minor, op. 41, is a Mazurka that is beloved of me.  Its scale is exotic, its rhythm convincing, its tune a little saddened by life, but courage never fails.  This theme sounds persistently, in the middle voices, in the bass, and at the close in full harmonies, unisons, giving it a startling effect.  Octaves take it up in profile until it vanishes.  Here is the very apotheosis of rhythm.  No. 2, in E minor, is not very resolute of heart.  It was composed, so Niecks avers, at Palma, when Chopin’s health fully accounts for the depressed character of the piece, for it is sad to the point of tears.  Of op. 41 he wrote to Fontana from Nohant in 1839, “You know I have four new Mazurkas, one from Palma, in E minor; three from here, in B major, A flat major and C sharp minor.  They seem to me pretty, as the youngest children usually do when the parents grow old.”  No. 3 is a vigorous, sonorous dance.  No. 4, over which the editors deviate on the serious matter of text, in A flat, is for the concert room, and is allied to several of his gracious Valses.  Playful and decorative, but not profound in feeling.

Opus 50, the first in G major, is healthy and vivacious.  Good humor predominates.  Kullak notes that in some editions it closes pianissimo, which seems a little out of drawing.  No. 2 is charming.  In A flat, it is a perfect specimen of the aristocratic Mazurka.  The D flat Trio, the answering episode in B flat minor, and the grace of the return make this one to be studied and treasured.  De Lenz finds Bach-ian influences in the following, in C sharp minor:  “It begins as though written for the organ, and ends in an exclusive salon; it does him credit and is worked out more fully than the others.  Chopin was much pleased when I told him that in the construction of this Mazurka the passage from E major to F major was the same as that in the Agatha aria in ‘Freischutz.’” De Lenz refers to the opening Bach-like mutations.  The texture of this dance is closer and finer spun than any we have encountered.  Perhaps spontaneity is impaired, mais que voulez vous?  Chopin was bound to develop, and his Mazurkas, fragile and constricted as is the form, were sure to show a like record of spiritual and intellectual growth.