is Mazurka is only four lines long and is charming, as
charming as the brief specimen in the Preludes. The next Mazurka is
another famous warhorse. In B minor, it is full of veiled coquetries,
hazardous mood transitions, growling recitatives and smothered plaints.
The continual return to the theme gives rise to all manner of fanciful
programmes. One of the most characteristic is by the Polish poet
Zelenski, who, so Kleczynski relates, wrote a humorous poem on this
mazurka. For him it is a domestic comedy in which a drunken peasant and
his much abused wife enact a little scene. Returning home the worse for
wear he sings "Oj ta dana"--"Oh dear me"--and rumbles in the bass in a
figure that answers the treble. His wife reproaching him, he strikes
her. Here we are in B flat. She laments her fate in B major. 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 fo