The scale is a mixture of major and minor--melodies are
encountered that grew out of a scale shorn of a degree.
Occasionally the augmented second, the Hungarian, is encountered,
and skips of a third are of frequent occurrence. This, with
progressions of augmented fourths and major sevenths, gives to
the Mazurkas of Chopin an exotic character apart from their novel
and original content. As was the case with the Polonaise, Chopin
took the framework of the national dance, developed it, enlarged
it and hung upon it his choicest melodies, his most piquant
harmonies. He breaks and varies the conventionalized rhythm in a
half hundred ways, lifting to the plane of a poem the heavy
hoofed peasant dance. But in this idealization he never robs it
altogether of the flavor of the soil. It is, in all its wayward
disguises, the Polish Mazurka, and is with the Polonaise,
according to Rubinstein, the only Polish-reflective music he has
made, although "in all of his compositions we hear him relate
rejoicingly of Poland's vanished greatness, singing, mourning,
weeping over Poland's downfall and all that, in the most
beautiful, the most musical, way.
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