'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.
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