Chopin's Love For Poland

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 135, 23 January 1942, Page 5

Chopin's Love For Poland

ADEREWSKI ence said of Chopin that he was the priest who carried to the scattered Poles the sacrament of nationalism. This fine image vividly recalls the revolution of 1830; the last despairing effort of Poland to rid herself of Russian suzerainty. Chopin, a boy of twenty, had left Poland only a few weeks before the revolution broke out. He was alone in an unfriendly city, aching to be back again in Warsaw where all that he loved in the world-his family and his country-were in peril; hungering for news that came only at long intervals; a prey to fears which only a torturing imagination could raise. Little is more pathetic than the thought of him in this hour, looking down at his long delicate hands, his fragile body, and realising their utter uselessness. He wandered from Vienna to Munich, from Munich to Stuttgart, where on September 8, 1831, he heard of the collapse of the revolution and the capture of Warsaw. From that day one must think of him always as the exile, bearing in his heart a permanent wound, the tragedy of his people. Their songs, their dances-and in Poland the very ballads of the country are dances-became the warp and woof of his music. She is the land of the dance, and the rhythm of Polish dance sounds through nearly the whole of his work. When he left home, he had a presentiment that he would never return. His friends gave him a silver cup filled with Polish earth. This he kept by him all his life. It was this earth that, when he died, they scattered on his coffin in Paris. It was all that remained of Poland, save in his music; those " few score pages in which," as has been beautifully said, "were to burn for three-quarters of a century the — mysticism of a nation." — ("Our Allies and Their Music: Poland," 2YA, January 4.) :