Mazurka

The mazurka is a Polish folk dance in triple meter, distinguished from the waltz by where the accent falls: on the second or third beat rather than the first, producing a hesitating, rotating rhythmic feel. The folk source comes from the Mazovia region around Warsaw; Chopin's mazurkas (he wrote over fifty across his career) abstracted that rhythmic identity into a solo piano genre that uses the dance's metric quirk as expressive material rather than as choreographic accompaniment. Chopin's mazurkas range from one minute to four, alternate slow lyric sections with faster dancing ones, and routinely use rubato (deliberate stretching and contracting of tempo) — a Polish performance tradition that puts the right-hand melody slightly ahead of or behind the left-hand pulse.

Folk mazurkas spread from rural Mazovia into urban Polish dance halls in the late eighteenth century, then across European ballrooms during the early nineteenth. Chopin (1810-1849), born near Warsaw and trained there before emigrating to Paris after 1830, wrote mazurkas across his entire compositional career as a way of staying connected to the Poland that was partitioned among Russia, Prussia and Austria during his lifetime. Karol Szymanowski and Witold Lutosławski wrote later twentieth-century mazurkas; in Polish folk practice the dance survives in regional repertoires, but Chopin's stylized versions are now the form's central representatives.

Listen for where the accent lands inside each bar of three. Chopin's mazurkas resist the predictable down-beat emphasis: try counting one-two-three and notice how often the pianist leans on the two or the three. Rubato is essential — the left-hand pulse stays steady while the right-hand melody bends ahead and behind, and pianists differ widely on how much. Compare two recordings of the same mazurka by Arthur Rubinstein and Krystian Zimerman to hear the interpretive range.

Chopin's Mazurka in A minor, Op. 17 No. 4 (1834), is the most-played individual mazurka — short, lyrical and ending unresolved. The Mazurka in F minor, Op. 68 No. 4 (1849), is the last piece Chopin completed before his death.

Polish pianist Karol Mikuli, a Chopin student, transcribed performance markings into his teacher's mazurkas that show Chopin himself played them with much wider rubato than the printed scores suggest. The 'authentic' Chopin mazurka has always been a moving interpretive target — the Warsaw Chopin Competition (held every five years) reserves a special prize for the best mazurka playing alone.