Jew World Order

Frédéric [or Fryderyk] Chopin “is often spoken of as ‘the most Polish of Polish composers’,” observes Stephen P. Mizwa¹, with Honoré de Balzac even commenting that the composer was “more Polish than Poland”². There is an irony, then, in the fact that this child piano prodigy who would become one of his nation’s cultural heroes was incompletely Polish in his family background, having been born to a French expatriate father and a Polish mother. He studied at the recently established Warsaw Lyceum, where his father lectured in French, and then at the Warsaw Conservatory. “But he was studying by himself, composing, and took advantage of his summer vacations when he listened to and was fascinated by folk music,” Mizwa continues. “Warsaw gave him his material for Polonaises, but the countryside gave rise to his Mazurkas.”³ Chopin himself wrote, “I should like only to write and leave for posterity the ABC of that which is truly Polish and to teach people how to discard things which are called Polish but which are not really Polish.”⁴

Encouraged by his father to expand his horizons by touring Europe, Chopin, after enduring some hardship, would win fame in Paris, where he secured the patronage of the Rothschilds in finding wealthy piano students⁵. (Chopin seems to have been anti-Semitic, but not inordinately so, mainly criticizing insistent moneylenders or Jewish music publishers slow in paying him for his work. “Jews are always Jews,” he wrote, “but what to do? – I have to deal with them …”⁶) His homeland and its people were never absent from his thoughts, however. This was an uneasy period for Poland, which had suffered a series of imperial partitions during the eighteenth century. “It was remembered” of the young Chopin, writes Tadeusz Jarecki, “how he had said that one day genius would uncover the mystery of folk art […] This remark exposes the reverence he felt for the old village culture, a sentiment shared by the greatest of the Polish poets who later lived and worked in exile.” Jarecki continues:

In Poland, creative minds, disturbed by the restless cross currents of revolution and reaction, turned also to this ancient culture, to tradition, to history for a solution of the national problem. Especially did the timeless wisdom of the humble villagers appear to them to be the only solid foundation upon which a new and enduring Polish structure could be erected […] in seeking the roots of its existence lay the only hope of a nation deprived of the right to bear a natural fruitage.⁷

“The whole life of Chopin belonged to Poland, the first half in its entirety, physically and spiritually,” writes Stanislaw Niewiadomski. “In the second half, despite his attachment to Paris, those bonds of love and loyalty were even strengthened.”⁸ Chopin, as a “Slavonic” composer, would also – ironically, given Russia’s subjugation of Poland – come to exercise an influence on the emergence of a Russian national spirit in music. “He too was a Slav,” the great Polish pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski remarks of Chopin – “yet with how great a difference! How distant his grace and charm, his wealth of color, of lights and shades, from the somber and monotonous although clever Russian Muse, upon whose cheek no smile of humor or of happiness seems ever to have played. What an abyss,” Paderewski scoffs, “between his yearnings, his griefs, the unfailing fitness of his tragic sense, and that withering despair which blows towards us as a blast frost-laden, across steppes immeasurable, boundless, hopeless …”⁹ “The average Polish listener, unfamiliar with the art of music, hears the masterpieces of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven with indifference, at times even impatience,” Paderewski confides:

But let Chopin’s voice begin to speak and our Polish listener changes immediately. His hearing becomes keen, his attention concentrated; his eyes glisten, his blood flows more quickly, his heart rejoices although tears are on his cheek. Be it the dancing lilt of his native Mazurka, the Nocturne’s melancholy, the crisp swing of the Krakowiak; be it the mystery of a Prelude, the majestic stride of a Polonaise; be it an Etude, vivid, surprising; a Ballade, epic and tumultuous; or a Sonata, noble and heroic; he understands all, feels all, because it is all his, all Polish. …¹⁰

Perhaps best known for his romantic nocturnes or gloomy pieces like Piano Sonata No. 2, containing the instantly recognizable “Funeral March”, Chopin was equally capable of writing rousing, nationalistic music. The Fryderyk Chopin Institute notes that the Op. 40 Polonaises of 1838 “form a pair of polonaises that are at once both similar – they both strike an heroic tone – and different”:

In 1837, Heinrich Heine uttered that famous sentence about Chopin, beginning with the words “Poland gave him a chivalrous soul and the suffering of its history”. The A major Polonaise might be said to encapsulate that “chivalrous soul”, and the C minor Polonaise synthesise[s] the historical suffering of the Polish nation.

The A major Polonaise could hardly be more succinct, synthetic and condensed in its style and character […] and the theme strikes one with its firmness and grace. As Jan Kleczyński put it, “Each note, each accent, glows with life and power”. The theme that complements the main part of the polonaise contains more of those pungent, robust sonorities, referring to the style of military music. But the pinnacle of succinctness and firmness is presented by the Polonaise’s trio, in D major. […] Here, too, the complementary theme brings strains of military music, evoking for many interpreters the sounds of a snare drum.

Tradition has it that Chopin imagined the A major Polonaise functioning as a coronation polonaise [for a future king of an independent Poland]. The thought of Poland’s rebirth never left him for an instant. In 1848, when he was already weak and ailing, he wrote to [Julian] Fontana: “but at the end of it all there is Poland – splendid, great … in a word: Poland. That moment is nigh, but not today. Perhaps in a month, perhaps in a year …”¹¹

Chopin’s music “eludes metrical discipline, rejects the fetters of rhythmic rule, and refuses submission to the metronome as if it were the yoke of some hated government,” avers Paderewski¹².

It is interesting to note that in this same oration, delivered in 1910 in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of Chopin’s birth year, Paderewski refers to the composer as a “spokesman of the Polish race.”¹³ Polish-American music scholar Maja Trochimczyk asserts that “the focus of Chopin’s [Polish] followers and devotees in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rested on his usefulness for their causes, not on a full understanding of his musical achievements.”¹⁴ Skeptical of such racial definitions of Polishness, Trochimczyk nonetheless concedes that “Chopin seemed to believe that there were emotional and personality traits that were distinctly national, pointing to the essential character differences separating a Slav from a Scandinavian or a Spaniard.”¹⁵ Trochimczyk elaborates:

The tendency to circumscribe the national identity to common genetic origin and shared personality traits and to define art as an expression of such narrowly described features increased in the Western world toward the end of the nineteenth century. Europeans and Americans habitually described spiritual essences of their nations in terms of their shared genetic heritage. Such descriptions permeate the aesthetic writings of Hippolyte Taine which greatly influenced generations of Polish music critics and historians. The concept of race itself was developed much earlier in Germany (by Johan Blumenbach, 1952-1840) and France (by Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, 1816-1862). From its inception, it served to provide arguments about the supposed inequality of the world’s peoples and the superiority of Europeans, or, in particular, the French or the Germans. Different genealogies were compiled for various national races, and their hierarchies reflected the nationalistic and political views of the writers.

The term Polish race referred to people of inherited Polish ethnicity, that is, those who were born to Polish parents, who, in turn, were children of Polish parents, and so on. The chain of origin extended back in time indefinitely to the nation’s mythical birth from several Slavonic tribes who “dwelt from time immemorial on the vast plain “between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathian Mountains.” One could be Polish only when sharing the Polish genes; this heritage was thought to engender common psychological and spiritual traits of the Polish nation. These racial definitions of Polishness were found in self-definitions proclaimed in Poland and abroad, as well as in descriptions offered by outsiders. Jakob Riis saw “the thrifty Polish race” (1890) among impoverished emigrants to America; James W. Gerard mused about the great future of “the splendid Polish race” in its own, independent country (1918).¹⁶

Chopin would not live to see the emergence of that sovereign Poland of which he dreamed. Mily Balakirev, one of the five nationalistic composers collectively known as “the Mighty Handful”, was one of the greatest champions of Chopin’s music in Russia. Still, centennial celebrations of Chopin’s birth were forbidden in Russian-administered Warsaw in 1910, so inextricably connected with Polish nationalism was the composer’s cultural legacy. The Chopin centennial celebrations were consequently held in Habsburg-controlled Lwow, where Paderewski delivered the above-quoted oration on the composer’s crucial significance to the Polish national spirit. It might have heartened Chopin to know that Paderewski, his ardent admirer and a champion of the movement for Polish independence, would be one of the men to help to form a new Polish government-in-exile during the First World War, eventually becoming the second Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland in 1919.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Endnotes

1. Mizwa, Stephen P., Ed. Frederic Chopin: 1810-1849. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983, p. x.
2. Ibid., p. 1.
3. Ibid., p. 5.
4. Ibid., p. xi.
5. Ibid., p. 9.
6. Szulc, Tad. Chopin in Paris: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 1998, p. 59.
7. Mizwa, Stephen P., Ed. Frederic Chopin: 1810-1849. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983, p. 31.
8. Ibid., p. 35.
9. Ibid., p. 82.
10. Ibid., pp. 78-80.
11. http://en.chopin.nifc.pl/chopin/composition/detail/id/236
12. Mizwa, Stephen P., Ed. Frederic Chopin: 1810-1849. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983, p. 78.
13. Ibid., p. 80.
14. Trochimczyk, Maja. “Chopin and the ‘Polish Race’: On National Ideologies and the Chopin Reception”, in Goldberg, Halina, Ed. The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Studies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004, p. 278.
15. Ibid., p. 281.
16. Ibid., pp. 281-282.

Source: Aryan Skynet