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.A few wordsMickiewicz intended for Pan Tadeusz bear remembering:The land of childhood!That shall aye endureAs holy as a first love and as pure.That happy country, happy, poor and small!The world is God s but that was ours ours all,And all belonged to us that lay around.Chopin may well not have known these precise lines, coming as theydo from the unpublished epilogue to Pan Tadeusz, but they evoke a realmhe knew well already: the promised land, the indescribably sweet, un-spoiled homeland that time, distance, and events had forever cut off fromthe living but that would bloom forever in the expatriate consciousness.The same can be said of the poem s introductory paean to Litwo!, quotedand discussed in chapter 5: the scene is set, but it will be twenty-six linesbefore we segue into the world of Mickiewicz s characters, so in a sensethe passage is self-standing, separate from the hurly-burly of the epic snarrative, though its relationship to the narrative is clear.Just as Mick-iewicz s introduction functions outside the greater continuity of PanTadeusz, then, so does Chopin s opening section of op.38 work as anindependent entity, an almost impossibly beautiful evocation of a child-hood paradise lost.The full version of the Second Ballade can be heard toreflect much of Mickiewicz s anguish about the Polish Pilgrims, of course,172 chopin s polish balladebut the bittersweet nostalgia of the opening section in no way depends onit.So the imagery and cultural vocabulary of both versions of the pieceand the First Ballade too, for that matter have much of Mickiewicz inthem, exactly as Schumann remembered Chopin said: as inspiration.However persuaded the reader is by the specifics of my narrative readingsof the First and Second Ballades, Chopin s suggestion that the two workswere inspired by  certain poems of Mickiewicz is completely plausible,and ought now to be beyond question.The Forest and the TreesThis study has focused primarily on one work, and it has been my goal todemonstrate that, for all its popularity, one of the primary reasons that agreat deal of its relevant musical and cultural context has remainedhidden is a widespread, and rather curious, lack of scholarly interest inthe musical surface and a reluctance to glean information from thestylistic gestures found there.The topics (the siciliano and the storm inthis ballade) are apparent to those familiar with the art-music repertoire,yet only rather recently have people begun to suspect that style per semight be worth analytical attention.Jim Samson s  confrontation ofstyles formulation is a good indication of this still-nascent trend: hesees the styles as defining features, not ancillary ones.And one of themain lessons from Sikorski s earnest appreciation of the piece is thatwithout awareness of style, analysis is adrift; for all his love of op.38he really had little to say about it because it did not do what he expected aChopin work to do.Overlooking musical style leads commentators tofocus on nonessentials: for Sikorski, it was the rumination on Polishversus German legends, and more recent attention has centered on iden-tifying the specific Mickiewicz poem that supposedly inspired the ballade,or teasing out a relationship to sonata-allegro form.None of these issuesis helpful in parsing Chopin s piece, and their persistence in the literaturegenerates much more heat than light.We see, finally, what results when general questions are asked of  theballades as a whole and not of opp.23, 38, 47, and 52 individually.Theidea that each of the works to which Chopin gave this generic title mustbe like the others in predictable ways is a natural outgrowth of privileginggeneral over specific, of genre over individual pieces in other words, ofcomprehending the ballades first and foremost as they relate to eachother, not (say) to other music, or the wider culture, or especially interms of what is extraordinary about each.Certainly, this is a verycommon approach in musicological writing; books on Haydn s stringmartyrdom and exile 173quartets or Brahms s symphonies fill not only commercial and disciplin-ary niches, they neatly reflect our intellectual patterns as well: it is naturalto mentally organize the repertoire in chunks that may be conceptualizedin a consistent way so that the informed person will have some idea whatto expect when he or she hears or studies an unfamiliar Haydn quartet orBrahms symphony.The Chopin ballades make even likelier candidates forthis kind of overview because they essentially defined the entire instru-mental ballade genre, and there are only four of them.Looking atmusic Chopin s ballades especially in terms of generic commonalities,expectations, and even  generic contracts thus seems a natural, evencommonsensical way to proceed.It is too easy to forget, though, that musical works are composed andperformed in blood and sweat and tears, I cannot forebear to add oneat a time, not as complete genres.Looking at genres or any other groupingof works almost always forces one to scant the unique qualities of eachwork in order to make generalizations about the family resemblances ofthe group.Although there can be astounding formal and rhetorical differ-ences between works of the same genre (Haydn s symphonies or Beetho-ven s piano sonatas, for instance), it is still the general patterns more thanthe idiosyncratic flashes of genius that lodge most firmly in our conscious-ness and remain as  knowledge.The common caution not to miss the forest for the trees not to missthe big picture by getting bogged down in individual cases or minutiaecan thus be a stumbling block.Privileging form, motivic deployment, andso on in the study of music enables broad patterns to be discerned andgeneralizations to be made across vast amounts of repertoire all thesymphonies, all the sonatas, all the string quartets but too often thesebecome the bromides of the music-appreciation classroom and historicalsurvey, the too rarely questioned platitudes of our discipline.When mis-applied this way, a generic contract becomes an artificially straitening yetstill binding series of assumptions based upon not the whole of a genre,but rather a very limited subsection of it, and often the subsection in-cludes only the best-known and most predictable examples [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]