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What was the polonaise in its early days?
A dance in 3/4 time, often used for processions, and
which was sometimes sung. Originally derived from
the folk music of rural Poland, it possessed a whole
repertory of themes and usages, and was heard at
official ceremonies and private festivities. It broke
out of its purely functional framework from the
seventeenth century onwards: Johann Sebastian
Bachmade use of it in the French Suite no.6 BWV817,
and later his son Carl Philipp Emanuel devoted to it
several published collections of harpsichord pieces,
offspring of the
Aufklärung
and, building on that, of
an already pre-Romantic imagination. The form had
found its character, somewhere between brio and
lyricism, dance and narrative. It would still be long
associatedwitha certainexoticismof sound, already
much exploited by Telemann, then by Haydn, until
Beethoven exalted it in the witty Rondo alla Polacca
finale of his Triple Concerto.