26 / 80
26 CHOPIN_POLONIA
But in the case of Chopin, whose bible was
The Well-Tempered Clavier
, the key
concern of his artistic maturity was polyphony. Not scholastic polyphony in
the vein that Schumann exhausted, not to mention a Liszt already absorbed by
refinement of timbre and the dissolution of harmony – two composers, be it said,
who were never indifferent to Chopin’s grammar – but polyphony as stained glass,
that paradise of colours and voices whose watchword is complexity.
And yet the first polonaise of op.40, which was to become the emblem of the
genre, so direct, so foursquare, so metrical in its utterance, might seem to be a
simple manifesto. The publisher attached the epithet ‘Military’ to it, turning it into
a standard of revolt. He was wrong. For Chopin conceived a pair of polonaises
between 1838 and 1839: the sombre rumination, sometimesmorbid if it is not taken
at too swift a tempo, of the Polonaise in C minor, which answers that first piece in
the form of a negation, changes the game. Its enclosed formulas are as obsessive
as the brilliant and affirmative motifs of the A major piece, an undoing, an
unravelling: here the dark side of the composer’s psyche performs a sinister dance
whose harmony manages to disconcert the listener more than once, a slippery
trajectory which is not really resolved by those last two peremptory chords: the
work just needs to end, that is all.