Hearing the Nation in Chopin
Hearing the Nation in Chopin

Summary/Abstract: The premise underlying this paper is that some of the music composed by Chopin in 1830 represents the first canonical repertory of European nationalism. Building on that premise, the paper will reflect on agendas, on musical materials, and on reception, all three of which are relevant to constructions of nationhood in music. As to agendas, evidence will gleaned from Chopin’s education at the High School of Music in Warsaw, part of the University of Warsaw, to suggest that he was responsive to a current of idealist literature on music and nationhood associated above all with Kazimierz Brodziński. This will be articulated within a larger thesis that the shaping influence of pedagogy has been underrated in Chopin studies and in 19th-century musical scholarship more generally. As to materials, the paper will seek to expose the space separating the rhetoric of 19th-century nationalism in music from the reality of its musical materials. Some rock-face evidence will be presented from autograph sources to reveal this space in the particular case of Chopin. But this will open a window to more generalised observations on the musical materials of so-called “national schools”. These observations will take us to Chopin reception and to the claims made upon his music by several national traditions, to use a term that will be interrogated. While these claims might suggest that the text tends to “vanish” before such diverse constructions of meaning, this paper will counter that Chopin was multiply claimed only because he was worth claiming in the first place.

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