YOU SAY MAZURKA…

Stephen Johnson’s article in the February 2017 issue of BBC Music

Magazine on the mazurka set me thinking about terminology. Should we refer to mazurkas with their correct Polish form (mazurek, mazurki, mazurków) as Chopin does in his letters? ‘Mazurek’ was often used as a collective term for the three related dance forms of mazurek, oberek and kujawiak, it being the custom for them to flow in performance from one to the other and then circle back again. Chopin often compressed hints of all three forms into one short work. Though ‘Mazurka’ seems to be the accepted internationalism, it belies the complexity of the folk tradition Chopin was influenced by. Interestingly, it is the genitive form in Polish: ‘of’ the mazurka, rather than the mazurka (of folk idiom) itself. Ruth Windle, Frome