Mazurka

The mazurka is a stylized Polish folk dance in triple meter with a lively tempo that has a heavy accent on the third or second beat. Its folk origins are the slow kujawiak and the fast oberek. It is always found to have either a triplet, trill, dotted eighth note pair, or an ordinary eighth note pair before two quarter notes. The dance became popular at ballroom dances in the rest of Europe during the nineteenth century. The Polish national anthem has a mazurka rhythm but is too slow to be considered a mazurka.

Mazurka in Polish is mazurek, derived from the word mazur, which up to nineteenth century referred to an inhabitant of the Mazovia region of Poland, and which also was the root of the term Masuria). Mazurka is the genitive and accusative case of mazurek. Several classical composers have written mazurkas, with the best known being the 57 composed by Frédéric Chopin for solo piano. Henryk Wieniawski wrote two for violin with piano (the popular "Obertas", op. 19), and in the 1920s, Karol Szymanowski wrote a set of twenty for piano and finished his composing career with a final pair in 1934.

Outside Poland

In Russia, Mily Balakirev composed seven mazurkas for solo piano. Also, Tchaikovsky composed six mazurkas for solo piano, one for his Swan Lake score, one in his opera Eugene Onegin, and one for his Sleeping Beauty score; Leo Delibes composed one which appears several times in the first act of his ballet Coppelia; Borodin wrote two in his Petite Suite for piano; Mikhail Glinka also wrote two, although one is a simplified version of Chopin's Mazurka Number 13 and Alexander Scriabin used the form as well. The mazurka is an important dance in many Russian novels. In addition to its mention in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina as well as in a protracted episode in War and Peace, the dance is prominently featured in Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons. Arkady reserves the mazurka for Madame Odintsov with whom he is falling in love.

In France, Impressionistic composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel both wrote mazurkas; Debussy's is a stand-alone piece, and Ravel's is part of a suite of an early work, La Parade.

Mazurkas are also popular in the traditional dance music of County Donegal, Ireland.

In Swedish folk music, the quaver or eight-note polska has a similar rhythm to the mazurka, and the two dances have a common origin.

In Portugal the mazurka became one of the most popular traditional European dances after the first years of the annual Andanças, a festival of traditional dance held in São Pedro do Sul, Portugal.

The dance was common as a popular dance in Europe and the United States in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. It survives in some old time fiddle tunes, and also in early Cajun music, though it has largely fallen out of Cajun music now. In the Southern United States it was sometimes known as a mazuka.

In Cape Verde the mazurka is also revered as an important cultural phenomenon played with a violin and accompanied by guitars. It also takes a dance form found in the north of the archipelago, mainly in São Nicolau, Santo Antão, and Brava.

In Cuba, composer Ernesto Lecuona wrote a piece titled Mazurka en Glisado for the piano, one of various commissions throughout his life.

In Nicaragua, Carlos Mejía Godoy y los de Palacaguina and Los Soñadores de Saraguasca made a compilation of mazurkas from popular folk music, which are performed with a violin de talalate, an indigenous instrument from Nicaragua.

In Curacao the mazurka was popular as dance music in the nineteenth century, as well as in the first half of the twentieth century. Several Curacao-born composers such as Jan Gerard Palm, Joseph Sickman Corsen, Jacobo Palm, Rudolph Palm and Wim Statius Muller have written mazurkas.

In Brazil, the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote a mazurka for classical guitar in a similar musical style to Polish mazurkas.

In Australia, Julian Cochran composed a collection of mazurkas for solo piano.

In Popular Culture

Groucho Marx mentions the mazurka in his song "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" from "At the Circus": "For two bits, she will do a mazurka in jazz..."

Pink Martini reference mazurka as a metaphor for a relationship in their song "Dosvedanya Mio Bombino (farewell my bumblebee)" from "Hey Eugene!": "In Florence we were on the mend; But that mazurka had to end..."

A class of Danish sex-comedies, referred to generically as "bedroom mazurkas" was made in the 70's and 80's, apparently based on this early movie title

Media

See also

• Polish music
• Polonaise

External links

• history, description, costumes, music, sources
• Mazurka within traditional dances of the County of Nice (France)
• The Russian Mazurka
• The Mazurka Project