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Symphony," and F. H. Cowen has made some employment of Welsh tunes in his "Welsh Symphony."
Music is often the child of sorrow, national or individual, and it is but natural to find, among the more oppressed of civilized races, a folk-music of especial emotional power. This is emphatically the case with the music of the Bohemians, Russians, Poles and Hunga�rians, and, when these mines are more thoroughly explored by the classical composers of the world, much virgin gold will be discovered to be worked into musical jewels by the skilled artificer. The older Bohemian music is almost obliterated, for the unhappy nation was scourged into silence by thirty years of war, and almost all of its songs succeed that dreadful epoch.
Only in recent times did the renaissance of Bohemian music take place; it was Smetana who first wrote in classical forms founded upon the folk-songs of his country. The music of this composer is in�tensely national, and shows what a wealth of expression lies in the melody of his native land.
Fortunately he had a pupil whom he imbued with his own love of national music, and Antonin Dvorak, although not so intense as his preceptor and friend, has carried the banner of Bohemian music over all the world.
The Hungarian music has its roots in the songs of the Gypsies. Weird and strange musicians are these wandering sons of the muse. In Buda-Pesth the present writer has often heard a band of Gypsy musicians, most of them with stringed instruments, giving fully harmonized music without a scrap of notation to guide them, impro�vising the orchestral settings as they played them, but always having as their theme some national melody familiar to them all and to most of their audience.
What Liszt did for Hungary, Chopin did for Poland, and the con�trasted frenzy of the Slav's gayety and gloom of despair is heard in the nocturnes, the polonaises, and the ballads of this prince of the piano. The strong contrasts of Slavonic or Czech music lend them�selves admirably to the forms of the modern concert room.
� It must be remembered that hand in hand with the folk-songs of a musical nation are the dances of the people. It is impossible to exaggerate the influence of these upon classical music, for not only have they entered freely into orchestral and even symphonic works, but they have, in some degree, influenced the very shape of suite and symphony, so that it is no exaggeration to say that dancing is the mother of musical form.
In modern times we find all composers keenly sensitive to the
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