Hey, looky here! Music by a prince! It's not every day you get music by a jenuwine prince. Kings, yes--Hank the Eight, and Fred the Great, and Alfonso the Ten, and good old "Roy Henry". But composerprinces are scarce as iguana feathers.
However, I fear I must pour some slightly tepid water on your expectations. I'm not entirely sure Oginski was a prince. Baker's says he was. The Harvard Dictionary calls him a count. The notes supplied me by MHS call him "Prince" on one page and "Graf" on the next two. But Grove's has no doubts of his princehood, and when I am confused I go with Grove's. That work tells me that his father was none other than Prince Andrzej Oginski, Voivode of Troki. He himself--properly called Michal Kleopha-Oginski--rose to be Grand Treasurer of Lithuania (total assets 283 lits). His uncle, Prince Michal Kazimierz Oginski, had his own orchestra, his own opera company, his own canal linking the Niemen and the Dnieper, and supposedly invented the pedals for the harp. A distant cousin, Prince Gabriel 0., played the fiddle.
Prince M. Cleophas was fiercely patriotic and would never have dreamed of pretending he was Irish and spelling his name O'Ginski in the manner of certain American politicians. In fact he became very angry when his piano teacher, Jozef Kozlowski, defected to Russia, where he became conductor of Prince Potemkin's private band, which played things like "Marching Through Poland" and "When Ivan Comes Marching Home Again, Gurrah! Gurrah!" He became even angrier when, as a result of the semi-annual partition of Poland in 1794, he was stripped of his posts and estates. For a while he entertained the notion that Napoleon would help him and his unfortunate country, and went so far as to write an opera called (as subtitle) ''Bonaparte in
Cairo." But Napoleon turned out to be worse than most Polish jokes, and Oginski shuffled about from Constantinople to Hamburg to Paris to Florence, where he died in 1833.
Oginski is chiefly remembered for his polonaises for piano, of which he seems to have written around 20. (The liner notes list, by my count (or prince), forty-one, but I gather that many of these are duplications repeated by various publishers.) The history of the polonaise seems to find little agreement among the authors I've consulted, but since someone at headquarters, spurred by some obscure potential economic gain, has suddenly moved my deadline up to yesterday, I've no time to make sense of it. The name, of course, is French and means simply ·'Polish'' (see "Allemande," "Schottische," etc.) Apparently there were peasant forebears of the form, almost certainly dance-songs. The Grove's man talks learnedly of the Chodzony, the Wolny, the Powolny, the Wielki, the Obracany, the Starodawny, the Staroswiecki, the Okragly, and The Hops, all of which, like the Polonaise, seem to be in three-quarter time, but what he's getting at eludes me. The dance popular in Oginski's time was an aristocratic, quasi-ceremonial affair, with a characteristic "Yum-ta-ta Tum Tum Tum Tum" rhythm, as in the lead-in to the Boris Godunov polonaise. This form seems to go back to the latter part of the sixteenth century--possibly to the coronation of Henry of Anjou--and could therefore have been danced by Maria Mnishek and her friends in Tsar Boris' time. Early polonaises of this kind were mostly for orchestra and very simple in concept. Kozlowski was one of the first to treat the form seriously and Tchaikovsky used a polonaise of his in the ball-scene in "The Queen of Spades''. Oginski dealt with it as concert music, rather than as dance music, and the fact that his polonaises are for piano makes him a direct musical forebear of Chopin.
