Folk music is always considered a good thing. There is a catch, however: it has to be "real" folk music, anonymous, evoking not an individual but a c… - Charles Rosen

Inaudible music may seem an odd notion, even a foolishly Romantic one—although it is partly the Romantic prejudice in favor of sensuous experience that makes it seem odd. Still, there are details of music which cannot be heard but only imagined, and even certain aspects of musical form which cannot be realized in sound even by the imagination.

Chopin's mazurkas stand apart from the rest of the considerable production inspired by folk music which reaches into all forms of Romantic music; they cannot conveniently be classified with any of the other manifestations. They are not arrangements of popular folk tunes, ... He uses only fragments of melody, Polish formulas, typical national rhythms, and he combines them in his own way with great originality. From early on, Chopin's mazurkas are much more elaborate than the few modest pieces employing mazurka rhythms by Chopin's Polish predecessors, and they soon became the occasion for some of the most complex and pretentious of Chopin's forms.

By this time Mozart had been dead for almost fourteen years and Haydn was too weak to compose. Beethoven was unchallenged throughout Europe as the greatest living composer of instrumental music. Even more, he was generally recognized as having surpassed his famous predecessors. This, of course, did not prevent critics from greeting each new work as a disappointment after his by then acceptable achievements of the previous years.