Arthur Rubinstein plays the music of his compatriot –  Frederic Chopin’s Polonaise in A Flat ( Opus 53, “Heroic”, 1842).

The Polish genius took the slow, flowing folk-dance and turned it into the swaggering form that perfectly expressed his own fervent nationalism, the heroism of his people, and the mystic nationalism of Chopin’s literary counterpart, the activist and poet,  Adam Mickiewicz. Moved by the dismemberment of Poland, the devoutly Catholic Mickiewicz adopted the doctrine of Messianism. The mystic Andrzej Towiaski led him to embrace the belief that Poland was a Christ among nations, like Israel, and that the Kingdom of God would come about in the middle of the nineteenth century, through the Jews, the Poles, and the French.

It’s fitting music for the burial of former Polish president Lech Kaczynski at Wawal Cathedral in Krakow.

KRAKOW, Poland (AP) —http://www.9and10news.com/Category/Story/?id=221012&cID=3

A massive bell inside a thousand-year-old cathedral was tolling as the bodies of Poland’s president and first lady arrived for burial. Some 150,000 Poles in Krakow paid their last respects to Polish President Lech Kaczynski (lekh kah-CHIN’-skee) and his wife, Maria. The funeral was long on tradition but short on world leaders. Many of their travel plans were wrecked by the enormous plume of volcanic ash that blanketed Europe.