"Chopin did not try to write Polish music; and it is possible that he would have been surprised to be called a Polish musician. Nonetheless, he was a national musician par excellence...With his imagination and his talent, he was the epitome of a poetic sentiment inherent to his nation and present in all his contemporaries...And since nowadays the folk melodies of various countries are being collected, with good reason, it is interesting to pay attention to the character of those...composers particularly inspired by a national feeling. Until now, there are few works of merit outside of the traditional division of Italian, French or German music. We can presume, nonetheless, that...[new] artists will appear...whose works will be distinguished by an originality born of the diversity of races, climates and customs. We foresee that in music, as well as the other arts, the influence of the fatherland will be seen both in the great and the modest masters."

Liszt's premonition came true towards the end of the XIX century when the national spirit became a defining characteristic of art music written by composers like Grieg, the Norwegian, the Bohemians Dvorak and Smetana, Albéniz and Granados, in Spain, the Russian Group of the Five (Rimsky-Korsakof, Balakiref, Borodin, Cui, Mussorsky), and others. In contrast with their successors in the XX century, however, they only exceptionally suffered from the loss of place that was to be so significant in the lives of many of the great composers of the last century, as it was in the incipient, pioneering efforts of that most patriotic of composers, Frederic Chopin.

Affected in the flesh by the horrors of persecution, war and displacement, many modern composers show, more or less evidently, the pangs of separation from their birthplace. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, De Falla, Bartok, and many others of lesser prominence, all offer psychological clues, in their lives and works, of the impact of this loss of place, although not all can be easily catalogued as strictly "nationalist" composers.

It is telling that Stravinsky's "Russian period," initiated most successfully with his stunning ballets written for the Ballet Russes of Sergei Diaghileff, begins to fade out at the time of his one-act opera Mavra, completed around 1922, and his final orchestration for The Wedding, finished in 1923. These are the last testament to an aesthetic that the composer was trying to discard, ever since he became, officially, an exile after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Not only was he in search of more innovative or challenging approaches, but also, perhaps, this was an instinctive survival response to the trauma of exile and cultural displacement. Dissociation with the personal past, after all, is a possible way of freeing one's future.

However, the option he adopted, the "looking back" aesthetic of neo-classicism, belies this attempt at detachment, for, indeed, all artistic "return" movements are, at bottom, reminiscent and, hence, nostalgic. Stravinsky' s neo-classicism, in which he re-elaborated music from Pergolesi to Tchaikovsky, allowed him the freedom not to face his personal longing for his lost roots, through a depersonalized, objectified back glance at historical ways of doing that, notwithstanding the wit and brilliance with which he dealt with the

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