Chopin grew up in a Poland under foreign occupation, entirely under the rule of Austria, Prussia, and Russia since 1795. Chopin left Poland just weeks before the November Uprising of 1830, which was brutally crushed by the Russian Army. He never returned. Chopin was not only a revolutionary composer in a foreign land, but one of a host of Polish intellectuals whose lives were spent as revolutionaries in exile.

110 years after Chopin left the country, Poland was again under foreign domination following German and Soviet invasions. The infamous massacre of Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn Forest in 1940, denied by the Soviet Union for another half century, is perhaps the most overwhelming of the myriad atrocities of that occupation.

Chopin described the proper feeling of the opening of his second Scherzo as that of a "charnel house" (according to Wilhelm Lenz), invoking the horror of a place where the bones of the dead are gathered and stored. What if his revolutionary vision could have seen the future, and encompassed the layers upon layers of Polish bones discovered by German soldiers beneath the trees of a Russian forest? Could his ironic "scherzo" have retained its humor and its tenderness?

My forbears were exiles, like Chopin (from Nazi Germany and from the Soviet occupation of Latvia). None of them returned to their native lands; I grew up with grim shreds of the stories of those who remained behind. Schumann described the second Scherzo as "overflowing with tenderness, boldness, love, and contempt." These are among the emotions that infuse this tiny piano piece as its composer looks back (from a time and place of relative safety) at the enormous charnel house of Europe's history.