The nineteenth century saw a rise in a sense of national identity, a sentiment which overrode the borders of the old empires, kingdoms and principalities. Its main musical proponents were a rather paradoxical group. Brought up under the old dispensation, of the two most famous supporters of their respective ethnic groups, Chopin and Liszt, Liszt, a German speaker, never succeeded in mastering the subtleties of his fellow Hungarians’ Finno-Ugric language, Magyar; while Chopin left his native Poland in 1830 never to return, eventually becoming a French citizen (his father was French).
And yet both composers produced works based on what they, sometimes mistakenly believed – ethnomusicology (the study of folk music) was at this time still in its infancy – were the folk songs and dances of their native lands. Chopin’s fifty-nine mazurkas and twenty-three polonaises and Liszt’s nineteen Hungarian Rhapsodies all bear witness to their dedication to the idea of national identity.
Chopin’s mazurkas are many and varied. Though they share a time signature (
) with the waltz the resulting music can be very different:
The polonaise is also in but, with its charateristic 
rhythm, it could never be a waltz! Chopin prefixes his Grande Polonaise Brilliante with a contrasting Andante spianato (spianato means smooth/calm).
Moving from Poland to Hungary, Liszt’s contribution to Hungarian nationalism was his Hungarian Rhapsodies. Later generations of composers (e.g. Bartók and Kodály) were much more stringent in their definition of what constitutes their musical heritage, seeing much of the supposed folk element in Liszt’s music as derived, not from the Magyar themselves but from the gypsy bands that entertained in the cafés of Budapest and elsewhere.
Nevertheless the pieces remain popular and are outstanding examples of keyboard virtuosity:
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Pontarddulais!
The Art of Listening 