Polonaise through the White House receiving line. Sousa wrote it in 1886 at the request of President Chester A. Arthur who died before it was performed. Tchaikovsky's opera "Eugene Onegin", an adaption of Alexander Pushkin's novel in poetry verse, includes a famous polonaise. The polonaise is a Polish dance and is one of the five historic national dances of Poland. The others are the Mazurka (Mazur), Kujawiak, Krakowiak and Oberek, last three being old folk dances. Polonaise originated as a peasant dance known under various names – "chodzony" ("pacer"), "chmielowy" ("hops"), "pieszy" ("walker") or "wielki" ("great"), recorded as early as the
Pavane (Fauré) about six minutes. The original version of the "Pavane" was written for piano and chorus in the late 1880s. The composer described it as "elegant, but not otherwise important." Fauré intended it to be played more briskly than it has generally come to be performed in its more familiar orchestral guise. The conductor Sir Adrian Boult heard Fauré play the piano version several times and noted that he took it at a tempo no slower than 100 quarter notes per minute. Boult commented that the composer's sprightly tempo emphasised that the "Pavane" was not a piece of German romanticism, and