Operatic versions of the femme fatale, the preeminent figure of European modernist aesthetics, compel and allure because we witness her coming into material presence through the course of her opera. Through vocalizing, the femme fatale manifests her corporeality under imminent threats of erasure by coopting and manipulating the offstage world as represented by the orchestra. The Seguidilla seduction scene in George Bizet's Carmen and the “Dance of the Seven Veils” in Richard Strauss's Salome raise the question of how subjectivity and material presence, especially of the femme fatale character, are depicted sonically, dramaturgically, and metaphysically.

The traditional musicological perspective on Chopin's slow, minor-key mazurkas and mazurka sections—that he modeled these episodes on the kujawiak , a Polish folk dance from Kujawy region — is plagued by contradictory statements. Re-evaluation of source material reveals that the kujawiak , as it is understood in relation to Chopin's mazurkas, is largely a creation of Polish nationalism after Chopin's time. In Chopin's own time, the term kujawiak is used only sporadically and appears to be interchangeable with mazur; by the end of the nineteenth century, however, the kujawiak becomes an important marker of Polishness for which authors offer specific but widely diverging musical characterizations. It is around this time that writers also begin to emphasize the kujawiak 's impact on Chopin's mazurkas, forging a persistent link between this imagined “national dance” and his compositions. In place of these vague and conflicting constructs, it is proposed that Chopin used the slow mazurka—the kind widely but anachronistically called the kujawiak —to summon nostalgia for the spatially and temporally distant (and mythical) Poland, through musical styles and gestures that include reminiscence and allusion; auditory distancing; disruptions of form and genre; and surface distortions. Nostalgia as a cultural and medical concept also provides a prism through which his contemporaries perceived Chopin's illness, his experience in exile, and his music.