Ballade No.2 in F major, Op.38

Bearing in mind Schumann’s review of Chopin’s Sonata in B flat minor in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1841, it is surprising that the two composers were able to retain their polite, if cool relationship. Schumann    particularly disliked the third movement, where he felt that “an Adagio in D flat major would have had an incomparably more beautiful effect” than the Marche funèbre in B flat minor. He was at a disadvantage in that he did not know that the Marche funèbre was written two years before the rest of the work, which was actually designed to fit round it. The agitated first subject of the first movement relates not only to the grim falling seventh of the brief Grave introducton    but also anticipates the tragedy implicit in the funeral march that comes later. After the tonal strategy here and in the Scherzo, which Schumann found “bold, intelligent and imaginative,” an Adagio in D flat major could not have had the inevitability of the Marche funèbre, where D flat major harmonies are actually reserved for the consolatory middle section. There is no consolation of any kind in the ghostly flight of bare octave triplets which, exclusively, haunt the Presto last movement – “more mockery than music,” said Schumann.

Ballade No.2 in F major, Op.38 The one literary association to which any kind of credence can be attached is that of No.2 in F with Mickiewicz’s Switez: a mysterious woman rises slowly from the lake to tell the story of the struggle of the Lithuanians against the tsars and to describe how the inhabitants of Switez were engulfed by the waters and transformed into aquatic flowers.

When Schumann heard Chopin play the First Ballade in 1836 he declared it “the best of all his works.” Chopin agreed with him. In 1839, when he had finished the second Ballade in F major, he dedicated the new work to Robert Schumann (crossing out the description, “my friend,” incidentally, and spelling the dedicatee’s name wrong in his instructions to his publisher). This work quickly became a favourite too. Chopin performed it frequently but never, apparently, in its entirety. He is said to have played only the first part, in an extended version. Obviously, this is the most attractive part, and it is particularly inspired in the way its gentle pastoral theme grows so naturally out of the repeated harp notes in the first few bars. The parts Chopin did not play are the two stormy presto con fuoco episodes, with the narrator’s voice from the First Ballade rising in an impassioned cry in the left hand. The idyll is definitively drowned by the second episode, which leads not into F major again but to an agitato coda ending in a desolate A minor

If any one of Chopin’s four ballades has a programme behind it, it must be the Second in F major, Op.38. Robert Schumann, to whom the work is dedicated and who heard the composer play it (or part of it) in Leipzig in 1836, claimed that Chopin had told him that both this ballade and its predecessor in G minor were “inspired by poems of Mickiewicz.” Although he might have meant no more than that the Ballady i romanse furnished him with a useful title and the general idea of a poetic narrative, there is an understandable tendency to associate the Ballade in F with Miciewicz’s Switez: a mysterious woman rises slowly from the lake to tell the story of the struggle of the Lithuanians against the tsars and to describe how the inhabitants of Switez were engulfed by the waters and transformed into aquatic flowers. There is also a theory, which is less understandable in story-line terms, that it is based on Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, an opera which Chopin greatly admired in his youth.

Whatever the source of inspiration, the most compelling evidence that there is some kind of story behind the Ballade in F is in the music itself. A work beginning in one key and ending in quite another was not only a defiance of convention but also a radical departure from Chopin’s own established practice. While it might be an early experiment in progressive tonality, the extinction of a placid F major by a highly aggressive A minor is far more likely to represent some dramatic and irreconcilable change in poetic fortune. Apart from that, the contrast between the simple siciliano material introduced in the opening Andantino and the torrent of Presto con fuoco bravura figuration that suddenly engulfs it in minor harmonies is so extreme that it can only have some descriptive purpose. The siciliano reappears in F major, if in rather less innocently pastoral colouring this time, but only to be even more comprehensively engulfed. The last distant echo of the siciliano melody is in a sad A minor.

chopin piano works, recital V

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

Ballade No.2 in F major, Op.38

If any one of Chopin’s four ballades is based on a story, it must be the Second in F major, Op.38. According to Robert Schumann, to whom the work is dedicated and who heard the composer play it in Leipzig in 1836, Chopin told him that both this ballade and its predecessor in G minor were “inspired by poems of Mickiewicz.” Although he might have meant no more than that the Ballady i romanse furnished him with a useful title and the general idea of a poetic narrative, there is an understandable tendency to associate the Ballade in F with Mickiewicz’s Switez: a mysterious woman rises slowly from the lake to tell of the struggle of the Lithuanians against the tsars and to describe how the inhabitants of Switez were engulfed by the waters and transformed into aquatic flowers.

Whatever the source of inspiration, the most compelling evidence that there is some kind of story behind the Ballade in F is in the music itself. A work beginning in one key and ending in quite another was not only a defiance of convention but also a radical departure from Chopin’s own usual (but not invariable) practice. While it might be an early experiment in progressive tonality, the extinction of a placid F major by a highly aggressive A minor is far more likely to represent some dramatic and irreconcilable change in poetic fortune. Apart from that, the contrast between the simple siciliano material introduced in the opening Andantino and the torrent of Presto con fuoco bravura figuration that suddenly engulfs it in minor harmonies is so extreme that it can only have some descriptive purpose. The siciliano reappears in F major, if in rather less innocently pastoral colouring this time, but only to be even more comprehensively engulfed. The last distant echo of the siciliano melody is in a sad A minor.

When Chopin played the Second Ballade he customarily restricted himself to the F major material, omitting the con fuoco sections. This is how Schumann heard him play it. So Schumann’s assumption that Chopin added the A minor ending between 1836 and its publication in 1840 is not necessarily correct. We do know, on the other hand, that Chopin did some work on it in Majorca in 1839.

Two Nocturnes, Op.37

No.1 in G minor

No.2 in G major

Although there is often a hint of opera in Chopin’s nocturnes, there is nothing quite as evocative of the opera house as Op.37, No.1, in G minor. In this case it is a matter not only of the vocal decorations and expressive syncopations applied to the lamenting soprano line. There is also an E flat major chorale sounding off-stage, so to speak, to bring the heroine spiritual encouragement in her hour of need. As she repeats her aria in a shortened but none the less despondent form , she appears inconsolable. But just at the end - in a change of harmony reminiscent of the baroque tierce de picardie but with a more emotive effect than that - G minor quietly melts into G major.

The G major Nocturne, which was also completed at Nohant in 1839, is not so much operatic as aquatic. Beginning as a barcarolle, its melody rippling cheerfully in thirds and sixths over a 6/8 accompaniment, it includes a sadly reflective episode in the relative minor which, however, needs little persuasion from the barcarolle material to change its mood and reappear in G major. A brief recall of both thematic elements confirms a happy ending which was never much in doubt.

Rondo in F major, Op.5

It could well be that we owe the Rondo in F major - or “Rondo à la Mazur” as it is more familiarly known - to the encouragement, or at least to the example, of Chopin’s teacher at the Warsaw Conservatoire, Jozef Elsner. Certainly, it was written at much the same time as Chopin enrolled at the Conservatoire in 1826 and, if he did not have Elsner’s “Rondos à la Mazourek”actually presented to him as models for a composition of his own, he can hardly have been unaware of them.

It is an indication of Chopin’s satisfaction with the piece that, although it had been published in Warsaw in 1828, he co-operated in having it published again in Paris eight years later. By then, of course, he had his own very personal way with the mazurka, preferring to create thoroughly distinctive individual examples rather than compilations like the Rondo in F. However, while there is little here of the poetry inspired in him by the mazurka in his maturity, there are several characteristic features - not least the delight he takes in the sharpened fourth of the first two themes in Lydian mode, emphasising the dissonance by placing it on the idiomatically displaced second- beat stress. He is fertile in entertaining keyboard colouring, virtuoso passage work, witty modulations, expressive chromaticisms and generally ensuring that there is no dull moment.

Sonata No.1 in C minor, Op.4

Allegro maestoso

Menuetto

Larghetto

Finale

Although he wrote three masterful sonatas - the two celebrated ones for piano and a less familiar but no less inspired example for cello and piano - Chopin was unhappy with sonata form as such. The first movements of all four of his sonatas show that, while he could accept most of the conventions, he resisted the basic requirement that the first subject should reappear in the tonic at the beginning of the recapitulation. In both the mature Piano Sonatas and the Cello Sonata he opens the recapitulation with the more lyrical second subject and gives no formal attention to the first. In the Piano Sonata in C minor, which he wrote as a third-year student at the Warsaw Conservatoire in 1828, he reintroduces the first subject at the conventional point but in the far from conventional key of B flat minor.

Chopin’s First Piano Sonata is, in fact, a remarkably radical and accomplished work, not at all the student exercise one might have expected from a composer of eighteen. It is an indication of the quality of the teaching at the Warsaw Conservatoire that Joseph Elsner - to whom the Sonata in C minor is dedicated and who might well have condemned it for its provocative failure to observe the academic rules - promptly sent it off to a publisher in Vienna. Haslinger made no immediate effort to publish it but he was clever enough to keep the manuscript and eleven years later, when Chopin scores were at a premium, to have it engraved - although, perhaps because of some opposition to the project on the composer’s part, its actual publication was delayed until 1851, two years after his death.

The other extraordinary quality of the first movement of the Sonata in C minor, apart from its tonally dislocated recapitulation, is its domination by a four-note rising theme derived from the very first bar. There is a second subject of sorts but the Allegro maestoso is basically an improvisation, spontaneous and obsessive, on that not very ingratiating opening motif. Conventional virtuoso gestures mix with keyboard figuration clearly prophetic of the mature composer and with harmonic audacities which, though they clearly did not disturb Elsner, would have dismayed any ordinary professor of composition of the day.

The Menuetto in E flat major - more like a Schubert German dance than a minuet - is not particularly individual until, in the sonorously scored middle section, it briefly assumes the character of a mazurka. The A flat major Larghetto, on the other hand, is remarkable for its daring adoption of a quintuple-time metre, for the varied and always fluent solutions to the rhythmic problems arising from that and for the nocturnal decorations so lavishly applied to the melodic line.

As for the Presto finale, while Elsner might usefully have had a word with his pupil about its over-extended construction, he would have noted too that its rhythmic energy - stimulated perhaps by Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasia - is such that dramatic interest is sustained to the end.

Four Mazurkas, Op.30

No.1 in C minor

No.2 in B minor

No.3 in D flat major

No.4 in C sharp minor

Although most of Chopin’s mature mazurkas contain more than one tune, they are never medleys in the sense that the Rondo in F is or even some of the waltzes are. The Mazurka in C minor, Op.30, No.1, for example, is a conversation between its plaintive opening theme and a more confident companion in the relative major - not that the con anima intervention of the latter has the least effect on the mood of the former, as it confirms when it returns in its original form to effect a sadly resigned ending in C minor.

Moreover, although most of the mazurkas are in ternary form, they never follow set patterns. Op.30, No.2 in B minor is a unique construction. The material to all appearances presented as the main theme in the opening bars gives way to a sequence leading to a new theme in the dominant. And that, after another sequence, is where it ends, with no recall of the opening theme and not in B minor but in F sharp minor, leaving the impression like many of its folk models that it is unfinished. Op.30, No.3, in D flat major, its freely modulating and elusive middle section offsetting its plain-speaking outer sections, is scarcely less remarkable.

The most developed structure, as is usual in Chopin’s mazurkas by this stage in his career, is that of the last in the set. The unharmonised introduction to No.3 in D flat is no more than a run-in to the main theme. The harmonically complex introduction to No.4 in C sharp minor is an integral part of the construction and a preparation for an extraordinary event near the end. Its function is not only to lead into the main theme in C sharp minor, bouncing lightly in the right hand on heavily strummed chords in the left, and to re-introduce it after an extended and dynamically liberated middle section. It also has to restore a tonal situation dissolved out of recognition by a sequence of dissonant harmonies descending in parallel chromatic steps in the final bars. Those who heard or read this on the publication of Op.30 in 1838 had surely never come across anything like it before.

Ballade No.1 in G minor, Op.23

The Ballade in G minor is traditionally associated with Adam Mickiewicz’s poetic novel Konrad Wallenrod, which was first published in 1828. Chronologically, even if the work were conceived in Vienna in 1831 - and that early date is now dismissed as unreliable - some such association is clearly not impossible. Temperamentally, assuming that the First Ballade was actually written in Paris in 1835, it is not at all unlikely that a Polish nationalist poet exiled in the same city, where they were certainly known to each other, would have influenced the composer in one way or another. Mickiewicz’s Ballady i romanse did at least supply Chopin with a title for this new form of piano music.

Aesthetically, however, it is impossible to reconcile Mickiewicz’s bloodthirsty epic Konrad Wallenrod with Chopin’s romantic lyricism, dramatically articulated though it is. The Ballade in G minor is, it is true, a narrative poem - the narrator is almost as prominent as the principal characters - but, like its three successors, it is a story of vividly characterised thematic protagonists involved in harmonic adventures against a distant sonata-form background.

The First Ballade begins with a short harp-like prelude which establishes the bardic personality. The narrator then introduces one of the principal thematic characters, the melancholy but excitable first subject, in G minor. The second subject is happier and more relaxed in E flat major. Goaded by the first theme, however, the second is compelled to change its mood during the course of the development, achieving full-scale eloquence in A major and, at the end of a scherzando episode based on the narrator’s theme, urgently asserting itself in E flat major again. The first subject is recapitulated in the tonic but without the second subject: all conventional expectations are swept away in a presto con fuoco coda. The narrator adds a dramatically expressive epilogue, where funereal allusions in G minor to a characteristic rhythmic feature of the second subject confirm the unhappy ending .

Three Mazurkas, Op.56

No.1 in B major

No.2 in C major

No.3 in C minor

Equivalent to the Polonaise-Fantasie among the polonaises, the Mazurka in C minor, Op.56, No.3, is the longest and the most freely developed of all the mazurkas. It is of such exceptional stature that Chopin must have had to think carefully about how to present it as part of a set. His solution, when he delivered Op.56 for publication in 1843, was to precede it with a short and comparatively primitive oberek in C major and to balance it with an opening number which, though little more than average in length, is itself a sophisticated example of the art.

The B major Mazurka, Op.56, No.1, is based on two alternating tempi - an Allegro non tanto, which veils its tonality in a subtly contrived texture of counterpoints and misleading pedal points before proudly asserting it in plain triadic harmonies, and a Poco più mosso which runs away in E flat major like a waltz-time moto perpetuo. While it is not surprising that the process is repeated, with the Poco più mosso now in G major, it is remarkable how the Allegro non tanto extends itself in a spontaneous and adventurous development in the closing section of the piece. The simple left-hand drone harmonies of Op.56, No.2, which are repeated virtually unchanged throughout the opening section and its recall at the end, is a refreshing and necessary contrast at this point.

Op.56, No.3, is more a matter of thinking about the mazurka, in often abstruse harmonic and contrapuntal terms, than performing one. A characteristic four-note rhythmic motif emerges in the opening bars and is repeated several times as the left-hand thinking goes on. But that is as far as it gets until the key definitively changes for what sounds like the beginning of a lyrical episode in B major. Inimical harmonies stand in its way, however, and force a return to the initial rhythmic motif. The nearest approach to mazurka continuity is made in the middle section, where two new themes succeed even in persuading the four-note motif to make something of its rhythmic implications. But the thinking begins again and, except in one more briefly lyrical gesture, contemplation of the four-note motif persists until it happens upon the quietly pronounced C major chords at the end.

Two Nocturnes, Op.55

No.1 in F minor

No.2 in E flat major

With a Nocturne like the one in E flat major, Op.55, No.2 - which is remarkable in its way as the Mazurka in C minor, Op.56, No.3 - Chopin had to exercise great discretion in pairing it up for publication (and for dedication to his Scottish pupil and admirer Jane Stirling) in 1843. He chose to link it with a piece of comparatively simple texture, short duration and, until the stormy middle section, modest keyboard requirements. Op.55, No.1, is short not because it is unambitious, however, but because of the inspired treatment of the opening section on its reprise. Far from retracing its measured steps out of F minor and back in again, it dissolves into harmonies which carry it away from its course to an early F major conclusion all the more radiant for the consequent foreshortening of the structure .

Op.55, No.2, though an essential nocturne, is not analyzable in the ternary terms which can be applied to most of the others. It is a continuous, effortlessly spontaneous development of one theme which is more beautifully and more meaningfully decorated than any of its kind. At the same time it is abundant in rhythmic and contrapuntal complexities which, having everything to do with melodic imagination and nothing to do with academic routine, is unique to Chopin at this stage in his development.

Scherzo No.2 in B flat minor, Op.31

Although it would be a further six years before Chopin could approach the scherzo in the playful mood traditional to it, the Scherzo No.2 in B flat minor is nowhere near as demonic as its predecessor in B minor.

Written in 1837, only two years after the First Scherzo, it begins with fiendishly threatening gestures ominously reminiscent of the earlier work. But in this case the relative major makes an early impression as a melodious second subject, its aspiring line carried high in the right hand over impulsive arpeggios in the left. The lyrical middle section, moreover, instead of being hermetically sealed off from the rest of the work like that of the Scherzo in B minor, integrates with it by absorbing a variant of the opening gesture into its contrapuntal texture. While this gives the demonic element an opportunity to return, by shaping the variant motif back to its original form, it also means that major-key ambitions are more realistic here than in the earlier work. So, although the demonic gesture is recalled once again after the recapitulation, D flat major most convincingly triumphs over B minor opposition in the final bars.

Gerald Larner©