Scherzo No.1 in B minor, Op.20

chopin: ballade in A flat

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

Scherzo No.1 in B minor, Op.20

Nocturne in B major, Op.9, No.3

Scherzo No.4 in E major, Op.54

It would be a mistake to underestimate the extent of Chopin’s success in sonata form. He did, after all, write two of the most popular of all piano sonatas and an uncommonly fine cello sonata. But it is probably true to say that the ballade and the scherzo were more congenial to him: one of those forms he more or less invented to suit his lyrical genius; the other he fundamentally adapted to accommodate his less abundant but no less intense flair for the dramatic. His work in scherzo form was, in fact, complementary and parallel to his work in ballade form. The first Ballade and the first Scherzo were both conceived in about 1831 and - after what seems like far more than a decade of development in style and temper­ament - the fourth and last of each set was completed in 1842

Although a macabre element was not unknown in the scherzo when Chopin adopted the form, the character of the First in B minor was still so unconventional that Schumann was moved by it to make his classic remark that if this is a joke he would like to know what serious music sounds like. When it first came onto the market in this country, Chopin’s English publisher, Wessel of Regent Street, thought it expedient to ignore Chopin’s title and call it Le Banquet infernal. In conventional ternary form, it ends in a mood as “bold and stormy” (in Schumann’s words) as it began. The intervention of the Polish Christmas song, “Sleep, Baby Jesus,” as the basis of a serenely lyrical middle section in the relative major, has no influence on the emotional outcome.

Wessel also had his own way of selling the first set of Nocturnes, Op.9, which were first published in Leipzig in 1832 under their proper title and then in London as Murmures de la Seine. “Wessel is an imbecile,”said Chopin. It is certainly an inappropriate title for No.3 in B major which departs from the regularly flowing left-hand rhythms and nostalgic melodic lines of the other two for a peculiarly wistful and capricious kind of scherzo with a dramatically passionate agitato middle section in the tonic minor.

The Fourth Scherzo, in the bright key of E major, is good-humoured, capricious and unpredictable. Basically, with quick outer sections and a slow middle section in the relative minor, it is a conventional ternary construction. But there is a remarkable flexibility within that basic shape. It accommodates not only a wonderfully effective allusion to the middle section just before the precipitous coda but also an ingenious combination of scherzo and sonata form. There is a new purity in the piano writing, above all in the simple two-part texture of a trio section so very different from its richly scored counterparts in the earlier scherzos.