Three Nocturnes, Op.15

chopin piano works, recital III

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

Three Nocturnes, Op.15

No.1 in F major

No.2 in F sharp minor

No.3 in G minor

As a composer of piano nocturnes, Chopin must always have been aware, however vaguely, of the John Field prototype - which, basically, postulates an expressive and often highly decorative vocal melody in the right hand poised over a wide-spaced arpeggio accompaniment in the left. Much though he admired the Field model, however, he was far from content simply to follow it; sometimes, presumably in an effort to expand the scope of the form, he would deliberately challenge it.

Of the earliest examples Chopin himself chose to publish, the three Nocturnes, Op.9, the first two have obvious parallels with the prototype while the third clearly does not. Much the same applies to the next in the series, the three Nocturnes, Op.15, which were published a year later in 1833. Even in No.1 in F major, which has the most tenderly expressive of outer sections, Chopin makes a radical departure in a quicker and surprisingly fierce con fuoco middle section in F minor. No.2 in F sharp major is more conformist in the undulating left-hand accompaniment figures and (though it is far more elaborately detailed than anything Field achieved in this respect) in the decorative bel-canto treatment of the melodic line. But here too there is a quicker middle section in the minor which, while it is less aggressive in attitude, is equally distracting by virtue of the intricately worked texture in the right-hand part and the rhythmic syncopations in the left.

As for No.3 in G minor, it relates to the prototype only in its slow tempo and generally thoughtful mood. Constructed in a quite uncharacteristic binary form, it is scarcely a nocturne at all. The first section is not an aria but a melancholy mazurka and the second, which is connected to the first by a highly chromatic transition, is a religioso chorale in modal four-part harmony beginning in D minor and ending, after a coda of trumpet calls, in G major. Unfortunately, since no autograph copy now exists, a report that Chopin inscribed the manuscript with the words “Après un représentation de Hamlet” cannot be verified - not that it would make matters much less enigmatic if it could.

Two Polonaises, Op.40

No.1 in A major

No.2 in C minor

The most popular of Chopin’s polonaises is not the most characteristic of them. While it is true that the Polonaise in A major, Op.40, No.1, has most of qualities expected of a work of its kind, it is also true that they are displayed in such abundance that there is no room for anything else. It is unmistakably heroic in character, for example, but nowhere in the A major outer sections or in the D major middle section is there a hint of a more intimate or poetic side to its personality. It is stirringly massive in sound - not least in the six or seven-note chords hammered in rhythmic unison in the opening section, still more in the trills so emphatically applied to the octaves heralding the last appearance of the fanfare theme of the middle section - but the dynamic level is sustained at forte or above.

Clearly, Chopin intended the two Op.40 Polonaises - the first of them written in Paris in 1838, the second all but completed in Majorca a year later - to be taken as a pair. The contrast to the triumphalism of the so-called “Military” Polonaise in A major is in the sorrow of its companion in C minor.

The scoring of the later work is, at first, scarcely more intimate than that of its predecessor: the repeated chords in the right hand and the heavy octaves carrying the melody in the left seem to proclaim some public rather than private grief (and the fact that the theme is a minor-key version of that of Karol Kurpinski’s “Coronation” Polonaise surely confirms that this was Chopin’s intention). It is significant too that as soon as there is a suggestion of the proud polonaise rhythm in a major key the harmonies run away from it. The same emotional problem motivates the middle section where lyrical material in A flat major is brought into contact with more reminders of the polonaise rhythm and, gently applied though they are this time, cannot accommodate them.

Berceuse in D flat major, Op.57

The Berceuse is one of the miracles of Chopin’s later years. All it is, basically, is a four-bar melody and a one-bar accompaniment figure. The left-hand repeats the accompaniment of alternating tonic and dominant harmonies more than thirty times until - while the rocking cradle-song rhythm remains always the same - the tonality briefly veers towards the subdominant on the last page. The magical quality is in the variety of decorative inspirations applied to the melodic line in the right hand, which scarcely seems to be aware of what the left hand is doing, its chromatic colouring clashing most exquisitely with the explicit D flat major harmonies in the bass. Conceived in 1843 as (according to the sketch) “Variantes,” the Berceuse was completed in 1844 when the two bars of left-hand introduction were added, apparently, as an afterthought.

Barcarolle in F sharp major, Op.60

Another masterful product of Chopin’s late years - it was written two years after the Berceuse - the Barcarolle cost the composer much trouble. It was a matter not only of his increasingly problematic relationship with George Sand and her children, which made life at Nohant so uncomfortable for him, but also of a severely self-critical attitude to his work, which made it difficult for him to get anything finished. But, of course, when he did complete the Barcarolle - at Nohant in the summer of 1846, having started it there twelve months earlier - it seemed no less spontaneous than anything else he had written during the last five or six years.

Like the Berceuse, the Barcarolle takes a popular convention as its starting point. In this case it is the Venetian gondola song, all the traditional attributes of which, after the short introduction, are there - the 12/8 metre, the gentle rocking accompani­ment, the melody sung in seductive thirds and sixths. But this is only the beginning of a construction which far transcends its origins. Basically, it is a ternary shape with a quicker middle section and, at the heart of that, a still quicker episode with a new theme in A major. That central theme both inspires the fortissimo climax of the last section, when it reappears in F sharp major, and underlies the pianissimo decorations in the tranquil last bars.

Already far gone in his final illness by the time he gave the first performance of the Barcarolle in 1847 - at what was to be his last concert in Paris - Chopin was too weak to achieve a fortissimo and chose to reduce the climax to a pianissimo. It must have had a peculiarly eerie effect.

Four Mazurkas, Op.17

No.1 in B flat major

No.2 in E minor

No.3 in A flat major

No.4 in A minor

Chopin’s dedications are not usually of much signficance when it comes to understanding the music they so flatteringly recommend to some Parisian Comtesse, Baronne, or Princesse. With the Four Mazurkas, Op.17, however, the situation is a little different. Completed in 1833. they were published in the following year with a dedication to Mme. Lina Freppa, who was a singing teacher much respected in Paris and a friend of both Chopin and Bellini. It is true that we do not know whether they were written with Mme Freppa specifically in mind or whether she was selected as a suitable dedicatee once they were finished. But, either way, it is interesting that the one set of mazurkas which indulges in bel-canto melodic decoration - of a kind found more often, of course, in the nocturnes - should have been consigned to an Italian vocal specialist and a friend of Bellini.

The decorative style of the briskly self-assertive first piece in the set is not operatic but pure mazurka, economically designed to emphasise the shift of the rhythmic stress away from the first beat in the bar. The harmonic style is pure mazurka too: nowhere else, uncommonly bold though he was in this respect, would Chopin have risked such wayward harmonies as those with which the right hand so cheerfully teases the glum left-hand ostinato in the E flat major middle section. Although the slow Mazurka in E minor opens in a distinctly serious mood, it displays from an early stage a tendency to run into more playful major-key areas and into correspondingly more ornate figuration - except, that is, in the middle section where Chopin once again amuses himself at the expense of the drone harmonies, this time by means of chromatic extensions of the open fifths in the left hand.

There is a similar witty use of chromatic harmony in Op.17, No.3, where the opening theme is consistently associated with a dissonance which, though it immediately resolves onto the tonic, causes a frisson every time it is heard. It too has a decorative element but, like that of its predecessor in E minor, it is more instrumental than vocal. The stylistic anomaly is in No.4 in A minor, which is so inclined to give voice to its melancholy in delicately detailed elaborations of the melodic line that it sounds at times more like a nocturne than the mazurka-like Nocturne in G minor heard earlier in today’s programme. Much the longest of the four and conscientious enough to recall material from No.2 in E minor in the middle section, the the Mazurka in A minor was clearly intended as a finale for the whole group. This would be the structural pattern of Chopin’s sets of mazurkas from now on.

Impromptu No.1 in A flat major, Op.29

Chopin’s first impromptu was not the Impromptu No.1 in A flat, Op.29, but the one published six years after his death as Fantaisie-Impromptu in C sharp minor, Op.66. Why he did not himself offer the earlier work for publication no one really knows - perhaps the dedicatee, one Mme d’Esté, had some kind of right in it - but it is quite certain that he did not intend to waste it. The Impromptu in A flat major, written in Paris three years later, is clearly a replacement for it. It is not only that both works are in ternary form, with quicker outer sections based on a distinctive figuration and a song-like episode between them, but also that the theme of the middle section of the Impromptu in A flat major has more than a little in common with that of the earlier piece.

As the two later works of the same kind confirm, while replacing the C sharp minor Impromptu, Chopin was consciously consolidating the impromptu form as he had inherited it from Schubert and Moscheles and had so successfully reshaped in his own style.

Ballade No.4 in F minor, Op.52

The one form which Chopin can be said to have invented is the ballade. It was “inspired,” he told Robert Schumann, “by the poems of Mickiewicz, ” the Polish nationalist poet in exile at the time and a member of the composer’s circle in Paris. Chopin surely did not mean to indicate to Schumann that his ballades were directly based on the stories in Mickiewicz’s Ballady i romanse. It is not entirely impossible but it is more likely that what he owed to them was a useful title, the general idea of a poetic narrative and, above all, a solution to the problem endemic to the romantic composer: where to find the dramatic or epic form which could be sustained by lyrical material.

By the time he came two write the fourth in the series of Ballades, in 1842, Chopin’s mastery in integrating melody and form was complete. Although the ballade conventions - the 6/8 metre, the narrative style, the bardic prelude - are retained, the F minor work is even more liberated in form than its predecessor in A flat major and is on a larger scale. One of Chopin’s greatest works, it is a structural masterpiece and, like all the best examples of story-telling, never predictable.

The main theme, introduced after the short prelude with the characteristic repeated notes, sounds like a fragile stray from one of the nocturnes. Although it at first gives no hint of the epic trials it is about to withstand, it proves to be an adaptable melody, capable of carrying a weight of passionate expression, before it is relieved by the entry of a happier, less complicated theme in B flat major. The burden of the main climax is borne by this more robust second subject, now in D flat major. But the brilliant coda, beginning after the slow and quiet chords which bring the music temporarily to rest on C major, is yet another transformation of the mercurial main theme.

Introduction and Rondo in E flat major, Op.16

The commercial strategy of Chopin’s London publisher in awarding the misleadingly fictitious title Adieu à Varsovie to the Rondo in C minor, Op.1, was innocent in comparison with the deception he had applied to the Introduction and Rondo in E flat, Op.16, which he had put on sale in 1834 as “Rondeletto sur la Cavatina de L’Italiana in Algeri .” Customers of Messrs Wessel in Regent Street would have looked in vain for familiar traces of Rossini in the latest Chopin novelty. What they would have found - in a stylistically variable score started, presumably, in Warsaw and completed, certainly, in Paris - was an intriguingly eccentric, initially simple but increasingly obsessive Andante in C minor and an engagingly tuneful Allegro vivace in E flat major. The latter section, which seems to be inexhaustible in its decorative exuberance, was presumably written first.

Three years after he had published the alleged “Rondeletto sur la Cavatin de L’Italiana in Algeri,” incidentally, Wessel issued a piano-duet arrangement under the almost authentic and actually rather apt title of “Rondo élégante.”

Four Mazurkas, Op.24

No.1 in G minor

No.2 in C major

No.3 in A flat major

No.4 in B flat minor

Chopin’s fourth set of mazurkas is in some ways - harmonically and even rhythmically - less adventurous than its predecessor. Written two years after the Op.17 set and published in 1836, it is remarkable above all for the expanded structure of its B flat minor finale. As if to compensate, the first and third mazurkas in the group, though no shorter than the average, are so shaped as to leave no room for a developed middle section. The con anima passage at the centre of No.1 in G minor consists of little more than repetitions of a key phrase from the expressive opening theme, accelerated and exposed to a variety of rhythmic stresses. No.2 in C major, on the other hand, does have a fully contrasting middle section in D flat major - presumably to offset the carefully preserved modal innocence of the outer sections. Thematically similar to the G minor Mazurka, though in a quicker tempo and a major key, No.3 in A flat resembles it also in structure, the central passage in this case upsetting the harmonic orientation before the unexpectedly early return of the main theme in the tonic.

The last Mazurka in the Op.24 set is one of the most interesting of its kind, not least because of its rondo-like structure. Approaching its B flat minor tonality obliquely, by way of a gradual contraction of the right-hand octave in the opening bars, it remains uncertain of its harmonic identity. The D flat major tonality of the scherzando first episode is clear enough, it is true, and the B flat minor return of the main theme only slightly less so. But the Lydian colouring of the sotto voce passage in octaves and the constantly modulating con anima second episode are both unsettling. The B flat minor ending is implied but, as it dies out on an unaccompanied and only fragmentary melodic line, not confirmed.

Two Nocturnes, Op.32

No.1 in B major

No.2 in A flat major

Because of a superficial conformity to the John Field prototype, the Nocturne in B major, Op.32, No.1, is believed by some commentators to have been written at some earlier date than the 1836 usually ascribed to it. The problem with that theory is that the Nocturne is not as conformist as, for much of its duration, it seems. It is true that there is no more characteristic example of ornate vocal melody elegantly poised over a wide-space arpeggio accompaniment than the main theme of the Nocturne in B major. It is also true that the F sharp major middle section does not seriously disturb the atmosphere, in spite of the minor harmonies that are touched on here and there. But, even though a suitable transition is set up no fewer than three times, the opening theme never returns. Instead, just at the point where it seems that at last it will, a quietly sinister drum beat intervenes at the bottom of an alien chord. A brief but dramatic protest cannot prevent the unhappy B minor ending.

The companion Nocturne, Op.32, No.2, does at least conform to the ternary pattern. In fact, it has an additional framework formed by the two-bar cadential chord progression which, paradoxically, opens the piece and which, logically, closes it. In the meantime there is an unaffectedly charming first section based on a Schumannesque melody in A flat followed by an urgently impulsive episode in F minor and a both fortissimo and appassionato recall of the main theme. Just what those unlikely directions imply as to the tempo and dynamic pressure to be applied to essentially unheroic material (marked lento and sempre piano e legato on its first appearance) is one of the many interpretative problems associated with Chopin’s piano music.

Waltz in E flat major, Op.18 (Grande Valse brillante)

“I haven’t got what it takes for the Viennese waltz,” Chopin once confessed. Certainly, there is no danger of mistaking any of Chopin’s twenty or so surviving waltzes with any of those he might have heard -by Joseph Lanner perhaps or the elder Johann Strauss - on the two visits he made to Vienna before he found that Paris was so much more congenial a city. Although he regularly adopted the medley form much favoured by the Viennese, the Chopin waltz has a quite different character. For one thing, it was not intended for dancing, which immediately liberated it from the accepted tempo constraints. It is distinguished also by Chopin’s romantic temperament, his voluptuous harmonies, his inexhaustible keyboard invention and, above all, by a triple-time rhythmic sense more at home with the Polish mazurka than with the Austrian Ländler.

Even in the introduction to the first waltz the composer himself chose to publish - it appeared in 1834, two years after it was written - Chopin takes an otherwise conventional fanfare motif and deliberately shifts the rhythmic stress away from the first beat of the bar. The brilliant first theme, with its busy repeated notes, is unexceptional in this respect. The second theme, on the other hand, incorporates a rhythmically contradictory element from the fanfare motif and, although its demonic crush notes are a more prominent feature, the third also has its third-beat stresses. Order is apparently restored by a recall of the fanfare with its accents no longer displaced and a straight recapitulation of the first theme. But a vertiginous coda, beginning after a couple of pauses with quiet but unmetrical accompaniment figures in the left hand, wittily loses touch with waltz-time reality.

Polonaise in A flat major, Op.53

Written in 1842, between the Fantasia in F minor and the Fourth Ballade, the Polonaise in A flat is the last in the series before Chopin finally transcended the form in the Polonaise-Fantaisie. It is no mere polonaise, however: it is more a tone poem, which draws on the heroic associations of the dance as Chopin had developed it during the last seven years but which also includes other kinds of material which it is difficult not to think of as being inspired by some kind of poetic programme.

There is nothing specifically of the polonaise in the dramatically articulated introduction and, although its generic character is unmistakable, the splendid main theme is accompanied not by the usual rhythmic figures but by pairs of quavers phrased across the bar lines. A new, less muscular theme marked sostenuto is awarded the authentic polonaise accompaniment but it doesn’t last long before it provokes a fortissimo return of the main theme. The passage which invites programmatic commentary is the one beginning with seven emphatic chords of E major and continuing with a galloping ostinato in the left hand while a proud new melodic personality rises above it in the right. So does the apparently anomalous passage of decorative semiquavers running over syncopated figuration in the bass. Anyway, the main theme returns in all its splendour and the coda briefly recalls the galloping ostinato, which is by now won over to A flat major of course.

Gerald Larner©