Nocturne in B major, Op.33, No.2

Nocturne in A flat major, Op.33, No.3

Eventually, during the course of the 45 years between his first work in the form and his last, the nocturne became Fauré’s most personal and most intimate means of expression. To begin with, however, his ambition as far as the nocturne was concerned seemed to be limited to emulating Chopin - whose piano music was more important to him in the early stages of his development than that of any other composer - and to providing himself with something suitable to play in the fashionable Parisian salons of the day. It wasn’t until 1884, when he wrote his Fourth and Fifth Nocturnes (in E flat, Op.36, and B flat, Op.37) that he was able to confide his thoughts to the form in his own style and without reference to a Chopin model.

The Second Nocturne in B and the Third in A flat, which were written in about 1881 and published in 1883 with the comparatively clumsy First Nocturne in E flat minor, are scarcely less attractive in spite of their echoes of Chopin. The Nocturne in B might be based on Chopin’s in the same key, Op.62, No.1, but Saint-Saëns found it “absolutely entrancing” - and flattering too, no doubt, in the dramatic middle section where the inspiration for the piano writing is more Saint-Saëns than Chopin.

Although he was to adopt the same strategy in later nocturnes - poetic outer section with a contrastingly turbulent episode in the middle - Fauré preferred in general to sustain much the same tempo throughout and to base the middle section on a variant of the main theme. The Nocturne in A flat, Op.33, No.3, is not only the earliest of that kind but also one of the most persuasive. The beginning of the middle section, where the opening theme appears in a variant form in the left hand as though suspended from the harmonies in the right, is both simple in conception and magical in effect.

Gerald Larner©