Fantasy in F minor, Op.49

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

Fantasy in F minor, Op.49

Written in 1841, between the Third and Fourth Ballades, the Fantasy in F minor could almost be taken for another work in the same series. It is of much the same structural stature as the Ballades, though a little longer than the longest of them, and it too seems to have some kind of dramatic rather than purely musical inspiration behind it - so much so, in fact, that a variety of stories have been spuriously attached to it, ranging from the heroically patriotic to the trivially domestic. The two opening bars, with their beckoning fourths, are clearly not George Sand knocking ominously on Chopin’s door at Nohant, just as the wistfully harmonised reply is clearly not the composer’s reluctantly given permission to enter. The early transformation of the latter phrase into a poignant funeral march carries emotional implications of a quite different kind.

The fact is that the Fantasy is just what it claims to be. Including several conventionally fantasy-style cadenzas as a clear indication of its historical associations, it is an improvisation even more spontaneous than any of the Ballades. Its main theme, introduced in F minor directly after the first of the cadenzas and opening with another falling fourth, is a melody so agitated by its syncopated rhythms that it seems to be falling over itself in panic. But that same theme emerges not much later as a brisk march in E flat major and - after another appearance in its minor mode between two more cadenzas - as a peaceful chorale in B major. Once more it appears in the minor but it takes only an assertive re-entry of the march in the relative major and just a hint of the chorale in the same key to bring the work to an end, unexpectedly but quite logically, not in F minor or F major but in A flat major.

Introduction and Rondo in E flat major, Op.16

When Chopin’s Rondo in C minor, Op.1, was first published in this country it bore the title Adieu à Varsovie - “Farewell to Warsaw” - which was a nice little fiction concealing the fact that it was written years earlier by a composer who was no more than a schoolboy at the time with several terms of study at the Warsaw Conservatoire still ahead of him. That, however, was an innocent deception in comparison with the claim attached by the same publisher to the Introduction and Rondo in E flat, Op.16, which he put on sale in 1834 (two years after it was written) 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 their newly acquired Chopin score. They would, on the other hand, have found an intriguingly eccentric, initially simple but increasingly obsessive Andante in C minor and an engagingly tuneful Allegro vivace in E flat major remarkable above all perhaps for its apparently inexhaustible decorative exuberance.

Impromptu in A flat major, Op.29

Chopin’s first acknowledged Impromptu was the one in A flat major, Op.29, written and published in 1837. The so-called Fantaisie-Impromptu was written three years earlier but was suppressed by the composer - perhaps because of its uncomfortably close resemblance to an Impromptu by Moscheles - and published only after his death. The Impromptu in A flat major could almost have been written as a replacement for it. It is not only that both works are in ternary form, with quicker outer sections based on a distinctive keyboard 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 work.

Four Etudes

in G sharp minor, Op.25, No.6

in C sharp minor, Op.25, No.7

in A minor, Op.25, No.11

in G flat major, Op.10, No.5

Chopin apparently did not consider his Etudes to be so very different from the general run of technical studies available at the time. Far from protecting his pupils from the more or less mechanical Gradus ad Parnassum or School of Velocity kind of thing, he put them to work on Clementi, Cramer and Czerny even after he had completed his first set of twelve Etudes, Op.10. In 1839, three years after he had completed the second set of Etudes, Op.25, he happily supplied three more examples for the frankly pedagogical Méthode des Méthodes of Fétis and Moscheles.

Some of his more enlightened contemporaries, on the other hand, were very well aware of the uniquely imaginative quality of his achievement in these works. Liszt, to whom the Op.10 set was dedicated in 1833, definitively declared that “they spring, like all his works, from the nature of his poetic genius.” Schumann, always in search of piano studies which “offer nourishment for both hand and spirit,” said that Chopin’s “are all true poetic images.” The variety in the imagery, moreover, was quite unparalleled in music of this kind. The G sharp minor Etude, Op.25, No.6 for example, cheerfully sets the right hand to work on a brilliantly frivolous continuity of parallel thirds, whereas the next one in the same set is deeply serious in calling not only for an eloquently expressive left hand but also for an exceptionally tactful right. The A minor Op.25, No.11, the longest of all the Etudes, is so much a tone poem in its combination of swirling semiquavers and defiantly harmonised melody that it has long been associated with the nickname of “Winter Wind.” The Etude in G flat major, Op.10, No.5, is so spontaneous, in spite of its studious adherence to the black keys, that Liszt was moved to declare it a “magnificent improvisation.”

Sonata in B minor, Op.58

Allegro maestoso

Scherzo: molto vivace

Largo

Finale: presto non tanto

Chopin, Schumann and Brahms each wrote three piano sonatas. But whereas Schumann and Brahms found the form uncongenial and abandoned it an early stage in their careers, Chopin returned to it in his maturity and developed a masterful version of his own. Even in the Sonata in C minor, which he wrote as a student in Warsaw in 1828, he resisted what he no doubt considered the predictability of the academically constructed first movement. In the Sonatas in B flat minor of 1839 and in B minor of 1844 he found ways of reconciling sonata form with emotional truth.

The problem for Chopin in the first movements of all three sonatas was the recapitulation, which was conventionally expected to begin with the first theme in its original harmonies. But the point of the Allegro maestoso of the Sonata in B minor is not to confirm the harmonic supremacy of the key in which it begins but to assert the optimism of the second subject over the grim mood of the beginning. Which is why, after an improvisatory and apparently spontaneous development section, Chopin declines to recapitulate the opening theme, preferring to devote the last part of the construction to celebrating the serenity achieved by the second subject in B major.

Having got the most difficult part over, he now abandons his 1839 model. He retains his optimism in an uncommonly happy Scherzo in E flat major, setting the lovely middle section most significantly in B major, which is not only intriguingly remote from the outer sections but also reminiscent of the serenity achieved in the first movement.

The Largo is no funeral march. It begins with an unexpectedly dramatic gesture but then melts into a melodic rapture in B major which is not only sustained but actually intensified in the liberated modulations of the middle section. But Chopin without his nightmares would not be Chopin and they return to haunt him in the Finale - a persecuted movement of rondo shape and virtuoso velocity which finds emotional relief in the major-key episodes but no definitive security until, almost playfully, the coda asserts the key and affirms the mood it has been the whole function of the sonata to secure.

Gerald Larner©

Wigmore 1/11/96

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

Fantasy in F minor, Op.49

Written in 1841, between the Third and Fourth Ballades, the Fantasy in F minor could almost be taken for another work in the same series. It is of much the same structural stature as the Ballades, though a little longer than the longest of them, and it too seems to have some kind of dramatic rather than purely musical inspiration behind it - so much so, in fact, that a variety of stories have been spuriously attached to it, ranging from the heroically patriotic to the trivially domestic. The two opening bars, with their beckoning fourths, are clearly not George Sand knocking ominously on Chopin’s door at Nohant, just as the wistfully harmonised reply is not the composer’s reluctantly given permission to enter. The early transformation of the latter phrase into a poignant funeral march carries emotional implications of a quite different kind.

The fact is that the Fantasy is just what it claims to be. Including several conventionally fantasy-style cadenzas as a clear indication of its historical associations, it is an improvisation even more spontaneous than any of the Ballades. Its main theme, introduced in F minor directly after the first of the cadenzas and opening with another falling fourth, is a melody so agitated by its syncopated rhythms that it seems to be falling over itself in panic. But that same theme emerges not much later as a brisk march in E flat major and - after another appearance in its minor mode between two more cadenzas - as a peaceful chorale in B major. Once more it appears in the minor but it takes only an assertive re-entry of the march in the relative major and just a hint of the chorale in the same key to bring the work to an end, unexpectedly but quite logically, not in F minor or F major but in A flat major.

Impromptu in F sharp major, Op.36

The four Impromptus are generally considered not to be among the most adventurous of Chopin’s inspirations. The Second Impromptu - written in 1839, just after the Piano Sonata in B flat minor - is certainly more experimental, however, than the First. Here, after the march-like D major middle section, Chopin recalls the first section a semi-tone flat, so to speak, in F major. He then immediately repeats it in F sharp major and extends it, miraculously, with decorative writing demanding long-sustained delicacy from the pianist’s right hand.

Mazurka in A minor (“Notre Temps”)

The fourth of Chopin’s seven Mazurkas in A minor was written in 1840 and first published two years later by Schott’s of Mainz in an album called Notre Temps - along with pieces by Czerny, Kalliwoda, Rosenheim, Thalberg, Kalkbrenner, Bertini, Wolff, Kontski, Osborne, Hertz and, rather surprisingly, Mendelssohn. In that largely virtuoso company, Chopin’s Mazurka in A minor must have seemed peculiarly severe. In fact, it is severe, even in comparison with Chopin’s other mazurkas in A minor. Beginning as primly as any baroque minuet, it only gradually liberates the left hand to pursue an obbligato line curving expressively downwards under the strictly chordal texture in the right hand. It then recaptures the left hand in the A major middle section where, except for a half a dozen enterprising bars in the very centre of the piece, it proceeds in parallel octaves with the melodic line in the right hand. Expressive freedom is restored to the left hand in the reprise of the first section - a little earlier than before but only within the limits already set.

Nocturne in E flat major, Op.55, No.2

What is most remarkable about the Op.55 pair of Nocturnes - and most of Chopin’s Nocturnes were published in pairs - is not that they are both dedicated to the composer’s Scottish pupil and admirer Jane Stirling nor even that the first is one of the shortest and the second one of the longest, although duration does have something to do with it. The point is that the Nocturne in F minor is probably the most popular in the series - mainly because it is, for the most part, so accessible to pianists of modest technique - while the Nocturne in E flat is surely the most inspired and perhaps also the most difficult. The latter 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 a kind of counterpoint which, having everything to do with melodic imagination and nothing to do with academic precedence, is unique to Chopin.

Sonata in B flat minor, Op.35

Grave - doppio movimento

Scherzo

Marche funèbre: lento

Presto

Robert Schumann has never been forgiven for finding “something repulsive” in the third movement of Chopin’s Piano Sonata in B flat minor. But he did have the perception to realize that this is no ordinary slow movement and that there is, in fact, something anomalous about it. Although he could not have known it, the Marche funèbre was written two years before the rest of the sonata as a separate work - to commemorate, so they say, the anniversary of the Warsaw rising. The other three movements were designed to fit round it: “I am composing a sonata in B flat minor which will have in it the funeral march you already know,” Chopin wrote to a friend from Nohant in 1839.

One reason why the Marche funèbre has survived its subsequent misuse - at the hands of both church organists and overimaginative pianists - is that it is so thoroughly and so carefully integrated with the other three movements: when the sonata is performed complete, it relates more to its context than to its extraneous associations. The falling seventh in the first of the four Grave bars at the beginning of the work is not only an appropriately grim opening gesture but also the thematic cell from which much of the subsequent melodic material is derived. The agitated first subject not only relates to the falling seventh but also anticipates the tragedy implicit in the funeral march that comes later. Chopin is not prepared to shut out the light at this stage, however, and it is not the first subject - he omits it from the recapitulation - but the more lyrical second subject which assumes the greater importance in the construction, bringing about the B flat major ending of the movement.

This same lyrical inspiration illuminates the G flat major trio section of the second movement. But this time the demons which persecute the E flat minor first section return in full-scale vehemence and, although the trio section is briefly recalled, the ending in the relative major is distinctly uneasy. Schumann felt that, after this “bold, intelligent and imaginative” second movement, “an adagio in D flat, say, would have had an immeasurably more beautiful effect” than the “still more sombre funeral march” which actually does follow - and which, of course, is unquestionably appropriate in a context so thoughtfully prepared to accommodate both its ceremonial B flat minor outer sections and its consolatory but still sorrowful middle section in D flat major.

There is no consolation of any kind in the ghostly flight of bare octave triplets which, exclusively, haunt the Presto last movement. Schumann said it is “more mockery than music.” Mendelssohn couldn’t understand it at all. For Chopin, who simply described it as “a short finale of about three pages…the left hand chattering unisono with the right hand,” there was apparently nothing very special about this extraordinary adventure in dry textures, sotto voce dynamics and fugitive harmonies.

Twenty-four Preludes, Op.28

No.1 in C major

No.2 in A minor

No.3 in G major

No.4 in E minor

No.5 in D major

No.6 in B minor

No.7 in A major

No.8 in F sharp minor

No.9 in E major

No.10 in C sharp minor

No.11 in B major

No.12 in G sharp minor

No.13 in F sharp major

No.14 in E flat minor

No.15 in D flat major

No.16 in B flat minor

No.17 in A flat major

No.18 in F minor

No.19 in E flat major

No.20 in C minor

No.21 in B flat major

No.22 in G minor

No.23 in F major

No.24 in D minor

Chopin completed his Twenty-four Preludes, Op.28, between November 1838 and February 1839 when he was staying in Majorca with George Sand and her children. It was a holiday which - as winter set in, as his piano failed to arrive, and as his health deteriorated - proved not to be the idyll it ought to have been. So much romantic literature has been written about Chopin at this time, coughing blood and banished by Majorcan ignorance to the deserted but supposedly haunted monastery of Valdemosa, that the preludes have taken on an additional, retrospective emotional colouring. Most of them were actually written in Paris before he left. No.7, a charming stray from the mazurkas, and No.17 date from as early as 1836, and only Nos.1, 2, 4, 10 and 21 were actually written on the island.

It is conceivable that the exotic sounding No.2 in A minor, with its syncopated ostinato and repeated fragments of melody has something to do with the African aspect of Majorca. As for the famous “Raindrop,” No.15 in D flat, it is difficult to resist the temptation to set it in the monastery at Valdemosa, in spite of the chronological evidence to the contrary. After the efforts of George Sand and Liszt and the romantic biographers, however, the pathological aspect of the preludes does not need to be stressed here. What is more significant is that in this “cell shaped like a tall coffin,” beneath the “enormous vaulting covered with dust,” on that legendary “old square grubby box with a leaden candle stick and a little candle” was a copy of Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues. They more than anything else are the inspiration of Chopin’s 24 Preludes in 24 keys. The “raindrops” of Prelude No.15 in D flat major are already there in the repeated notes of the Prelude in C sharp major in Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Slightly alter the rhythm of Bach’s C major Prelude in Book 1 and there is Chopin’s “feverish” No.1 in C major. The continuous semiquaver figuration of Chopin’s No.5 in D minor, crossed by a fragment of melody in conflicting rhythm, the alternating runs and cadences of No.10 in C sharp minor, the radiant right-hand arpeggios in No.23 in F major are all anticipated in the Preludes in corresponding keys in Bach’s Book 1.

The Bach-inspired preludes are usually those which most resemble the technical studies of Op.10 and Op.25. Many of the others are studies in expression, perhaps even sketches for other works, like the flight of bare octaves crossing No.14 in E flat minor in a triplet figuration anticipating the last movement of the Sonata in B flat minor. There is an alternative funeral march in No.20 in C minor and an embryonic scherzo in No.22 in G minor. No.17 could be an experiment with the gondoliera form which he later developed even more impressively in the Barcarolle, Op.60. Nocturnes occur regularly, as in No.13 in F sharp major, the melodic style of which seems to owe something to Liszt, though the derivation here is not as clear as the Schumann influence in No.18 in F minor and Beethoven’s Appassionata melody in No.24 in D minor.

Gerald Larner©