Part 10

The third represents an evening scene, with the setting sun kindling to crimson and gold the spires and picturesque whitewashed cottages of the village of Majorca, a mile away across the little bay, while the gentle breeze, like the sigh of departing day, brings the sound of silvery bells from the little village church ringing the vesper chimes.

The fifth and sixth embody the same mood, in an almost identically similar setting. They may be effectively combined into one picture of a dark, depressing, late autumnal day; a day of gray skies and leaden sea; of heavy, windless calm, the calm of exhaustion and utter weariness, with the low, sad rain dripping monotonously upon the roof like the tears of the gods for a dying world. In one, the melody expressing the element of human sorrow is in the soprano, plaintively, touchingly, sweetly pathetic. In the other, it is placed in the lower register of Chopin’s favorite orchestral instrument, the ’cello, which it reproduces, throbbing with a more passionate intensity, a more poignant pain. But in general character and treatment the two belong together.

No. 8 tells of the gay carol of the birds at dawn, floating in at the open windows of Chopin’s chamber. No. 17 is a rustic dance of the Majorcan peasants. No. 24, the last, is a graphic description of a tropical storm with the flash of lightning and the ominous roll of the thunder literally portrayed.

Space does not permit of a detailed analysis of all the numbers, but each has its special character and suggestive import, and is a picture of some episode or mood during that winter’s sojourn on Majorca.

Chopin: Waltz, A Flat, Op. 42

Every dance, the waltz included, is based upon and adapted to some particular dance movement. All its effects, whether of melody, harmony, rhythm, or embellishment, are carefully calculated by the composer to meet the requirements of this special movement, to conform to and express its general character and be governed by its usual rate of speed. Each of these dance movements embodies in itself some peculiar quality or characteristic, such as stately grace in the minuet, martial pomp in the polonaise, impetuous vivacity in the galop, which the music must indicate and supplement. The Chopin waltzes are no exception to this rule. They are distinctly and preëminently waltzes; and though of course not for actual dance purposes, they are intended as idealized tone-pictures of the waltz, and of ball-room scenes and experiences.

The one in question, Op. 42 in A flat, is planned upon a broader scale, contains more variety, and taxes more thoroughly the resources of the accomplished pianist than any other work of Chopin in this vein. Its tender, floating melodies, bright, delicate passage work, and swinging, swaying rhythms are replete with all that eloquent, gliding grace, that arch coquetry, that passionate warmth of mood, which we so invariably associate with the festive scenes,

“Where youth and pleasure meet To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.”

Lights sparkle, delicate draperies are afloat, like perfumed clouds, upon the languid air, bright eyes scintillate with mirth or soften with emotion, and

“All goes merry as a marriage bell.”

And yet throughout all there runs a half-hidden undertone that tells of deeper, sterner thought and far intenser feeling; that tells of dark forebodings, of distant alarms, of sudden trumpet calls; so that the work in its entirety cannot but seem to us the counterpart in music of that familiar, almost hackneyed, but immortal word-picture of Byron, describing the great ball on the eve of the battle of Waterloo, to whose thunderous music the fate of nations was reversed, like the steps of the dancers in a ball-room, and France changed monarchs as a lady shifts her partners.

The somber trio strain, about the middle of the composition, suggests to us “Brunswick’s fated chieftain,” who sat apart and watched the dancers and listened to the revelry with “Death’s prophetic ear.” Later, where the rhythmic pulsation of the waltz is abruptly and violently interrupted in the midst of its flowing cadences, by a strong emphasized G natural F, repeated twice by both hands in unison, we are forcibly reminded of the line—

“But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!”

After a moment of consternation and suspense, the waltz movement proceeds, appearing almost flippant by contrast, and seeming to say, like the verse which follows,

“On with the dance, let joy be unconfined!”

Lastly, the breathless, impetuous finale indicates the “hurrying to and fro,” the “mounting in hot haste,” and “marshalling in arms,” with which the dance broke up at midnight, as cavaliers rushed from the ball-room to the battlefield. Both Chopin, the greatest musician of Poland, and Mickiewicz, her greatest poet, were powerfully impressed by the personality and poetry of Lord Byron, and there is no doubt that our composer had the stanzas of the contemporaneous English writer in mind in the creation of this work.

The first duty of the performer in rendering this composition should be to suggest irresistibly to the listeners both the mood and movement of the waltz, and to force them to feel, as far as may be, the elastic swing of the rhythm and the warm, voluptuous mood of the music. The tone quality employed should constantly change to suit the contrasting colors of the different strains; now warmly lyric, now sparkling and vibrant, at times deeply somber, and again strikingly dramatic and declamatory.

As to tempo, I would caution the player against an extreme rate of speed. Remember that the usual waltz step is, approximately at least, our guide in choosing the proper movement. I am aware that many pianists, of the greatest skill and reputation, are guilty of the cardinal error of playing one of these beautiful poetic little compositions of Chopin’s at _prestissimo_ tempo, so as to display their phenomenal finger dexterity at the expense of all musical and artistic truth; so fast, indeed, that even if the notes were all struck with accuracy, which is by no means always the case, its graceful rhythmic swing and all its melodic and harmonic effects are utterly lost, leaving nothing but an incoherent, formless, purposeless whirlwind of tone, as dry and unlovely as the eddies of dust in a September gale, suggesting neither the mood nor movement of a waltz.

Chopin’s Nocturnes

In derivation and general significance the term nocturne coincides with our English word nocturnal. It is music appertaining to the night, a night piece, suited to and expressing its usually quiet, dreamful, pensive mood, and frequently portraying some nocturnal scene or episode. The name nocturne was originally used as synonymous with that of serenade, and they were virtually identical in character. But in later times it has come to have a much broader application, and to-day, though every serenade is of course a nocturne, all nocturnes are by no means serenades.

The serenade is a real or imaginary song of love, and presupposes a fair listener at a lattice window and a lover singing beneath the stars, to the accompaniment of a harp, mandolin, or guitar. The nocturne may legitimately embody any phase of human emotion or experience, or any aspect of inanimate nature, which can rationally be conceived of as appropriately emanating from or environed by nocturnal conditions.

It must not be supposed that this vein of composition was Chopin’s only or even his most important field of activity. To judge him exclusively by his nocturnes and waltzes is precisely like judging Shakespeare solely by his sonnets. But it was a vein in which, owing to his peculiarly poetic temperament and fertile imagination, he far excelled all other writers, no less in the quality than in the number and variety of his creations.

Chopin: Nocturne in E Flat, Op. 9, No. 2

This perhaps is the easiest and certainly the best known of Chopin’s nocturnes. Scarcely a student but has played it at one time or another. In fact, it has been worn well-nigh to shreds; yet still retains its simple, tender charm, if approached in the proper spirit. It is replete with melodic beauty and warm harmonic coloring, and is an excellent study in tone-production and shading, as well as a model of symmetrical form. It was one of his early works, and the glow of first youth still lingers about it, in spite of its over-familiarity and much abuse. As a teaching-piece it sometimes surprises the weary teacher with a waft of unexpected freshness, like the fleeting odor from an old and much-used school-book in which violets have been pressed.

It is a pure lyric, a love-song without words, but to which a dreamily tender poetic text can easily be imagined and supplied; and the very evident suggestion of the harp or guitar in its accompanying chords facilitates the effort and brightens the poetic effect. So far as I can learn, it has no definite local background, either in fact or tradition; no special place or persons to which it refers. It is an abstract idea treated subjectively, the embodied emotional reflex of imaginary conditions. The scene is a garden—any garden, so it be beautiful, rich with the vivid luxuriance of the South, fragrant with the breath of sleeping flowers, with the South summer-night hanging fondly over it, and the summer stars glittering above. The melody is the song of the ideal troubadour, pouring out his heart to the night and his listening lady, while the accompanying chords are lightly swept from vibrant strings by the practised fingers of the minstrel. The cadenza at the close is intended as a mere delicate ripple of liquid brilliancy, as if the moon, suddenly breaking through a veil of evening mist, had flooded the scene with a rain of silvery radiance.

Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 27, No. 2

This nocturne, though one of Chopin’s most intrinsically beautiful compositions for the piano, is even more frequently heard upon the violin. It has been, for decades, a favorite lyric number with all the leading violinists of the world, and adapts itself admirably to the resources and peculiar character of this instrument.

For this there is an excellent reason, far other than mere chance. On a certain evening in the early thirties were assembled in an elegant Parisian salon a company of the musical and literary _élite_ of the French capital, to meet several foreign celebrities and enjoy one of those rare opportunities for intellectual and artistic converse and companionship, of which we read with envious longing, but which are practically unknown in our busy, prosaic age.

There were present Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, the latter then in Paris on a brief visit, besides many local musicians of note, including some of the professors of the Conservatoire, also George Sand, Heinrich Heine, Alfred De Musset, with some lesser literary lights, and a brilliant gathering of social leaders. It was an evening long to be remembered for the sparkling wit and repartee, flashed back and forth from these brilliant intellects, like the rays of light from the glittering jewels of the ladies, for the occasional bursts of glowing eloquence and poetic thought from the profounder minds, and especially for the music, which was plentiful and of the best.

It may have been on this very occasion that Rossini made his famous, but most unfriendly, hit at the expense of Liszt’s marvelous powers of improvisation, which he, Rossini, was inclined seemingly to doubt. Liszt was being pressed to play and to improvise, and Rossini called out across the room: “Yes, my friend, do improvise that beautiful thing that you improvised at Madam —’s last Friday, and at Lord So and So’s the week before.”

In the course of the evening a local violinist of prominence played for the company a new composition of his own, a sweet, long-sustained cantilena, with a more involved second movement in double stopping. When he had finished and the applause had subsided, one of the ladies was heard to remark, “What a pity that the piano is incapable of these effects! It is brilliant, dramatic, resourceful, what you will; but only the violin can stir the heart in that way.”

Chopin rose, bowing with one of his equivocal smiles, half-sad, half-playfully mocking, stepped to the piano and improvised this nocturne, a perfect reproduction of all the best violin effects, cantilena and all, including the double-stopping in the second theme, with a certain warmth and poetry added, which were all his own. Of course, it was afterward finished and perfected in detail, but in substance it was the same as the D flat nocturne which we all know so well and which the violinists, though most of them unconscious of the reason, have singled out as specially adapted to their instrument.

The player should keep the violin and its effects in mind in rendering it, the lingering, songful, string quality of tone in the melody, the smooth legato, the leisurely, well-rounded embellishments; and the tempo should never be hurried. It may be well to say, in this connection, that in these Chopin nocturnes, and in all other lyric compositions, the embellishments, grace-notes, and the like should be made to conform to the general mood and character of the rest of the music. Symmetry and fitting proportions are among the primal laws of all art.

In a Liszt rhapsody, a cadenza should flash like a rocket, but in a Chopin nocturne it should glide with easy, undulating grace, should float like a wind-blown ribbon, a fallen rose-leaf. Too often we hear the ornamental passages in a lyric played as if they were wholly irrelevant matter, dropped in there by accident out of some other entirely different compositions,—a bit of vain, noisy display in the midst of a poetic dream, breaking instead of enhancing its charm, utterly incongruous. Harmonize the embellishments with the subject! Fit the trimming to the fabric!

Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 32, No. 1

Although technically easy and thoroughly musical, this little work is strangely enough but little played. It is technically no harder than the Op. 9 referred to, though it requires more intensity and stronger contrasts in its treatment.

It is singular that a comparatively simple composition, of such intrinsic merit, by one of the great composers, comprising, as it does, so many attractive elements in such small compass, should be so little used. Possibly, to those not acquainted with its subject, the closing chords, with their sharp, almost painful contrast, and utter dissimilarity to the preceding movement, have seemed incongruous and unintelligible; but, when the theme and purpose of the whole are understood, it is seen in what a masterly manner, and with what simple material, Chopin has produced the most striking dramatic results.

The subject of this nocturne is the same as that of Robert Browning’s later poem, “In a Gondola”; an episode to be found in the annals of Venice, when, at the height of her pride and power, she was nominally a republic, but from the large legislative body elected exclusively from among the nobility, an inner, higher circle of forty was chosen, and they, in turn, selected from their number, by secret ballot, the mysterious, potent Council of Ten, gruesomely famous in history, who wielded the real power of the State, often for the darkest personal ends, the Doge being little more than a figure-head. Highest and most dreaded of all was the Council of Three, chosen from their own number by the Ten, by an ingenious system of secret ballot so perfect that only those selected knew on whom the choice had fallen, and they did not know each other’s identity. They met at night, in a secret chamber, in which the three tables and three chairs, and even the blocks of marble in the pavement of the floor were symbolically triangular. They entered at the fixed hour, by three separate doors, disguised in black masks and long black cloaks, conferred in whispers only, and their decrees, like those of the Greek Fates, were inexorable and inevitable. Veiled and shielded by mystery, they worked their awful will, from which there was no escape and no appeal.

The story runs that once a beautiful and high-spirited heiress, the daughter of a former Doge, and the special ward of the Council of Three, as the disposal of her hand and fortune was an important State matter, had the courage to brave their prohibition and secretly to welcome the suit and return the love of a young, gallant, but fortuneless knight, who risked his life to obtain their brief, stolen interviews, or to breathe his love in subdued but heart-stirring melody beneath her window. One night, when a great ball at the palace seemed to afford an opportunity for her to escape unnoticed, he came disguised as a gondolier, and for a few sweet moments they were alone together upon the moonlit water.

The first theme of this nocturne suggests the scene in the gondola, with its softly swaying motion as it feels the faint swell of the great sea’s distant heart-throb, while the melodic phrases embody the tender mood of the lovers as if in a sweet, low song. Browning expresses the mood in his opening lines:

“I send my heart up to thee, all my heart, In this my singing; For the stars help me and the sea bears part; The very night is clinging Closer to Venice’s streets to leave one space Above me, whence thy face May light my joyous heart to thee, its dwelling-place.”

The second theme is somewhat more intense, though still subdued. It tells of greater passion and also of deeper sadness, with an occasional passing thrill of suppressed terror. Browning sings it:

“O which were best, to roam or rest? The land’s lap or the water’s breast? To sleep on yellow millet sheaves, Or swim in lucid shadows, just Eluding water-lily leaves. An inch from Death’s black fingers, thrust To lock you, whom release he must; Which life were best on summer eves?”

To which the lady answers:

“Dip your arm o’er the boat-side, elbow deep, As I do; thus; were death so unlike sleep, Caught this way? Death’s to fear from flame or steel, Or poison, doubtless; but from water—feel!”

The last measures of the lyric melody, full of lingering sweetness, are like the parting kiss. Then suddenly, brutally, with the G major chord against the crashing F’s in the bass, the voice of fate breaks the tender spell. Death enters with swift, heart-crushing tread, and his icy hand snatches his victim from the very arms of love; and the closing chords, brief, but impressive, voice the shock, the cry of anguish, and the swift sinking into black despair, which were the lady’s more bitter share in the tragedy. For too soon the time had passed. Their brief happiness had been saddened and softened to deeper, graver tenderness by the knowledge of impending danger, by the ever-recurrent cloud like the passing thought that Browning voices in the line:

“What if the Three should catch at last thy serenader?”

They must return or be detected. Reluctantly he guides the boat back to the landing, and just in the moment of their farewell he is surprised, overpowered, and stabbed to death by waiting assassins, dying in her arms.

The closing of the nocturne as just described is, to my thinking, more dramatic, more realistic, and far stronger than the last lines of Browning’s poem:

“It was ordained to be so, sweet! and best Comes now, beneath thine eyes, upon thy breast. Still kiss me! Care not for the cowards! Care Only to put aside thy beauteous hair My blood will hurt! The Three I do not scorn To death, because they never lived; but I Have lived, indeed, and so (yet one more kiss) can die.”

Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 37, No. 1

Opus 37, No. 1, in G minor, was written during Chopin’s winter sojourn on the island of Majorca already described. On this occasion also the composer had been left alone to occupy himself with his piano, while his more active friends went for a sail on the bay. The sun had disappeared behind a western bank of cloud. The evening shadows were fast closing around him, filling with gloom and mystery the distant recesses of the vast, irregular apartment where he sat, and the columned cloister beyond, which led from the ruined refectory of the monastery to the chapel where the priests and abbots of ten centuries lay entombed. The ruins of a dead past were on every side. The silent presence of Death seemed all about him. He felt that, like the day, his life was swiftly declining, and the mood of the place and the hour was strong upon him. It found utterance in the sorrowfully beautiful, passionately pathetic first melody of this nocturne, with its falling minor phrases, like the cry of a deep but suppressed despair, and its somber, sobbing accompaniment, like the muffled moan of the surf on the adjacent beach. A precisely similar mood is powerfully expressed in Tennyson’s poem “Break, break, break,” especially in the closing lines,

“But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me.”

Suddenly, in the midst of his melancholy reveries, Chopin was seized by one of those deceptive visions, so frequent at that time. The shadowy forms of a procession of dead monks seemed to emerge from beneath the obscure arches of the refectory, in a slow funeral march along the cloister behind him to the chapel, where their evening services were formerly held, solemnly chanting as they passed their _Santo Dio_. This impressive chant, as if sung by a chorus of subdued male voices, is realistically reproduced in the middle movement of the nocturne. The very words _Santo Dio_ are distinctly suggested by each little phrase of four consecutive chords.

When the monks have vanished, and their voices have died away in the distance beneath the echoing vault of the chapel, Chopin recovers himself with a shudder and resumes his sad dreaming, symbolized by a return of the first melody. But just at its close the sun sinks below the western bank, its last rays gleam for a moment on the white sail of the boat just rounding up to the landing. His friends return. His lonely brooding is cheerfully interrupted. His mood brightens and the nocturne ends with an exquisite transition to the major key.

The player should strive in this work for a somber intensity of tone, and should render each phrase of the melody as if the pain expressed were his own, making the undertone of the sobbing sea distinctly apparent in the accompanying chords. In the middle movement, where the monks’ chant is introduced, the imitation of a muffled chorus of male voices should be made deceptively realistic. All the notes of each chord must be pressed, not struck, with a firm but elastic touch, and exactly simultaneously; and each little quadruplet of chords must rise and fall in power, so accented as to enunciate the words _Santo Dio_. This is at once the saddest, the deepest, and the most descriptive, while technically the easiest, of all the Chopin nocturnes.

Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 37, No. 2

Graceful, tender, and cheerful is the general tone of the Nocturne in G major. It was written the following summer after Chopin’s return to France, during a visit of some weeks at Nohant, the beautiful country seat of George Sand, where in the midst of a smiling rural landscape, bright and winning, rather than awe-inspiring, breathing the mild but invigorating air of his beloved France, surrounded by cheerful and congenial companions and by every possible physical comfort, our composer’s health and spirits temporarily revived. To this epoch, brief as it was, we owe some of his most genial and attractive compositions.