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.
Again it is evening and Chopin is alone, but this time it is in his own familiar, cozy room, where the perfect appointments and tasteful arrangement tell of loving feminine hands, glad to minister to every fancy of his delicately fastidious nature. The scent of flowers floats in through the open window, and mingled with it the low voices of friends in the garden below. He watches the play of lights and shadows among the swaying branches of a tall, graceful willow tree just outside his casement, the vaguely outlined, fleecy, floating gray clouds, ghosts of dead storms, silently passing on into the infinite unknown spaces of the sky. He listens to the night wind sighing among the tree-tops, to the good-nights of sleepy birds, to the vesper bell of a distant village, and embodies his dreamy impressions in the first movement of this nocturne, with its wavering, undulating murmurous effects, and its faint, intermittent melodic suggestions, like the half-remembered music of a dream.
The second movement, twice alternating with the first, though in different keys, is distinctly a slumber song in rhythm and mood, a restful, gentle, soothing lullaby to the composer’s own weary heart, to his momentarily slumbering griefs, and forebodings; peaceful, tender, pensively sad at times, but entirely free from that ultra-bitterness and gloom which color most of his later works. His Polish biographer calls this the most beautiful melody Chopin ever wrote, and it reminds us strongly of Tennyson’s lines in the same mood:
“There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentler on the spirit lies
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.”
An extremely light but fluent legato touch, and an ethereal delicacy and grace of conception are demanded for the first movement, and the ever-present curve of beauty should be indicated in each little passage of three measures. Let the player imagine a brightly tinted feather ball, tossed lightly into the air and fluttering softly and slowly to earth again.
For the second movement, a singing lyric tone, a subdued warmth of color, and a steady, reposeful, rocking rhythm are a necessity, and the lullaby mood should be kept in mind.
| LISZT | ||
| 1811 | 1886 | |