Chopin: Fantasie Impromptu, Op. 66
Among other manuscripts found on Chopin’s writing-table after his death was the original of this composition, complete in every detail, but written across the back, in his own trembling hand, were the words, “To be destroyed when I am gone.”
It is difficult to account for this injunction, except upon the theory that he feared that both the form and the content of the work were too original, too subtle and complex, and too wholly unfamiliar to the musical world of his day, to be readily comprehended, and that it would either suffer from incorrect rendition or be condemned and ignored. So he preferred a quick death by fire for this child of his sad later days, to a slow death by mutilation or cruel neglect.
Fortunately the request was disregarded by his friends. The work was published and has become one of his most beloved, as it is one of his most faultlessly beautiful compositions. The peculiarity of form referred to is familiar to all who have attempted the study of this impromptu. The whole first movement, consisting of a continuous rapid figure of four notes in the right hand against three in the left, is one of the most unusual and difficult musical problems to solve satisfactorily, and only to be mastered by long and special practice—a case, as I have often said, where it is well to remember the biblical injunction, “let not thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth.” But when smoothly played, it produces just that sinuous, interwoven, flowing effect which the composer desired, and which could not have been obtained, in such perfection, in any other way.
The content of this composition, like that of many of Chopin’s smaller works, is purely emotional, like a strictly lyric poem, by his literary counterpart Tennyson, for instance; it is a wholly subjective expression of a mental state, an emotional condition, not of any scene or any action. It touches the minor key and sounds the plaintive harmonies to which his heart-strings were tuned and vibrating at the time when it was written. It voices a soft summer twilight mood, half sad, half tender, full of vague regrets, of indefinite longings and aspirations, of fluttering hope, never destined to be realized, and bright fleeting memories that rise and pass, dimmed by intervening clouds of sorrow and disappointment, like the shifting forms and hues of a kaleidoscope seen through a misty glass, or the luminous phantoms of dead joys and shadowy suggestions of the “might have been,” against the gray background of a sad present and an uncertain, promiseless future. It is a strange, delicately complex mood, a mood of life’s sunset hour, colored by the pathetic glories of the dying day, and the depressing, yet tranquilizing shadows of the coming night—a mood well-nigh impossible to express, but perfectly embodied in the music.
The following simple little verses, in which, as will be seen, has been made a somewhat free use of the suggestive symbolism of nature, may serve to illustrate, though by no means to the writer’s satisfaction, his conception of the artistic significance of this composition:
THE FANTASIE IMPROMPTU.
The sigh of June through the swaying trees,
The scent of the rose, new blown, on the breeze,
The sound of waves on a distant strand,