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ABOUT THE PROGRAM PETER HALSTEAD
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810–1849) Nocturnes
Chopin’s Nocturnes Revisited
As Simon Callow has suggested, by re-ordering Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the story behind them is revealed. Possibly by changing the traditional numbering of Chopin’s Nocturnes, new profiles are unleashed. Chopin saw a different night than we do, in a different light, if you will.
His night was filled with carriage wheels, the stench of corpses, the miasma of the Seine’s questionable effluvia, and a sky without interference from any motorized urban presence.
His foray into the seamy underground world of trans- vestites in the Bois de Boulogne, thinly masked by the prettified salons given in wainscoted drawing rooms above Baron Haussmann’s broad avenues, was a highly successful attempt to revamp John Field’s eighteen schmaltzy works, generously called by Liszt “half-formed sighs” and “vague Aeolian harmonies.”
Now Chopin’s 21 own fantasies of the night need to be rescued from a performance tradition which barely hears the music because of performance conventions. A vesper or a compline in Gregorian chant was a prayer chanted in the evening or just before midnight, when nocturnes were originally meant to be played. Like tribal masks on the doors of mud huts, such songs were meant to dispel the devil, to exorcise the demons of the day from sleep, the sleep of the righteous when monks spoke to the angels, which restored their faith.
Rudolf Steiner felt that a deep sleep made it possible for humans to touch the angels, to converse with their dead beloveds, to channel the heavens through dreams. Without that energy, the next day would be almost lifeless. We have all felt the exhaustion of a light sleep.
This summer, we will have the Goldberg Variations, meant by Bach to be played by his friend, the harpsichordist Johann Goldberg, to put Johann’s patron, Count Kaiserling, to sleep. We will have Schubert’s incantatory Notturno, referencing the Italian form from which later versions of the nocturne derive. We will have Mompou’s somnolent music, Ravel’s “Noctuelles,” and Aaron J. Kernis’s music
of the spheres: newer versions of Chopin’s night vision. Perhaps we have the need to speak to our angels more than ever.
Chopin’s inventive fantasies have no form at all, although many of them have a wilder midsection, the opposite of the slow movement in a sonata. Chopin was disrupting tradition. Of course, his schizophrenic inversions of classical form have now become their own traditions, and need to be themselves disrupted, in order to regain the stillness of a lost world.
The Nocturnes have a schizophrenic quality because most of them become bored with their soporific dream state and digress into explosions of waking vitality, into energetic variations on the original quieter theme, before this dream of day subsides again into the lilting night of the initial melody, as if the underlying reality of the Parisian world was not day, but night. Artists are creatures of the night, well portrayed in Puccini’s opera La bohème of 1896 and in Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show of 1975. Chopin lived, however, a very disciplined life. He rose at eight, took language lessons at ten, received students until noon, and practiced until two, after which he changed out of his dressing gown, went for walks, and eventually went to dinner. He wrote in 1848:
One has to sit two hours at table with the men, look at them talking and listen to them drink- ing. I am bored to death (I am thinking of one thing and they of another, in spite of all their courtesy and French remarks at table). Then I
go to the drawing-room, where it takes all my efforts to be a little animated—because then
they usually want to hear me—; then my good Daniel carries me up to my bedroom (as you know
174 The Music at Tippet Rise