Page 175 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

that is usually upstairs here), undresses me, gets me to bed, leaves the light; and I am free to breathe and dream till it is time to begin all over again.
In a letter from Vienna to Jan Matuszyński in 1830:
After dinner black coffee is drunk in the best Kaffeehaus; that is the custom here. . . . Then I pay visits, return home at dusk, curl my hair, change my shoes and go out for the evening; about ten, eleven or sometimes midnight,—never later—I come back, play, weep, read, look, laugh, go to bed, put the light out and always dream about some
of you.
So it would seem that Chopin wrote his music during his work day, in between visits from language masters and students. Professional artists don’t need inspiration to com- pose; they schedule genius like a haircut. Chopin didn’t need the night for his Nocturnes. And yet he was only the third composer to pay lavish attention to the form.
Paris is the city of night; gas lamps made it inviting; there was very little street crime in the 1800s, at least in the better arrondissements. And the countryside around it would be entirely dark. So nocturnes reflected a different world from the one we know, and maybe we can absorb a little of the reflected moonlight of the 19th century from the reflective interpretations of Ingrid Fliter.
James Attlee, in his book, Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight, discusses how human beings in urban environ- ments are “devolving,” losing their ability to relate to the natural world, a circumstance which we in Montana are ideally situated to avoid. Scheduling Chopin’s Night Music is a reminder to us all of a world of dreams which we want to treasure and preserve.
It is not just the imaginary angels, Nabokov’s “misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs” who restore us in the night; it is moonlight itself which triggers temporal structures in the cycles of complex organisms on which they base their lives; we all apparently need the structure of night and day to in- tegrate our own biologies into the universe. Attlee describes
the freedom of the night as seen by many writers, such as Goethe strolling in Naples:
I can’t begin to tell you the glory of a night by full moon when we strolled through the streets and squares to the endless promenade of the Chiaia, and then walked up and down the sea- shore. I was quite overwhelmed by a feeling of infinite space.
Gothic literature, such as Dracula (1897), makes much
of moonlight, as does the poetry of Verlaine, on which Debussy based his Clair de Lune of 1890. Clair de Lune
was in turn a new take on Chopin’s Nocturnes, which
were written between 1827 and 1846. As John Ruskin pointed out one night in 1844, moonlight over Mont Blanc obscures as much as it reveals, as the snow-covered slopes disappear into each other.
2018 Summer Season 175