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Part 9: Night and Its Melancholy Mysteries - The Nocturnes (Ch. IX)

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Part 9 of chopin-the-man-and-his-music (Chapter IX: Night and Its Melancholy Mysteries - The Nocturnes).

Question this unit answers

What did Chopin actually do to the nocturne — a form he inherited rather than invented — and which of the twenty-odd pieces survive critical scrutiny once the sentimental performance tradition around them is stripped away?

Key terms

  • Nocturne — the night-piece genre Huneker treats as Chopin’s most admired and most unequal body of work; he counts the sets Op. 9 through Op. 62 plus two posthumous pieces.
  • John Field — Irish pianist, pupil and friend of Clementi, credited as creator of the nocturne form and Chopin’s acknowledged model.
  • Formal grouping (Niecks’ system) — the classificatory move by which the Berceuse (Op. 57) and Barcarolle (Op. 60) are counted as nocturnes despite their titles.
  • Ornament — Ehlert’s central category: decoration that is not applied to the music but constitutes it (“the Chopin nocturne is a dramatized ornament”).
  • Mode masculine — Huneker’s label for the heroic, unsentimental Chopin found in the C sharp minor and C minor nocturnes.
  • Basso ostinato — the unchanging tonic-dominant bass of the Berceuse over which the variations are built.
  • Doppio movemento — the faster middle sections of Op. 15 No. 2 and Op. 48 No. 1, whose tempo marking Huneker thinks should not be taken literally.
  • Programme reading — the critical habit (Kleczynski, Kullak) of attaching narrative scenes to the nocturnes, which Huneker mocks while still using imagery himself.
  • Music en sourdine — muted music; Huneker’s Verlaine-derived term for the nocturnes’ proper acoustic register.

Propositions

  1. Field, not Chopin, created the nocturne; Chopin’s contribution was to ennoble the inherited form with “dramatic breadth, passion and even grandeur” (Ch. IX).
  2. The nocturnes are simultaneously Chopin’s most admired works and, in several instances, his weakest — popularity and quality diverge here more than anywhere else in his output (Ch. IX).
  3. Field’s criticism (“a talent of the hospital”) contains real truth: Chopin is morbidly sad and complaining in many nocturnes (Ch. IX).
  4. Part of the nocturnes’ reputation for lushness is an artifact of performance, not composition — more vigor, quicker tempo and a less languishing touch would rescue them (Ch. IX).
  5. Calling the nocturnes “feminine” is psychologically false as a gendered judgment; the poetic side of all men of genius is feminine, and in Chopin it was merely over-emphasized (Ch. IX).
  6. The two summit nocturnes are the C sharp minor (Op. 27 No. 1) and the C minor (Op. 48 No. 1); the C minor is “the noblest nocturne of them all,” a miniature music drama (Ch. IX).
  7. The Barcarolle is a nocturne on a larger canvas, and the Berceuse is pure ornamental sophistication — hence both belong in the nocturne group (Ch. IX).
  8. The nocturnes are chamber-scale music: they should seldom be played in public, and never in a large hall (Ch. IX).

Arguments

Against Field-worship and against Chopin-worship at once. Huneker sets Field’s “naive and idyllic” nocturnes against Chopin’s “too bejewelled,” “too lugubrious,” “Asiatic” ones — the conservatory versus the open air. But he refuses the reactionary conclusion: he quotes Rellstab’s famous cayenne-pepper attack at length precisely in order to dismiss it, answering that “while Field was often commonplace, Chopin never was” and preferring Davison’s verdict that Chopin instinctively avoids the stale cadence and the trite progression.

Diagnosis as criticism. The recurring judgment is medical rather than formal. The pieces “seem to be suffering from anaemia”; the C sharp minor’s psychological tension borders “on a pathological condition”; the Tuberose Nocturne is “faint with a sick, rich odor.” Weakness in Chopin is figured as illness, strength as health and heroism — which is how Huneker can rank the C minor and C sharp minor highest: they are “free from mawkishness.”

Ornament as substance (via Ehlert). Huneker delegates the theoretical claim to Ehlert: Chopin did not buy his ornament from a jeweller but designed it, was “the first to surround a note with diamond facets,” and made the nocturne a dramatized ornament — so that even the veil hiding the ground thought is itself an ornament. This reframes decoration from a flaw into the genre’s organ of expression, and lets Huneker praise the Berceuse as “the very sophistication of the art of musical ornamentation” without contradicting his complaints about over-decoration elsewhere.

Performance tradition as the real defendant. Repeatedly the fault is located in players and editors, not the text: pianists take Op. 37 No. 2 too fast then too slowly and turn a poem into an etude; the crescendo and con forza in Op. 27 No. 2’s cadenza is “obviously erroneous”; Gutmann reports Chopin forgot to mark an increased tempo in Op. 37 No. 1; strict obedience to Op. 48 No. 1’s doppio movemento yields “inartistic precipitation.” The nocturnes need rescuing from their interpreters.

Programme-mocking that still traffics in images. Kleczynski’s Venetian corpse is dismissed as melodramatic and his “celestial harps” draw the aside about “the squeak of the old romantic machinery” — yet Huneker’s own descriptions (Poe’s “Ulalume,” a shroud woven in one’s lifetime, modulations from pigeon egg blue to Nile green) are no less pictorial. His implicit defense is that mood-images are legitimate where plot-narratives are not.

Evidence

  • Chronology as spine. Op. 9 (Jan 1833) through Op. 62 (Sept 1846), plus the 1828 piece published by Fontana as Op. 72 No. 2 and the C sharp minor discovered and published in 1895.
  • Contemporary criticism quoted directly: Rellstab in the Iris on Op. 9 No. 2 (“We implore Mr. Chopin to return to nature”); Davison’s block encomium on the early works; Schumann on Op. 37’s “greater simplicity of decoration and more quiet grace.”
  • Testimony from Chopin’s circle. Gutmann on the C sharp minor’s molto piu lento — Chopin said play it as recitative: “A tyrant commands… and the other asks for mercy.” Chopin’s own withdrawn programme for the G minor, Op. 15 No. 3: “After Hamlet,” changed to “Let them guess for themselves.”
  • Eyewitness performance evidence. Rubinstein sustaining the held F for three bars in Op. 15 No. 3 by some inaudible means, swelling and diminishing “as if the instrument were an organ”; Tausig playing the Barcarolle for de Lenz, who had disliked the score and then regretted the piece was not longer.
  • Textual variants. Kullak, Fontana and Klindworth disagree on a note in the last line of Op. 32 No. 1; Mertke prints original-versus-Klindworth readings of the Berceuse and explicates Op. 62 No. 1’s chain trills.
  • Provenance document. The Ascherberg & Co. note on the 1895 C sharp minor nocturne: Chopin’s handwriting in facsimile, authentication by Balakireff, first public performance at the 1894 Chopin Commemoration at Zelazowa Wola, the manuscript presumed lost in the 1863 sacking of the Zamojski Palace, quotations from the F minor Concerto and “Maiden’s Wish” for his sister Louise. Huneker prints it in full and still calls the piece “hardly a treasure trove.”
  • Errors caught in the sources: Niecks writes “C sharp minor” where he means the F sharp minor, Op. 48 No. 2.

Quotes

  • “He has a talent of the hospital.” (Ch. IX) — Field on Chopin
  • “they seem to be suffering from anaemia” (Ch. IX)
  • “Where Field smiles, Chopin makes a grinning grimace” (Ch. IX) — Rellstab
  • “We implore Mr. Chopin to return to nature.” (Ch. IX) — Rellstab
  • “The Chopin nocturne is a dramatized ornament.” (Ch. IX) — Ehlert
  • “a veil, too, can be an ornament” (Ch. IX) — Ehlert
  • “She wove her shroud, and wore it in her lifetime.” (Ch. IX) — Scotch proverb
  • “There is unhealthy power in this nocturne” (Ch. IX) — on Op. 27 No. 1
  • “this is the noblest nocturne of them all” (Ch. IX) — on Op. 48 No. 1
  • “the Chopin of the mode masculine” (Ch. IX)
  • “The Barcarolle is a nocturne painted on a large canvas, with larger brushes.” (Ch. IX)
  • “they are essentially for the twilight, for solitary enclosures” (Ch. IX)
  • Field as model, and the cantabile lineage. Huneker’s Field material connects directly to the pedagogical record in chopin-pianist-and-teacher-as-seen-by-his-pupils: Chopin taught singing tone, legato and the imitation of the voice, and prescribed Field’s music to pupils. Where Huneker treats Field-likeness as a limitation in Op. 9 No. 2 and Op. 32 No. 2 (“a reversion to the Field type”), the teaching sources treat the same quality as the technical foundation. Worth reconciling: is “Field-like” a diagnosis of shallowness or a description of correct touch?
  • Performance instruction versus critical judgment. Huneker’s prescription — faster, firmer, less languishing — is a claim about how the notes should sound, and the pupils’ testimony is the better evidence for it than his own taste. Gutmann’s recitative instruction for Op. 48 No. 2 is the strongest bridge between the two books.
  • Popularity as evidence against quality. The chapter twice uses frequent concert performance as a mark against a piece (Op. 27 No. 2 gives “a surfeit of sixths and thirds”; Op. 55 No. 2 “has also the merit of being seldom heard”). This is a critic’s reflex, not an argument, and it sits awkwardly beside his insistence that Chopin is never commonplace.
  • Genre boundaries. Admitting the Berceuse and Barcarolle as nocturnes on formal grounds (following Niecks) is a methodological choice worth flagging — it makes the nocturne a texture rather than a title, which is also how Huneker can read a “true barcarolle vein” inside Op. 37 No. 2.
  • The feminine note. Huneker’s rejection of “feminine” as a psychological category while retaining it as an aesthetic one is a period tension worth reading against the reception history in later chapters of the same book.

Open questions

  • Which of Huneker’s rankings survive modern scholarship? He calls Op. 9 No. 1 unjustly neglected, Op. 32 No. 2 tiresome, and the posthumous E minor “weak and uninteresting” — how do current editions and recordings treat these?
  • Is the 1895 C sharp minor nocturne (the “Lento con gran espressione,” KK IVa/16) authentic, and is it the piece Tausig described to Joseffy as belonging to Chopin’s “best period”? Huneker leaves the question open.
  • Whose text is right in Op. 32 No. 1’s penultimate line — Fontana’s F sharp or Kullak/Klindworth’s G? What do the autograph sources say?
  • Did Chopin really forget to mark the tempo increase in Op. 37 No. 1’s chorale, as Gutmann claimed, or is that a pupil’s rationalization of a passage he found dull?
  • Huneker’s claim that the nocturnes fail in large halls is empirical. Is it about dynamic range, pedal wash, or the instrument of 1840 versus the concert grand?

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