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Updated: June 23, 2025
She herself took to playing the less difficult of the Chopin nocturnes with a languorous over-accentuation of their softness which she was careful to keep from the ears of old Reinhardt. But one evening he came in, unheard, listened to her performance of the B-flat minor nocturne with a frown, and pulled her away from the piano before she had finished.
But if Nature had willed him so, I do not think we should have had the Nocturnes, which are clearly the outcome of a highly-strung, bloodless nature whetted on the whetstone of its own weakness to an exasperated sense of volatile colour and evanescent light.
Both have the heroic quality, both are free from mawkishness and are of the greater Chopin, the Chopin of the mode masculine. Niecks makes a valuable suggestion: "In playing these nocturnes op. 48 there occurred to me a remark of Schumann's, when he reviewed some nocturnes by Count Wielhorski.
The scent of the sea came through the window, and the air was like a cordial it intoxicated; and looking across the bay one seemed to be looking on the very thing that Whistler had sought for in his Nocturnes, and that Steer had nearly caught in that picture of children paddling, that dim, optimistic blue that allures and puts the world behind one, the dream of the opium-eater, the phrase of the syrens in "Tannhaeuser," the phrase which begins like a barcarolle; but the accompaniment tears underneath until we thrill with expectation.
Chopin loved the night and its soft mysteries as much as did Robert Louis Stevenson, and his nocturnes are true night pieces, some with agitated, remorseful countenance, others seen in profile only, while many are whisperings at dusk. Most of them are called feminine, a term psychologically false.
Rellstab remarked in 1833 of the Trois Nocturnes, Op. 9, that Chopin, without borrowing directly from Field, copied the latter's melody and manner of accompaniment. There is some truth in this; only the word "copy" is not the correct one. The younger received from the elder artist the first impulse to write in this form, and naturally adopted also something of his manner.
According to Fontana, Chopin composed this piece about 1834. Why did he keep it in his portfolio? I suspect he missed in it, more especially in the middle section, that degree of distinction and perfection of detail which alone satisfied his fastidious taste. Among Chopin's nocturnes some of his most popular works are to be found.
'A tyrant commands' the first two chords he said, 'and the other asks for mercy." Of course Niecks means the F sharp minor, not the C sharp minor Nocturne, op. 48, No. 2, dedicated, with the C minor, to Mlle. L. Duperre. Opus 55, two nocturnes in F minor and E flat major, need not detain us long. The first is familiar. Kleczynski devotes a page or more to its execution.
Yet he would scarcely acknowledge even to himself the possibility of such an appearance as that affirmed by Sir Graham. They drew near to the grave of little Jack, round which the chill winds of night blew gently and the dull voices of the waves sang hushed and murmurous nocturnes. Uniacke was taken by an almost insurmountable inclination to pause, even to turn back.
Out of Shakespeare's sonnets they draw, to their own hurt it may be, the secret of his love and make it their own; they look with new eyes on modern life, because they have listened to one of Chopin's nocturnes, or handled Greek things, or read the story of the passion of some dead man for some dead woman whose hair was like threads of fine gold, and whose mouth was as a pomegranate.
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