The Chopin Berceuse (which is the French word for cradle-song) is a most
unique as well as most ideally beautiful composition, standing alone in
all piano literature, as regards its form and harmonic structure, the
only one of its species. It is beyond all question or comparison, the
finest cradle-song ever written for the piano, an exceptionally perfect
example of that rare blending of spontaneous genius and mechanical
ingenuity, for which Chopin was so preëminent, resulting in a work
matchless in its originality, its suggestive realism, its delicacy of
finish, and its poetic content. An organ point on D flat, which is its
only bass note, sustained throughout the entire composition, and a
couplet of the simplest chords, the tonic and dominant seventh,
alternating back and forth in a swinging, rocking motion, form the
accompaniment, continued practically without change, from first measure
to last, portraying naturally, easily, yet unmistakably, the soothing
monotony of the rockaby movement. The left hand may be said to rock the
cradle throughout the whole composition, while in the soft, continually
intertwining melody in the right hand, like an endless, infolding circle
of maternal love, we find the lullaby song of the mother, sung as she
sits there in the hush of the twilight, rocking her little one to sleep.
Around and over this melody Chopin has flung, with his own inimitable
delicacy, a silver lace-work of embellishment, falling soft and light as
the moonlight spray from fountains in fairyland, as through the
idealizing summer haze, half veiling a distant landscape, we seem to
catch dim glimpses of the dream-pictures, the fleeting fancies, the
changing phantasmagoria of prophetic visions, that drift through the
brain of the mother as she sits there in the gathering dusk, waiting for
the little eyes to be tightly closed, and wondering vaguely to herself
on what scenes they will open in the far future years.
Slower and gentler grows the motion of the cradle, softer and lower the
lullaby song, further and further the dream pictures drift into the
shadows, until at last the wings of slumber are folded about the little
one. Silence reigns. The mother’s daily task of loving ministry is ended
and she, too, may rest. The two lingering closing chords, soft and slow,
suggest the moment when she rises from the cradle and spreads her hands
in silent benediction over the sleeping child.
Infinite tenderness and delicacy are needed for the interpretation of
this composition; a tone like violet velvet, and a light, fluent finger
technic, to which its really extreme difficulties seem like dainty play.