Opus 37, No. 1, in G minor, was written during Chopin’s winter sojourn
on the island of Majorca already described. On this occasion also the
composer had been left alone to occupy himself with his piano, while his
more active friends went for a sail on the bay. The sun had disappeared
behind a western bank of cloud. The evening shadows were fast closing
around him, filling with gloom and mystery the distant recesses of the
vast, irregular apartment where he sat, and the columned cloister
beyond, which led from the ruined refectory of the monastery to the
chapel where the priests and abbots of ten centuries lay entombed. The
ruins of a dead past were on every side. The silent presence of Death
seemed all about him. He felt that, like the day, his life was swiftly
declining, and the mood of the place and the hour was strong upon him.
It found utterance in the sorrowfully beautiful, passionately pathetic
first melody of this nocturne, with its falling minor phrases, like the
cry of a deep but suppressed despair, and its somber, sobbing
accompaniment, like the muffled moan of the surf on the adjacent beach.
A precisely similar mood is powerfully expressed in Tennyson’s poem
“Break, break, break,” especially in the closing lines,
“But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.”
Suddenly, in the midst of his melancholy reveries, Chopin was seized by
one of those deceptive visions, so frequent at that time. The shadowy
forms of a procession of dead monks seemed to emerge from beneath the
obscure arches of the refectory, in a slow funeral march along the
cloister behind him to the chapel, where their evening services were
formerly held, solemnly chanting as they passed their _Santo Dio_. This
impressive chant, as if sung by a chorus of subdued male voices, is
realistically reproduced in the middle movement of the nocturne. The
very words _Santo Dio_ are distinctly suggested by each little phrase of
four consecutive chords.
When the monks have vanished, and their voices have died away in the
distance beneath the echoing vault of the chapel, Chopin recovers
himself with a shudder and resumes his sad dreaming, symbolized by a
return of the first melody. But just at its close the sun sinks below
the western bank, its last rays gleam for a moment on the white sail of
the boat just rounding up to the landing. His friends return. His lonely
brooding is cheerfully interrupted. His mood brightens and the nocturne
ends with an exquisite transition to the major key.
The player should strive in this work for a somber intensity of tone,
and should render each phrase of the melody as if the pain expressed
were his own, making the undertone of the sobbing sea distinctly
apparent in the accompanying chords. In the middle movement, where the
monks’ chant is introduced, the imitation of a muffled chorus of male
voices should be made deceptively realistic. All the notes of each chord
must be pressed, not struck, with a firm but elastic touch, and exactly
simultaneously; and each little quadruplet of chords must rise and fall
in power, so accented as to enunciate the words _Santo Dio_. This is at
once the saddest, the deepest, and the most descriptive, while
technically the easiest, of all the Chopin nocturnes.