Graceful, tender, and cheerful is the general tone of the Nocturne in G
major. It was written the following summer after Chopin’s return to
France, during a visit of some weeks at Nohant, the beautiful country
seat of George Sand, where in the midst of a smiling rural landscape,
bright and winning, rather than awe-inspiring, breathing the mild but
invigorating air of his beloved France, surrounded by cheerful and
congenial companions and by every possible physical comfort, our
composer’s health and spirits temporarily revived. To this epoch, brief
as it was, we owe some of his most genial and attractive compositions.
Again it is evening and Chopin is alone, but this time it is in his own
familiar, cozy room, where the perfect appointments and tasteful
arrangement tell of loving feminine hands, glad to minister to every
fancy of his delicately fastidious nature. The scent of flowers floats
in through the open window, and mingled with it the low voices of
friends in the garden below. He watches the play of lights and shadows
among the swaying branches of a tall, graceful willow tree just outside
his casement, the vaguely outlined, fleecy, floating gray clouds, ghosts
of dead storms, silently passing on into the infinite unknown spaces of
the sky. He listens to the night wind sighing among the tree-tops, to
the good-nights of sleepy birds, to the vesper bell of a distant
village, and embodies his dreamy impressions in the first movement of
this nocturne, with its wavering, undulating murmurous effects, and its
faint, intermittent melodic suggestions, like the half-remembered music
of a dream.
The second movement, twice alternating with the first, though in
different keys, is distinctly a slumber song in rhythm and mood, a
restful, gentle, soothing lullaby to the composer’s own weary heart, to
his momentarily slumbering griefs, and forebodings; peaceful, tender,
pensively sad at times, but entirely free from that ultra-bitterness and
gloom which color most of his later works. His Polish biographer calls
this the most beautiful melody Chopin ever wrote, and it reminds us
strongly of Tennyson’s lines in the same mood:
“There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentler on the spirit lies
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.”
An extremely light but fluent legato touch, and an ethereal delicacy and
grace of conception are demanded for the first movement, and the
ever-present curve of beauty should be indicated in each little passage
of three measures. Let the player imagine a brightly tinted feather
ball, tossed lightly into the air and fluttering softly and slowly to
earth again.
For the second movement, a singing lyric tone, a subdued warmth of
color, and a steady, reposeful, rocking rhythm are a necessity, and the
lullaby mood should be kept in mind.
LISZT
1811 1886