Frederic Chopin bequeathed to the world six solo scherzi. The four that
comprise a group are opus 20, in B minor, published February, 1835;
opus 31, in B flat minor, published December, 1837; opus 39, in C sharp
minor, published October, 1840, and opus 54, in E major, published
December, 1843. The other two are to be found in his second sonata,
opus 35, and his third sonata, opus 58. They are in the respective keys
of E flat minor and E flat major. These six compositions are the finest
evidences of Chopin’s originality, variety, power and delicacy. The
scherzo is not his invention--Beethoven and Mendelssohn anticipated
him--but he took the form, remodelled and filled it with a surprisingly
novel content, although not altering its three-four measure. We feel
the humor of the Beethoven scherzo, its swing, robustness and at
times rude jollity. In Mendelssohn one enjoys the lightness, velocity
and finish of his scherzando moods. They contain, strictly speaking,
more of the truer scherzo idea than Chopin’s. Mendelssohn’s delicate
sentiment of joyousness came from the early Italian masters of the
piano. Rossini voiced this when he said, after hearing a capriccio
of Felix the Feminine, “Ça sent de Scarlatti.” Yet the Mendelssohn
piano pieces of this character are finely considered efforts, full of
a certain gracious life and a surface skimming of sentiment, like the
curved flight of a thin bird over shallow waters.
But we enter a terrible and a beautiful domain in the Chopin scherzi.
Two only have the lightness of touch, clarity of atmosphere and
sweet gayety of the veritable scherzo. The other four are fierce,
grave, sardonic, demoniacal, ironic, passionate, fiery, hysterical
and most melancholy. In some the moods are almost pathologic; in
some enigmatic; in all, the moods are magical. The scherzo in E,
opus 54, can be described by no better or more commonplace a word
than delightful. It is delightful, sunny music, and its swiftness,
directness and sweep are compelling. The five preluding bars of half
notes, unisono, at once strike the keynote of optimism and sweet faith.
What follows is the ruffling of the tree-tops by warm south winds. The
upward little flight in E, beginning at the seventeenth bar and in
major thirds and fourths, has been boldly utilized by Saint-Saëns in
the scherzo of his G minor piano concerto. The fanciful embroidery of
the single finger passages is not opaque as in other of this master’s
compositions. A sparkling, bubbling clarity, freedom, freshness,
characterizes this scherzo so seldom heard in our concert rooms. In
emotional content it is not deep; it lies well within the categories
of the elegant and the capricious. It contains on its fourth page an
episode in E which at first blush suggests the theme of the valse in A
flat, opus 42, with its interminglement of duple and triple rhythms.
The piu lento further on, in C sharp minor, has little sadness. It is
but the blur of a passing cloud that shadows with its fleecy edges
the wind-swept moorland. This scherzo in E is emphatically a mood of
joyousness, as joyous as the witty, sensitive Pole ever allowed himself
to be. Its coda is not so forceful as the usual Chopin coda, and there
is a dazzling flutter of silvery scale at the end. It is a charming
work. Closely allied to it in general sentiment is the E flat scherzo
in the B minor sonata. It is largely arabesque and its ornamentation
is genial, though not ingenious. To me this scherzo savors somewhat of
Weber. It might go on forever. The resolution is not intellectual--is
purely one of tonality. The thought is tenuous; it is a light, highly
embroidered relief after the first movement of the sonata. The trio in
B is not particularly noteworthy. Truly a salon scherzo and challenges
Mendelssohn on his native heath. It must be considered as an intermezzo
and also as a prelude to the lyric measures of the beautiful largo that
follows.
We get on firm and familiar footing when the first page of the B flat
minor scherzo is opened. Who has not heard with awe those arched
questioning triplets which Chopin could never get his pupils to play
sufficiently tombé? “It must be a charnel house,” he told De Lenz.
These vaulted phrases have become banal. Alas! this scherzo, like the
lovely A flat ballade, has been done to a cruel death. Yet how fresh,
how vigorous, how abounding with sweetness and light when it falls
from the fingers of a master! It is a Byronic poem, “so tender, so
bold, so as full of love as of scorn,” to quote Schumann. Has Chopin
ever penned a more delicious song than the one in D flat, with its
straying over the borderlands of G flat? It is the high noon of love,
life and happiness; the dark bud of the introduction has burst into a
perfect flowering, and what miracles of scent, color, shape we seize!
The section in A has the quality of great art--great, questioning, but
sane, noble art. It is serious to severity, and yet how penetrating in
perfume!
The excursion in C sharp minor is an awakening of the wondering
dream, but it is balanced; it is healthy. No suggestion of the pallid
morbidities of the other Chopin. And how supremely welded is the style
with the subject! What masterly writing and it lies in the very heart
of the piano! A hundred generations may not improve on these pages.
Then, fearful that he has dwelt too long upon the idea, Chopin breaks
away into the key of E, and one of those bursts into clear sky follows.
After the repetition comes the working-out section, and, while
ingenious and effective, it is always in the development that he is at
his weakest. The Olympian aloofness of Beethoven, Chopin had not. He
cannot survey his material from all points. He is a great composer,
but he is also a great pianist. He nursed his themes with wonderful
constructive frugality; the instrument often checked his imagination.
There is a logic in this exposition, but it is piano logic and not
always music logic. A certain straining after brilliancy, a falling off
in the spontaneous urge of the early pages force us to feel happy when
the first triplet figure returns. The coda is brilliantly strong. This
scherzo will remain the favored one. It is not cryptic and repellent
like the two in B minor and C sharp minor, and is a perennial joy to
pupil and public alike.
We now trench upon a sacred and not often explored territory of the
Chopin music. The scherzo in E flat minor is one of the most powerful
of the six. To play it effectively one needs breadth of style, a heroic
spirit and fingers and wrists of steel. The tremendous crescendo in one
bar taxes the strength of most pianists. The composition has something
elemental about it. It is true storm music, and the whistling of the
wind in the chromatic successions of chords of the sixth has an
eerie effect on one’s nerves. None of the Chopin scherzi stir me as
this one. There is menacing gloom in the second bar, and the rush and
grandeur of the movement take my breath away. The blissful song in G
flat is not uninterrupted bliss. There is a threatening undercurrent,
as if the howling tempest might return; it does, and how originally
Chopin manages this! The descending octaves, which seem to carry us to
the mouth of hell, are burst in upon by the first stormy theme, and
again we are madly projected through space, a victim of the elements.
Defiance, satanic pride, the majesty of the microcosm, a spiritual
challenge to fate are all here. The lulling, lovely lines of the piu
lento steal in again and the curtain rings down on a great picture of
passion and pain.
Chopin’s first scherzo in B minor bears an early opus number. It is his
twentieth work--the most sombre, yet the most shrill and hysterical of
the scherzi. It is in his most ironic, yet most reckless, vein; Chopin
throwing himself to the very winds of remorse. A terrible mood, a
Manfred mood, a torturing mood. A soul-shriek from the first chord to
the last, with one dream inclosed within its gates of brass, it reminds
one of the struggles of an imprisoned soul beating with wounded palms
its prison door. It is the unhappiest, the most riotous of Chopin’s
works and suffers from prolixity. Its keynote is too tense for the da
capos marked by the composer, and unsuited for latter-day taste. Some
virtuosi play this scherzo without the repeats, and the piece gains
greatly. It is so harsh, so drastic, that the wondrous melody in B,
with its lapping, lilting tenths--“the sweet slumber of the moonlight
on the hills”--after the tragic strain, comes like a benediction.
This scherzo has almost had a special message. Chopin, like Robert
Louis Stevenson, was afflicted with weak health, was slender of
frame, but his spirit was brave as the lion’s. Both men could write
terrible things, even though they could not compass them. The sense of
impotence, of stifled longings, fills this scherzo with inarticulate
moans and bewailings. What a life tragedy is the opus 20!
The arabesque-like figure after the eight bar introduction--muted bars
some of them, as was Chopin’s wont--has a certain spiritual likeness
to the principal figure in the C sharp minor fantaisie-impromptu. But
instead of the ductile triplets, as in the bass of the impromptu,
we divide the figure in the scherzo between the two hands, and the
harshness of the mood is emphasized by the anticipatory chord in
the left hand. The vitality of the first page of this scherzo is
marvellous. The questioning chords at the close of the section are as
imaginative as any passages Chopin ever wrote. The half notes E and
the up-leaping appogiatura are also evidences of his originality in
minor details. These occur just before the modulation into the lyric
theme in B and with a slight change just at the dash into the coda. The
second section, an agitato, contains some knotty harmonic problems.
But they must be skimmed over at tempestuous speed, else cacophony.
Bold here is Chopin to excess, as if his spirit would knock at the very
gate of heaven, but the surge and thunder waxes, wanes, wastes itself;
the soul has stormed itself to slumber. The molto piu lento of this
scherzo is, by consent, one of Chopin’s masterpieces. It is written
in the richly colored, luscious key of B major. It is so fragrant, so
replete with woven enchantment, that the air becomes divinely dense.
With broken tenths, Chopin produces subtle effects. It is all a miracle
of tender beauty, and is like some old world Armida’s garden, when
time was young and men and women lived to love and not to sorrow. It
is only comparable to the B major episode in the B minor étude or to
the Tuberose nocturne of the same key. Mark how the composer returns
to his first savage mood! It is a picture of contrasted violence.
But beware of the da capo. It grows wearisome. Far better repeat the
first section only and attack the coda--the finest coda ever made by
the master. I know nothing of his that can equal its boldness, its
electrifying ride across country, its almost barbaric impetuosity. The
heavy accentuation on the first note of every bar must not blind one’s
rhythmical sense to the second beat in the left hand, which is likewise
accented. This produces a mixed rhythm that greatly adds to the general
murkiness and despair of the finale. Those daring chordal dissonances,
so logical, so effective, how they must have agitated and scratched the
nerves of Chopin’s contemporaries! And they must be vigorously insisted
upon; no veiled half lights, for the worst is over; the ships are
burned; nothing remains but the awful catastrophe. To his death goes
this musical Childe Roland, and the dark tower crumbles and creation
crumbles at the close. The scherzo ends in chaos, overwhelming,
supreme!
I think it was Tausig who first taught his pupils to use the
interlocked octaves at the close instead of the chromatic scale in
unison. I suppose Liszt did it before anyone else; he always thought of
such things, even if the composer did not. I doubt not but that Chopin
would have objected to the innovation, although it seems admissible.
After the furious Hercules-vein of the coda, to finish with a chromatic
scale sounds tame and ineffectual.
Even though the sneer, the peevishness and fretfulness of a restless,
unhappy, sick-brained man disturb it, the C sharp minor scherzo is
yet the most dramatic, the most finely moulded of the six. It is
capricious to madness, but the dramatic quality is unmistakable. It
seethes with scorn, if such an extravagant figure is permissible. It
is all extravagance, fire and fury, but it signifies something. Just a
word about the tempo. Nearly all the scherzi are marked presto, but it
should be remembered that it is the presto of Chopin’s day, and, above
all, of Chopin’s piano action. The action of the pianos of his time,
especially of the Pleyel piano, was superlatively light and elastic.
The Chopin tempi should be moderated, as Theodore Kullak has so often
insisted. You lose in ponderability and dignity by adopting the swift,
old-fashioned time markings. The first part of the B minor scherzo may
be taken at a presto--a comfortable presto, the scherzo in E must be
played presto; also the one in E flat; but where the thought takes on
a graver hue, where majesty of utterance or nobility of phrase are to
be considered, moderate your pulses, I conjure you, master pianists.
The C sharp minor scherzo is an especial sufferer from a too hurried
speed. The architectonics are consequently blurred, details jumbled
and the indescribable power of the piece lost. And if you start out
with such a fiery presto, where will you get your contrast of speed in
the coda, which should be fairly shot out from your finger-tips? Or
would you emulate Schumann and start in with a prestissimo possible
and follow with still more of a prestissimo? You remember his sonata?
Try a presto by all means, but remember the heavier tone mass of the
modern piano. This scherzo is a massive composition, yet full of fitful
starts and surprises. The bits of chorale in the trio are hugely
Chopin as to fioritura and harmonic basis. More than all the others
this one reminds you of some pulse-stirring drama. It is audacious and
declamatory. Even in the meno mosso it never tarries, and the coda is
built of one of those familiar figures cumulative in effect through
repetition and all written eminently for the instrument. The scherzo in
C sharp minor is grotesque; it is original. It has affinities with the
darkling conceptions of Poe, Coleridge, Hoffman, and is Heine-like in
its bitter irony. It is like some fantastic, sombre pile of disordered
farouche architecture, and about it hovers perpetual night and the
unspeakable and despairing things that live in the night. It is a
tale from Poe’s “iron bound, melancholy volume of the magi,” and on
its face is written the word Spleen. Chopin might have said with Poe:
“Then I grew angry and cursed, with the curse of Spleen, the river and
the lilies and the wind and the forest and the heavens and the thunder
and the sighs of the water lilies. And they became accursed and were
still. And the moon ceased to totter up its pathway to heaven--and the
thunder died away--and the lightning did not flash--and the clouds
hung motionless--and the waters sunk to their level and remained--and
the trees ceased to rock--and the water lilies sighed no more--and
the murmur was heard no longer from among them, nor any shadow of
sound throughout the vast illimitable desert. And I looked upon the
characters of the rock, and they were changed, and the characters were
Spleen.”
All this was told in the dreary region in Lybia by the borders of the
Zaïre, where the waters have a sickly and saffron hue. But Poe wrote
the word Silence, which I have changed to Spleen. Three of the Chopin
scherzi are the very outpourings of a soul charged with the spiritual
spleen of this age of disillusionment.