by HAROLD CRAXTON
FARNABY was clearly ahead
-*- of his time—the early seventeenth century. He was one of the most poetically-minded writers of the day. Many of his little pieces are miniature mood-sketches, expressive beyond the usual run of keyboard music at that period. We do not know if in writing this piece he had in mind any particular happenings at St. Paul's Wharf, by Thames-side, but the impression he aims at giving us is evidently a cheery one. Most likely, Pawle's Wharf was the name of a popular tune of the day, which he took as a basis for the composition.
DEFESCH was an eighteenth century Belgian violinist-composer who spent the last twenty-five years of his life in London.
CHOPIN was not the inventor of the Nocturne. That distinction belongs to the Irishman, John Field ; but Chopin had a wider emotonal range and a finer feeling for the possibilities of the Piano than had Field, and the three Nocturnes in the second set he wrote (of which this is one) show his developing imaginative power and technical freedom.
The Nocturnes, like many other of Chopin's pieces, are capable of bearing a good many poetical interpretations. The attraction of this music does not, of course, consist in its being supposed to represent or suggest this, that or the other, but in the fact that it has moods and real emotions, and that the player's imagination, working on the composer's material, transmits some clear mood and emotion to us. The Nocturnes may thus appeal in widely different ways to listeners of differing temperament, each hearer giving some personal colour to the music as it passes through the prism of his own imagination.