CHOPIN'S NOCTURNES
Played by EDWARD ISAACS (Pianoforte)
Nocturne in D Flat, Op. 27, No. 2
Nocturne in C Sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. I
CHOPIN was not the inventor of the Nocturne.
That. distinction belongs to the Irishman. John Field ; but Chopin had a wider emotional range and a finer feeling for the possibilities of the piano than had Field. Though Chopin's first Nocturnes are not unlike those of the Irishman, he very soon shows 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. In some the basic feeling is very clear. The D Flat Nocturne, for example, is full of luscious sentiment. The one in C Sharp Minor has provoked imaginative flights ranging from comparison with the song of a monk to a picture of a foul murder at sea !
The attraction of this music does not, of course, consist in its I eing 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 various Nocturnes played throughout the week may thus appeal in widely differing 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.