Chopin- Nocturne op.48 no.1 in C minor (extract)

Chopin was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1810, and died in 1849. He is most famous for his piano works. This piece is a Nocturne, meaning that it was written for night-time parties. This can be heard in the slow and tired, but stately feel of the piece. It is also just written for piano, and we know that by the Romantic period pieces were being written just for single instruments (or at least, instrument and accompaniment).
The melody comes in right away, and throughout this extract, it moves mostly in small intervals, with some large intervals used to create drama and tension in various places. It is all legato, with pedal written in throughout the whole extract, to add an even more legato feel. The phrases are not easily distinguishable, as with most music that comes before it, and are not balanced or at all symmetrical. There is not much sequencing in the melody either, but one example is bars 3 and 4 in the right hand, where, although the rhythmic units are not the same, the intervals are very, very similar. In bars 5 to 8, we get a melody that is similar to the beginning, but altered slightly. The note values in the melody are very varied- everything from semibreves to crotchets to semiquavers to sextuplet semiquavers. This adds a great amount of interest to the piece because nothing about it is predictable (except that the left hand always has chords).
The accompaniment (left hand) plays chords throughout, to maintain the sense of key/tonality. Its chords are mainly based around octaves, with every other chord simply being an octave pattern. It keeps the beat, as it has a stable crotchet pattern. This helps the audience because from the melody, we cannot hear a clear four-crotchet-beat pattern (the piece is in 4/4).
As the piece goes along, the note lengths get shorter, meaning that the harmonic rhythm gets faster, thus the piece becomes more and more 'interesting' as it develops.
The texture in this piece is quite thin, because it only has the two hands on the piano in it.
The piece is in C minor, but being from the Romantic period, and being Chopin, there are a lot of accidentals put in for effect. The tonality seems to change in bar 9, when it goes major for a short while; This is because of the Db's that come in. However this does not last very long, and we soon return to the minor feel as the Db's are again naturalised. The tonality comes into question at bar 21, when the melody has a long chromatic section, with lots of accidentals. However then we are again brought into C minor, when the melody has two triplets, on the tonic and the dominant (C and G) and then finishes on C.


An inspiring quote from Chopin:
“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”
(http://www.biography.com/people/frédéric-chopin-9247162#synopsis&awesm=~oFJXxVESjN7bYm)
I think this is heard very clearly in this piece!

I used this recording by the great pianist Ashkenazi. The extract finishes at 2:22.