Chopin is one with the piano. When you put your hands on your keyboard, he will whisper through your fingers. Each phrase guides your hands like a silent choreographer who imparts to your spirit the internal rhythm of the poem—not the one restrained by meter, but the one that governs the time encrypted within time. Unlike Liszt, Chopin is not here to conquer with the body what the spirit cannot conquer. Unlike Schumann, Chopin is not tortured by academic pedantry, by the mundane, by his confusion with love. Unlike Brahms, Chopin never proclaims himself as the avant-garde, nor is he absorbed inadvertently by the great march of Germanic destiny, in which each composer is merely an organic part of a cosmic evolution. Chopin is content with his self-abandonment to music, to the sparkle of life as each drop of blood is trickled as an absolutely insignificant particle in the immense universe, and in such insignificance, there lies the absoluteness of his being.
The nocturne is the pedestrian musical pleasure for the elite. The aristocratic beauty of this musical form lies within its idleness, and from this idleness, one creates by savouring the aftertaste of a state of otherness—a state one can only describe with either absinthe or opium. It is free of bourgeois pretension and inquisitiveness, rationality and linearity. It is the artists’ and high connoisseurs’ resistance against the bland revolutionary ideal of the middle class, yet its nobility is often appropriated by the middle class as a revolutionary gesture. It is the legacy of aristocratic contemplation of affections, and hence, there is something deeply catholic (both religiously and secularly) about it. It refuses to follow the Lutheran conscience of looking inside one’s soul, yet it stems from a being of beings much deeper than the finitude of the soul. No German composer in the 19th century has a heart on this kind of endeavour.
The nocturne is an improvisational form. It flows out of a gesture (not a motif, a product of rationality), but a syntax that is unbreakable into smaller units. It comes out of a stream of thought. It is the historical climax of the binary form (some might say the ternary form; but the ternary form is merely a variation of the binary). The nocturne is merely an “invention” that happens to answer, as the theme develops, the fundamental human obsession of a beginning, a middle, and an end; but in this seeming conformism there lies the gesture of defilement—a form that is not a form. What counts in the nocturne is not the beginning, the middle, and the end (not unless you pay rational attention to it). What counts is the subterfuge between each variation of the theme—the surprise, the unexpected, the yet to be performed. However, deep within this surprise is the un-surprise—the very stability of tonality throughout, the expectedness of the unexpected, and the cyclical nature of these variations. It borrows from the sonata form moments of the dialectics; but it also defies the rationality of the dialectics by unpacking it, transcending it, and revealing the consistency that lies within the inconsistency. Dynamics and contrasts are, in the nocturne, self-reflexive gestures for the artist to copulate with the piano, not as a machine, but as the organic map of the human body whom the pianist desires.
Opus 9, No.1 begins with a simple gesture in Bb minor. It is, reduced to its bare minimum, a turn around the note of Bb. In the second bar, the Bb yields to a repetition of its dominant (F). The gesture of insistence is cunningly juxtaposed with the contrapuntal relationship with its lower 3rd (Db), the mediaeval dissonance that drives desire (the Libestod), and the unresolved leading note that suddenly strikes the ear, carefully disguised as the upper third of the F. Chopin then casually develops the theme with chromatic embellishment, first in a sequence of 11 quavers (in the space of 6), followed by a sequence of 22 quavers in the space of 12—gestures that are barely short of being expressed as semiquavers, being further doubled in mathematical rationality. Between the 2nd and the 3rd bars, the submediant also wavers between its harmonic state (Gb) and its melodic state (G natural). It refuses to stay within the bourgeois confines of mechanising the minor from its natural being. Instead, it merely obeys the mediaeval sense of modal movement. In fact, Renaissance polyphony is alluded to, briefly but succinctly in bar 5 as a pleasant surprise, which is quickly displaced to the double-flatted B. The double-flatted B, a note that upsets the tonality of Bb precisely by flattening the tonic itself, and a gesture that would otherwise be considered meaningless in the tempered scale, is again a defilement of the bourgeois obsession with emotional and intellectual mediocrity. One can only perceive such note within the tension with the highest form of rationality (the note only exists in theory after the bourgeois temperament of the harmonic scale) and irrationality (the note indeed exists prior to the rationalisation of music). In addition, this note is first resolved downward to an Ab (to darkness), before Chopin casually transforms it to the leading tone of F major, and resolves it to the piece’s tonicised dominant.
Nevertheless, Chopin does not allow himself to fly from there. As I said before, the nocturne is a contemplation of a cycle, a self-reflexive gesture. The theme returns to its original key. In bar 12, Chopin regularises his embellishment by finally providing 18 quavers in the space of 12 (with standardised triplets); but the melodic steps he takes is anything but regular (octave, minor second, minor second, major second, minor second, major second, minor third, minor second, minor second, minor second, major second, minor second, minor second, major second, minor second, minor third, minor second, PERFECT FOURTH!). Out of imperfection, therefore, Chopin inserts a moment of perfection, though this surprise shows us how imperfect perfection is. In bar 14, Chopin finally brings us to the cadence by lifting the left hand up to the upper register, and bringing in the dominant seventh—the conventional preparation for the cadence. Out of this expected resolution, the left hand plunges into the lower register. Here, Chopin wrote: “appassionato,” which is followed by a crescendo towards an attack to the extreme high register (with a Db, the mediant) con forza, which he resolves with a Cb, an upper leading note that would be displaced into an A natural (the natural leading tone), before the music returns to Bb, the tonic.
The momentary display of passion with the Db is then developed into the middle section as a tonicised submediant “sotto voce.” There is nothing surprising or spectacular about this middle section; in fact, this section is merely an insistent repetition of the same theme. If you ever play it, however, you would understand that the power of this middle section precisely lies in its stubborn cycle. One becomes drunk in the beauty of the same thematic material; but out of this drunkenness, one becomes insane by being driven to the unchangeability of one’s obsession. The unchanging gesture of Chopin stages the untiring and relentless struggle within the poet. This obstinacy pounds into the body of the player, and without even paying attention to the instructions, one inevitably proceeds from pianissimo (bar 19) to fortissimo (bar 51) out of the poet’s dissatisfaction of the mundane (and yes, the mundane is here looked askance by the mundane repetition of the music itself). There is no resolution to this frustration. In fact, from bar 51 to bar 60, Chopin stays in one chord: the tonic, and in bars 59-60, the melody disappears, leaving the left hand walk its solitary walk. What follows is the absoluteness of the exquiste—a temporary change to the tonicised mediant (not the conventional candential dominant). Here, Chopin subdues the surprise by the following instruction (ppp legatissimo in bar 61, and sempre pianissimo). But there is nothing sempre about this cadence, for sempre is reserved for the bourgeoisie, and for the pedants. It is only in the context of the sempre can we shock the world with fz and smorz. What a wonderful payoff! By bar 70, when the music returns to the opening theme, Chopin writes “rall. e dolciss.”—one can now sing in sweetness because poetry is released from its poetic form.
It is in this light can we fully appreciate the recapitulation of the opening section. This third section is not the end of the piece; rather, it is merely a sweet memory of the beginning, a refusal to move on, a state of idleness that is in turn the Genius of art. It is not the idleness of which many pedantic scholars and artists are afraid (not every scholar is pedantic, and similarly, not every artist is creative). It is the openness of the creative gesture, a moment of poetry at play with itself: an emancipatory gesture that is at once masturbatory—and nobody is obliged to feel apologetic about it.
In the final chapter of The Open, Agamben talks about Titan’s Nymph and Shepherd (see the picture below) in comparison with The Three Ages of Man (see the title picture):
If you were a pedant, all you can see in this comparison is Agamben’s inconsistency. However, here lies the true test of poetry. What Agamben does not discuss is an all-too-obvious change in the painting that most pedants would dismiss. In Nymph and Shepherd, sex is a matter of formality: the shepherd holds the flute in his hand; the nymph reclines on his fully clothed body; the phallic tree withers in the distance. There is something bourgeois and puritanical about this. In The Three Ages, however, all the shepherd does is to recline in nude, sit back and enjoy a beautiful blow-job. There is no pretension about sex’s formality; no transcendence; no illusion. In this later painting of Titan, corporeality is what it is. Taking comfort as comfort, the body as the body, contradiction as contradiction, frustration as frustration is something that many pedantic scholars and artists would never learn. What I am arguing is not the fact that we should leave conceptualisation aside; rather, a discourse cannot take place until we can comfortably acknowledge what the scholastic discourse on knowledge has precisely denied and excluded.
True scholarship does not intellectualise poetry for the purpose of alienating us from it; rather, it seeks, in its celebration of the human intellect, an intimacy that remains unexplored by our senses. Similarly, true art does not alienate us from intellectualisation; rather, it opens the opportunity for us to look back, in our deep intoxication of its beauty, the darkness to which we are always drawn in order to derive from it our intellectual knowledge.
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