ries as much as did
Robert Louis Stevenson, and his nocturnes are true night pieces, some
with agitated, remorseful countenance, others seen in profile only,
while many are whisperings at dusk. Most of them are called feminine, a
term psychologically false. The poetic side of men of genius is
feminine, and in Chopin the feminine note was over emphasized--at times
it was almost hysterical--particularly in these nocturnes.

The Scotch have a proverb: "She wove her shroud, and wore it in her
lifetime." In the nocturnes the shroud is not far away. Chopin wove his
to the day of his death, and he wore it sometimes but not always, as
many think.

One of the most elegiac of his nocturnes is the first in B flat minor.
It is one of three, op. 9, dedicated to Mme. Camille Pleyel. Of far
more significance than its two companions, it is, for some reason,
neglected. While I am far from agreeing with those who hold that in the
early Chopin all his genius was completely revealed, yet this nocturne
is as striking as the last, for it is at once sensuous and dramatic,
melancholy and lovely. Emphatically a mood, it is best heard on a gray
day of the soul, when the times are out of joint; its silken tones will
bring a triste content as they pour out upon one's hearing. The second
section in octaves is of exceeding charm. As a melody it has all the
lurking voluptuousness and mystic crooning of its composer. There is
flux and reflux throughout, passion peeping out in the coda.

The E flat nocturne is graceful, shallow of content, but if it is
played with purity of touch and freedom from sentimentality it is not
nearly so banal as it usually seems. It is Field-like, therefore play
it as did Rubinstein, in a Field-like fashion.

Hadow calls attention to the "remote and recondite modulations" in the
twelfth bar, the chromatic double notes. For him they only are one real
modulation, "the rest of the passage is an iridescent play of color, an
effect of superficies, not an effect of substance." It was the E flat
nocturne that unloosed Rellstab's critical wrath in the "Iris." Of it
he wrote: "Where Field smiles, Chopin makes a grinning grimace; where
Field sighs, Chopin groans; where Field shrugs his shoulders, Chopin
twists his whole body; where Field puts some seasoning into the food,
Chopin empties a handful of cayenne pepper. In short, if one holds
Field's charming romances before a distorting, concave mirror, so that
every delicate impressi