Review Summary: Pearls on Velvet. A Classicist's Romantic.
Make Forgotten Composers Great Again. No. 5
If anyone’s been reading my reviews, especially the more recent ones, then it’s probably clear that I do not like Romantic music. The most honest conservative estimate I can give is that I don’t care for about 65% of it, at worst 90%. On the one hand, I love Brahms, even though he was a classicist at heart. I’d say that I am moved by about 90% of his piano music and all of his symphonies. I was also quite surprised when I found myself really, really enjoying Schumann’s piano music, although I do disagree with about everything he ever had to say. On the other hand, maybe I like about six or seven pieces by Liszt (his transcriptions don’t count), three or four pieces by Chopin, one or two overtures by Wagner, maybe something here or there by Mendelsohn, Tchaikovsky or Dvorak, maybe three or four pieces between the lot of Berlioz, Verdi, Bruckner, Puccini, and Mahler, and probably nothing by the hundreds of others. To me, Romanticism is the epitome of self will run riot; there’s both a distressing amount of egomaniacal bravado and a palpable lack of discipline.
All of this being said, it was a grand surprise to me when I found myself adoring John Field. But maybe it shouldn’t have been. Field’s music wonderfully avoids the excesses of Romanticism, nor did Field really live in the Romantic era c.1830-1910, he was born in 1782 and died in 1837. (Some may disagree with the dates I assigned to the Romantic era. There are those who assign 1780 as its birth date. But for my money, the classical era did not end until the year of Beethoven’s death in 1827, and it was in the 1830s when Chopin arrived on the scene and dealt Classicism its final blow.) Yet, Field’s music
feels romantic. The guy did, after all, invent the Nocturne. So much for Chopin’s alter-dimensional creativity.
Field was born in Dublin on July 26th 1782 into a family replete with generations of musicians, and was moreover the son of a court employed violinist at the Theater Royale. Like all of the turn of the century virtuosos Field was a child prodigy. By the age of nine he was giving concerts. The boy must have been phenomenal; only a short while later Clementi allowed the youngling the privilege of studying with him, and Clementi had less than zero patience for amateurs. But Field was gruff, grouchy and sullen, and these traits followed him to the grave. It surely did not help that Clementi extorted an exorbitant amount of money from Field’s family, gave the boy only a handful of lessons, kept him on meager rations and bad clothing, and quite outrageously exploited the boy’s talent for his own personal and financial gain. Shut up in various piano warehouses of Clementi’s for the next decade, the boy, and then the young man, was made to play for hours upon hours with the purpose of demonstrating Clementi’s pianos to prospective buyers. We can at least be sure Clementi taught him well enough to make some coin, and Clementi’s account that Field was his favorite pupil is probably apocryphal.
I would imagine that that it was during these years that the seeds of what would eventually become Field’s “dreamy melancholy” were planted. Nevertheless, Field was a powerful pianist. In 1802 Clementi took him to Paris and the twenty-two-year-old created a furor. From there the two traveled to Vienna and then to Russia where Field was to find his greatest success to the point of becoming spoiled. Clementi left Russia in 1803 and Field began a series of concerts throughout the Baltic states and Russia herself which led him to quickly become the most successful musician and sought after teacher in Moscow. It was in the motherland herself in 1814 that Field published the first three of his extraordinarily creative and prophetic Nocturnes.
The genre that Field invented and fathered was a single movement character piece evocative of nighttime. During Field’s lifetime, single movement works were written with a formal design. You had your rondos, themes and variations, fugues, and even your sonata-allegro form movements. I would imagine that composers of the budding Romantic era, though, felt that formal structure either restricted their creativity or imposed outside arbitrary rules on something they felt was supposed to be personal. “You’re telling me I must write the second theme in G Major？” Unprecedentedly bucking this trend, Field sought to emphasize mood rather than thematic development or virtuosic bravura. Nor do Field’s nocturnes follow any extra-musical structure (i.e. programmatic music), as is the case with the music of an Opera or Ballet. So just what musical language do you use to evoke the night？Field was particularly fond of three techniques: the use of
bel canto melodies over arpeggiated left hand accompaniment, tonal shading, and a healthy dose of pedaling, a technique that Field was a recognized master of.
Nocturne No. 1, dreamy and meditative, utilizes each of these nocturnal techniques on high. Perhaps the most impressive thing to note is the key of the piece, Eb Major. Well, the key in it of itself isn’t impressive, but the fact that only three of Field’s eighteen nocturnes are in the minor mode certainly is. You’d think it would be the other way around. You’d think that a genre that’s supposed to be evocative of the night would revolve around minor tonalities. Not necessarily. Field’s nocturnes express what is dreamy and imaginative rather than what is dark and violent. We begin in 12/8 (four groups of three 8th notes) on a dominant pickup to Eb in the soprano, and the first eight measures don’t feature a single non-diatonic note in the bunch. There’s supposed to be tension, isn’t there？Again, not necessarily. In fact, six of the first eight measures only utilize an Eb chord, the other two it’s dominant Bb. Try to come up with six measures that only feature one chord without any chromatics and try to make it sound half-way interesting, let alone evocative of something as sophisticated as dreamlike impermanence.
But Field’s focus was on shading rather than development, and the best way to provide this kind of contrast is to keep your theme simple. To illustrate, the simplicity of the harmony through the first eight measures is what makes the Ab minor chord in the last beat of m.9 (as vi moves down to V, (Cmin --> Abmin/Cb --> Bb)) so resonant. But I shouldn’t forget to talk about the melody. It would be too easy to use a simple verb like “floats” or “bounces” to describe it, nor would it do justice to the music. A different technique might yield better results. I’ll throw out words my mind’s eye feels as I listen. “Nature, green, rain, haze, smile, soar, lush, being.” I’m sure you can come up with your own.
Another refreshing aspect of Field’s playing is that the melody determines the harmony and not the other way around. As opposed to the German and Austrian masters, steeped in their contrapuntal and architectural ways, Field’s melodies are everything. Where Bach features intellectual rigor, Field features tone and delicacy, where Beethoven never played a piano he didn’t break, Field sat imperceptible at the keyboard, and it’s without a doubt that Field antedated Chopin’s fingerings, with hand changes on a held key to achieve a perfect legato. But it’s not as if the accompaniment isn’t important. The left hand plays a separate but equal role; the bass fingerings, often in an ostinato pattern, are an integral part in Field’s belief that the texture should do all the talking rather than the notes. Quite a romantic concept indeed.
The rest of Nocturne No. 1 follows an ABA pattern with the B section revolving around Bb. It’s actually hard to call what happens in the middle of the piece a new section. The only thing that changes is the harmony. The texture is exactly the same, and the melody follows a similar shape. This doesn’t mean that the B section is any less beautiful, just that we are in a different galaxy of the same universe. So, perhaps the change in harmony is enough to qualify it as a different section. Moreover, you can hear a clear ending of one section and the beginning of another with the repeat of the dominant pickup to Eb in the soprano. The repeat of the A section features the theme more decorated and florid before ending on heavenly sixths and a final delicate Eb in the bass.
So why is it that Field’s nocturnes are largely missing from the current repertoire？Yep, you guessed it. In 1832 Field visited Paris to put on a few concerts. Liszt, who often wrote reviews for French magazines was unimpressed to say the least, “[Field’s] inexpressive look aroused no curiosity…His calmness bordered on apathy and nothing could trouble him less than the impression he might produce upon his audience.” To the ultra-showman Liszt, the number one cardinal sin of piano was not being a subpar or fraudulent composer or in general a poor musician, it was being what he considered a boring performer. If your eyes didn’t roll to the back of your head or if your hands didn’t raise up two feet off the keyboard for every fortissimo, you weren’t worth his listening attention. At least Liszt knew good music when heard it, calling Field’s nocturnes “genuine masterpieces of refined emotion.” But my favorite description of Field is by the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka. After having heard Field in recital Glinka commented, “his fingers, like great drops of rain, poured over the keys as pearls on velvet.”
