They are
sufficiently popular, yet few amateurs have any idea of their
unfathomable depth, and few know how to use the pedal in such a way as
to produce the rich uninterrupted flow of tone on which the melody
should float. Most pianists play them too fast. Mozart and Schumann
protested against the tendency to take their slow pieces too fast, and
Chopin suffers still more from this pernicious habit. Mendelssohn in
"A Midsummer Night's Dream," and Weber in "Oberon," have given us
glimpses of dreamland, but Chopin's nocturnes take us there bodily,
and plunge us into reveries more delicious than the visions of an
opium eater. They should be played in the twilight and in solitude,
for the slightest foreign sound breaks the spell. But just as dreams
are sometimes agitated and dramatic, so some of these nocturnes are
complete little dramas with stormy, tragic episodes, and the one in C
sharp minor, _e.g._, embodies a greater variety of emotion and more
genuine dramatic spirit on four pages than many popular operas on four
hundred.
One of Chopin's enchanting innovations, which he introduced
frequently in the nocturnes, consists in those unique and exquisite
_fioriture_, or dainty little notes which suddenly descend on the
melody like a spray of dew drops glistening in all the colors of the
rainbow.
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