Chopin's twenty-one nocturnes perfected Field's night piece
Frédéric Chopin wrote 21 piano nocturnes between 1827 and 1846, and they remain concert staples. He did not invent the form—the Irish composer John Field did—but Chopin popularised and stretched it, and his set is widely ranked among the finest short piano works ever written.
Numbers 1 to 18 came out during his life in batches of two or three, in the order he wrote them. Numbers 19 and 20 were actually the earliest, composed before he left Poland but printed only after his death. Number 21 was not called a nocturne at all until it was published under that name in 1938, and a C-sharp minor piece sometimes sold as Nocturne No. 22 is spurious.
Field was already an established composer when Chopin was born in 1810, and Chopin had written five nocturnes before they ever met. As a young man he kept hearing that he sounded like Field, and Friedrich Kalkbrenner even asked whether he had studied with him. The admiration ran one way: after hearing Chopin's nocturnes in 1832, Field reportedly dismissed him as a sickroom talent, though critics later called Field himself Chopinesque.
From Field, Chopin took a singing right-hand melody over broken left-hand chords and generous use of the pedal to sustain and colour notes. He added freer rhythm, structures borrowed from Italian and French opera arias and sonata form, and counterpoint to build tension. Franz Liszt insisted the nocturnes owed a debt to Vincenzo Bellini's bel canto arias, a view many musicians share.
Early critics were divided, and several later withdrew their complaints. Op. 9 No. 2 in E-flat and Op. 27 No. 2 in D-flat remain the favourites. Mendelssohn, Schumann and Liszt praised the set, Brahms and Wagner echoed its melodic style, and Gabriel Fauré, a devoted admirer, wrote thirteen nocturnes of his own, with Satie, Scriabin, Poulenc and Rachmaninoff among later contributors.
Source: Nocturnes (Chopin)
