There is no doubt that Chopin’s piano scherzos are an apogee in the history of the genre. As Chopin sat down to compose the first, at the very threshold of the 1830s, he was confronting two closely related yet different traditions: one with Mendelssohn as its figurehead, the other with Beethoven. In the former, the music of scherzos was primarily a jocular trifle: a play full of movement, sprightly and ethereal. It found its model of expression and character in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the latter tradition, the scherzo also came to reflect imagination: a wild, fantastic, unfettered imagination, bewildering and extreme, at times fulgurating and demoniac. It was of the same variety that dictated the caprichos series to Goya or the night visions to Füssli.
Of the two, Chopin’s preference must have been for the idea of a scherzo of clear-cut features, “wild” and dark. It allowed him to purge his own extreme states and situations. The “faerie” tradition resonated more clearly only in the last of the scherzos.
All four come in an uncommonly rapid tempo (Presto) and in triple and hence winged metre. In each of the four, the middle movements arrest its momentum and, at the same time, are a moment of stepping out of time. They open a perspective to a different world: that of memories and dreams, of premonition and longing. Despite their common character and form, each of the four can boast of its irrefutably own nature. Each, too, carries a little of the aura of the time and place of its origin.
• Scherzo in B minor op. 20. An unproven yet persistent tradition associates the creation of the piece with the state of mind that visited Chopin during the winter of 1830/31, spent in solitude in Vienna. “I curse the moment of my departure... I act composed in the salon, but when I return home I thunder at the piano.” Confessions sent to his friend in war-torn Warsaw are full of rebellion and disquiet; fragments of memories blend with foreboding. “I play, I cry, I read, I look, I laugh, I go to sleep, I put out my candle and I always dream of you all...”
Two chords sharp as cries struck at the top and the bottom of the keyboard signal the onset of a mad dash, seemingly devoid of law, order, and goal. In this impetus, J. Kleczyński heard “a savage storm of motives,” H. Leichtentritt, “figures of wrath,” Z. Jachimecki, “heart-rending cries”, A. Hedley, “a stream of music that sounds like a fiery improvisation,” T.A. Zieliński, “a bizarre and restless movement of sound that carries a passion for terror, frenzy, and revolt.”
And then it all dwindles suddenly, while, in a slower tempo and a major key, a melody of a Polish carol-lullaby, Lulajże Jezuniu, seems to be coming from afar. Already known from songbooks of the time, it must have been also sung in Chopin’s childhood home. In Scherzo in B minor, it resounds like a yearning reminiscence of familial happiness, idealised by parting.
On a jarring dissonance, the frenzied gestures, rhythms and tones of the beginning return molto con fuoco. They rush towards the final climax, towards nine furiously struck dissonant chords. They are only followed by a music of passages across the width and breadth of the keyboard, and a couple of dry and sharp final chords. Each of these is like a gunshot.
• Scherzo in B flat minor op. 31. Biographers agree that Chopin composed it in 1837, most probably in autumn. It was not a good year for Chopin. Great plans began to fail almost from the start. He spent the summer of the previous year in Marienbad, enchanted with the youth and the talent of Maria Wodzińska; in autumn, he proposed in Dresden and was accepted, albeit on conditions. Yet the new year brought cold wind from that direction. In the summer, he had to abandon all hope for his own home. It must have been then that he collected all of Marie’s letters and annotated the package with the famous word: “my misery.”
Thus far, he had never written a work that carried so much personal passion, the greatest passion, almost a fury; where antipodal emotions were so closely bound and blended. Similar provocation must have brought Norwid to react with his famous phrase “At once I bless and I curse.”
Initial bars have been an electric shock already in Scherzo in B minor. In Scherzo in B flat minor, the tension attains even greater heights. Whispered questions (sotto voce) are answered with unexpected power. Yet in a moment, singing follows, spun endlessly and growing in volume until a moment of passionate and ecstatic rapture. Again in this scherzo, the middle movement fills with a music seemingly from another world. A siciliana and two varieties of a waltz take the audience away from the here and now, into Arcadia. Not for long: reality returns. Now, however, it is vanquished. This is the way Scherzo ends: not in the initial B flat minor but in an unexpected D flat major. It ends with music expressing both the highest of passions and the passion for victory.
Robert Schumann’s reading of the music of Scherzo in B flat minor comes as a surprise. He could hear there “an completeness of love and contempt.”
• Scherzo in C sharp minor op. 39. Although completed in Marseilles in the spring of 1839, it was mainly written in Majorca in winter and bears a mark of that unique place and of Chopin’s experience there. He wrote it “in the most beautiful of landscapes,” “betwixt rock and sea,” in a deserted Carthusian monastery of Valldemossa, in a coffin-shaped cell, with orange-trees, palm-trees and cypresses outside and Madame Sand in an adjacent cell, working on her new romance, the one on The Seven Strings of Her Lyre.
They arrived in euphoria, but, very soon, this arch-Romantic escapade proved to be a misunderstanding and a fiasco. “The sky is as beautiful as your soul, the soil as black as my heart,” Chopin confessed to Wojciech Grzymała after the first raptures had gone and the explosion of his illness and its threatening course had obliterated all hope for an earthly paradise. It might be difficult to believe that it is in this atmosphere between horror and hope that Chopin managed to write his cycle of Preludes, Mazurka in E minor, Polonaise in C minor, Ballad in F major – and his Scherzo in C sharp minor.
It was born of a clash of contrasting forces, a rebellion “against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and a desire to “by opposing end them.” The opening gesture ushers in mysterious and overwhelming questions. The main theme of Scherzo enters with uncommon power, in "a cascade of octaves” that to some signified “wrath” (Z. Jachimecki), to others “angry jeering” (F. Niecks). It is confronted with music that, once heard, can never be forgotten: a prayerful and concentrated chorale – interrupted with another cascade of sound, ethereal and enticing, from another reality. What comes later is both forces having its say in turn: the scherzo, described as demonic by more than one critic, and the chorale. The work’s finale is yet another surprise, as the chorale’s last appearance is victorious in shape and character. In the words of John Rink, “his music blooms here in a glorious apotheosis.”
At the same time there dwells, in this Scherzo, a surreal spirit of a ballad. Its origins might in fact be inspired by ideas found in Antoni Radziwiłł’s Faust and Meyerbeer’s Robert the Devil. The echo of the Scherzo was to resonate in Wagner’s Tannhaüser, in the chorus of pilgrims tempted by the emissaries of Venus.
• Scherzo in E major op. 54 was created in an entirely different aura: in the cosiness of Nohant, under George Sand’s care, at a time when nothing could herald the later dissonances between them. Chopin drafted it in the summer of 1842 and completed it in that of the following year. He wrote surrounded by close friends: Pauline Viardot, Stefan Witwicki, Eugene Delacroix. “The place is charming,” the painter noted. “At times, a breeze of Chopin’s music wafts through an open window to blend with the song of nightingales and the scent of roses.” Madame wrote the second volume of Consuela by night and made confiture by day.
The fourth and last scherzo did not follow its predecessors’ example. It carries some of the mood in which it was made. James Huneker might be quite right when he says that “there is sunshine imprisoned behind its open bars”. Indeed, it might be true that its ethereality, its luminosity and its playfulness are spiritually akin to The Midsummer Night's Dream. Yet it also carries tones and colours unique and unparalleled.
The music of the scherzo itself has been dominated by a theme that comes as many as eleven times in ever-varying form, each time flying off into the sky of the keyboard and vanishing as quickly as it appears; its essence consists in its elusive character. One could think that this music is a metaphor of chasing the unattainable. Yet the unattainable is soon attained. The middle movement of Scherzo, its extensive trio, is filled with music of truly unearthly beauty. This is nothing if not a voice of love. Timid at first, it then sings, broad-winded, and reaches an ecstatic fullness. Yet Chopin would not have been himself had he not suspended, over the entire Scherzo in E major, over its play and its song, a haze of silent melancholy.
Mieczysław Tomaszewski
