Chopin, Scherzo No 1

 
By 1833, barely two years after settling in Paris, Frédéric Chopin had won over a large part of French high society, to the point that the Revue Musicale of those years would express its opinion of the Polish musician in the following terms:

"Chopin deliberately departs from the beaten path. His playing and his composition have been accepted from the beginning with such consideration, and he has acquired such a reputation that in the opinion of many this artist is an inexplicable phenomenon."

And, interestingly, all this was also inexplicable for Chopin himself. In a letter to a Polish childhood friend, he writes, in January 1833:

"I am already launched! I see myself in high society, among ambassadors, princes and ministers, and I do not know by what miracle, since I have done nothing to enter it. But they say that for me it is indispensable to rub shoulders with these people because from there, they say, comes good taste. You are possessed of great talent on the spot if you have been heard at the English or Austrian embassy. You play better if the princess of Vaudemont has protected you..."

Good times
I don't know by what miracle, writes Chopin. Now that's incredible. There was nothing fatuous about Chopin, it would seem. In those years things were going well, in general. His students, at the beginning most of them amateurs, belonged to the Parisian aristocracy. This allowed him to charge 20 francs an hour for his lessons. If we think that, for example, his servant meant an outlay of 70 francs per month, the twenty francs per hour was not bad for him. 

Another story, very different, is the one related to the revenues per published work. Chopin sold to his publishers his entire work for only 17,000 francs. The four scherzos published between 1835 and 1843 are part of this production.

Scherzo No. 1 opus 20 in B minor

Likely sketched in 1831 in Stuttgart while on his way to Paris from Vienna, Scherzo N°1 was published in Paris in 1835, with a dedication to his friend Thomas Albrecht, who after the failed Warsaw uprising of 1831 had rightly suggested to him not to return to Poland.

The work inaugurates the model to which Chopin will be faithful in the three subsequent scherzos. Innovative in name and form, Chopin's scherzos are neither a diversion nor part of a larger work where they are intended to separate the allegro from the adagio or one of these from the end of the piece, in the style of Mozart or Haydn. They are, in the words of pianist and conductor Alfred Cortot "...terrifying games; they are dances, but feverish, hallucinatory; they only seem to be following the rhythm of human torments," which applies, genuinely, at least to the first three scherzos.

The rendition is by the Chinese pianist Yundi Li.

Structure

Like the rest of the scherzos, the piece is ternary in nature, with an ABA structure with a coda, that is, 1st theme (00), 2nd theme (3:50), and back to the first (7:00), plus a coda (9:12). It begins with two chords in fortissimo introducing the first theme at a tremendous speed putting early pressure on the performer. The central section offers him a comfortable truce in the form of a tender lullaby, taken - something unusual for Chopin - from a popular melody ("Sleep, Jesucito, sleep"). Then the furious line will reappear. After its repetition, it will lead to a short coda that will bring the piece to a brilliant ending.