When Chopin arrived in Paris in September 1831, the city had just under a million inhabitants and its size was a far cry from that of modern Paris. It was a year and a little more since the "three glorious days" of July 1830, which led to Charles X's abdication and the ascension to the throne of the last king of France, Louis-Philippe, putting an end to republican aspirations. In the autumn of the same year, Henri Délacroix – Chopin's friend in the years to come – painted his famous composition, La Liberté Guidant le Peuple, commemorating the toppling of Charles X –not the French Revolution, as is often believed.
A year later, the atmosphere in the city was still rarefied, and Chopin must have noticed for his first impressions were sweet and sour.
"...Here one finds, all at the same time, the greatest luxury and the worst filth, the highest virtue and the greatest vice..."
At the same time he is pleasantly surprised at the way Parisians behave in the streets:
"What a curious city! All the French prance and chatter, even if they don't have a penny...".
The Parisian salons
That was the open-air atmosphere. In the salons of the decadent aristocracy, of the rising bourgeoisie, also in those salons where Republicans and Saint-simonists (of which George Sand was one of its champions) met, the "romantic" evenings multiplied. Poets, painters, musicians, writers, and singers united their talents in the evenings, to exchange visions of society and the world. It was there that the "poet of the piano" would make his profit, with his veiled touch of preludes and nocturnes.
Nocturne Opus 15 N° 2
Between 1829 and 1846 Chopin wrote 21 nocturnes, 18 of them published during his lifetime and spread over several opuses. Published in 1831, the two nocturnes of opus 15 were dedicated to Ferdinand Hiller, a German pianist contemporary of Frédérick.
The nocturne No. 2 of opus 15 fully represents the structure with which Chopin, from the original proposal of the Irishman John Field – inventor of the genre –, endowed his nocturnes: a ternary structure whose second section must establish a clear contrast with the first:
Thus, obeying the Doppio movimento mark, which tells the performer to double the speed, the piece acquires in its second section (2:00) another "inner" rhythm (five beats against four) with an expressiveness radically different from the first. The third section (2:45) is little more than a re-exposition of the first, slightly modified for the purpose of closing the piece.
The rendition is by the great Cuban-American pianist Jorge Bolet, who died in 1990.
