In Chopin's Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9 No. 2 the same theme comes back three times, and he never once lets it return unchanged — each time it is decorated more heavily than the last. 3:17, with the full piano score on screen, note by note.
He does not write "repeat"; he says it again differently
The three Nocturnes of Op. 9 are the work of a composer of twenty-one or twenty-two, published in 1832 and dedicated to the pianist Marie Pleyel. The second is the most famous of them and one of the most played things he ever wrote.
The nocturne was not his invention — the Irishman John Field wrote them first, and Chopin took over both the name and the manner: the right hand sings, the left holds the harmony, nothing hurries.
What he added was ornament. The theme here is only four bars long and returns three times, and he never lets it return as it was: a few more notes the second time, so many the third that the tune is nearly buried. Those small notes are not decoration around the melody — they are how he wrote "the same sentence, said again in a different tone" into the score. Nineteenth-century singers improvised such things; Chopin fixed them on paper.
After the last return he writes a phrase with no barlines at all: no metre there, just a run climbing away. How fast it goes is the player's decision.
The left hand draws wide circles; the right floats above
The left hand does one thing throughout: a low note drops, then two harmony notes are scooped up above it — down, up, down, up. The circles are wide, four to a bar, and they never stop.
Above them the right hand sings a very slow line that often does not line up with the left; it arrives a little late, or leaves a little early. That is not a mistake, it is how this music is spoken.
The further in you go, the more notes the right hand has, and the finer they get. Near the end a whole sheet of them climbs away, and after that the sound settles onto the bass and sinks.
Thirteen hundred notes, more than half of them in the left hand
The piece has 1,300 sounding notes (plus 15 grace notes): 775 in the left hand and 525 in the right. That never-resting circle is where the number comes from. In 12/8 there are twelve eighths to a bar, and the left hand moves on every one of them.
The theme is a four-bar sentence and comes round four times (bars 1, 5, 13 and 21), with more right-hand notes each time: six to ten to a bar at first, then fifteen to twenty-two for the rest. You can count them on screen. A second, contrasting idea comes between them, twice (bars 9 and 17).
At 2:45 the right hand reaches the highest note in the piece; after that comes the phrase without barlines.
The hard part is letting the hands go their separate ways
We rate this 3 out of 5. The left-hand circles are wide: the bass drops and the hand must scoop straight back up, all night without a break. That is a stamina problem.
The real difficulty is keeping the right hand from being pulled along by the left. In this music the melody is meant to arrive slightly before or after the bass; playing them exactly together is the wrong answer — but being out of line by the right amount is much harder than being in line.
The phrase without barlines at the end has no standard reading. The timing here follows the beat-by-beat tempo written into the source score, so it breathes rather than running to a metronome.
The same set, and the same way of writing
Op. 9 also contains a first and a third nocturne; Chopin wrote twenty-one in all, and more will follow.
For more of one left-hand gesture holding up the whole piece: Chopin's Prelude in E minor, and Burgmüller's Arabesque.
