Titles Without Texts

“My work should be judged as it enters the ears and heads of listeners, not as it is described to the eyes of readers.” -Arnold Schoenberg

In our journey towards abstraction, we are now past the point of visual and textual inspiration. Now we're dealing with titles that point vaguely in a direction—'Nocturne,' 'Ballade'—and leave the rest up to us. This might be the biggest jump in the book so far, stepping across the line from concrete to abstract.

Night music

For many of us, night music was our first exposure to classical music—our parents played us Brahms to put us to sleep. This has done no favors for classical music's reputation as sleep-inducing; and those of us who love this music and hold it up as evidence of classical music's wonders can just make the problem worse.

In this section we'll hear several different composers' depictions of night time and explore the interpretive range that we're given, including how this music can keep you awake or put you to sleep depending on how you listen to it.

For Chopin, night time can bring many things—it can bring respite, it can bring contemplation, it can bring loneliness, and great sorrow. Always they have “long-necked, sinuous” melodies. They can be played alone in the darkness, or surrounded by close friends. ^💬

The first time I heard the posthumous C-Sharp Minor Nocturne, my best friend Brandon played it in a studio class for our teacher, Natalie. It was a small monthly gathering in her living room, maybe ten students and all their parents, reluctantly listening to the other kids. After Brandon finished and we clapped, Natalie said, “OK, this is a tragic piece. Now start it again like your mother just died.” He raised his hand slightly to play with a soft touch and instead started banging the opening chords in mock celebration. His mom groaned, the other students burst into laughter, and Natalie decided it was time to move on to the next performer.

The next time I heard it was in a masterclass with pianist Alan Chow. He was coaching a student on how to play the melody with more freedom. Listen to this, he said, and withheld a dissonant note, giving it the slightest pause that made you catch your breath. "I stole that from the movie The Pianist," he grinned. ^💬

The Pianist, based on a true story, shows this Nocturne twice, at the beginning and end of the Second World War. These images have stayed with me all these years. The privateness and inwardness of the piece and the playing interrupted by bombs and the performer's inability to tear himself away from it. Imagine how that piece felt to play in Poland near the beginning of the war. And then, when the theme is played again many years later in 1945, it has a very different meaning. There is the viewer's relief knowing that the faces we see on the screen are alive. The great leaps feel almost exultant in their freedom whereas before they felt like they were struggling to climb out of despair. But alongside that relief is also the great tragedy behind it. Somehow the music is able to make space for all of this in the same notes at the same moment.

Now here is a 2015 performance by Menahem Pressler, played at 92 years young.

I can't tell you what Pressler is thinking about while he's playing. I don't think it's the abstract idea of “night time.” But at the same time, there's something about the atmosphere that feels like it would be out of place on a bright afternoon.

There are many descriptions that might feel apt. Pianist Vladimir Feltsman's “atmosphere of yearning nostalgia” fits. But I'm pretty sure Pressler isn't think about that either. If I had to guess, he's just listening deeply to every note, every sound from the moment it starts to the moment it connects to the next one.

I had to look this up, to be sure I wasn't hilariously wrong, and I found this quote from Pressler's interview with Noa Kageyama—“When I have my best days, I don't think about anything. I listen. I'm inside the music. I sing it, I, I play it. I don't think of anything.”

As both a musician and a listener, I think this is the gold standard. Like everyone, I have felt a certain way and chosen music to play or hear based on my mood, and thought about specific memories. But to truly exist inside the moment, inside the sound—those are the best days.

A teacher once told me a legend that when Arthur Rubinstein, who many (myself included) consider the greatest performer of these pieces, recorded them half a dozen times, differently each time. After he finished, he walked out of the room and told his producer, “You choose.” I don't know whether this is true, but it definitely could be. I love it, the idea that any number of interpretations could be equally valid, and that the ones that we now consider our “reference” could easily have been completely different depending on the mood of his producer.

The Nocturnes of Lili Boulanger and Clara Schumann are so intimate that I almost feel intrusive watching. These musicians are getting ready for bed, in their most private moments, writing in their diaries, and we are looking through the window.

These Nocturnes live in the same space as Chopin's—they manage to hold peace and quietude alongside a depth of emotion mostly contained but occasionally seeps out in an outburst. While some Chopin is well-suited to the concert hall, I prefer this music in a dark room, with as few people as possible.

Both recordings were made without audiences, and I can't help but wonder how they would have come out if the seats were full. Would they, like Pressler, have brought us inside the music with them? Or would they not have been able to reach the same level of vulnerability? Maybe this is the true heart of Chopin's night music—recreating the atmosphere at which we are our most exposed.

As usual, let's consider that lens in the context of music not labeled “Nocturne.” Chopin's Piano Concertos—some of the only larger scale works that Chopin wrote—were vehicles for the composer to “show off” and achieve some sort of commercial success. But the slow movements of his two concerti still feel like Nocturnes.

Similarly, Béla Bartók's third piano concerto also feels like it could bring us music from the night. But for Bartók the sounds of night aren't always intimate; they can also be eerie. Maybe you hear frogs croaking, insects humming, or birds twittering.

In the first movement, we might wake up to morning and a relatively simplistic tune, but by the time the main theme returns in the recapitulation, its comfortable melodies have been given slightly uncomfortable nocturnal harmonies, and the main theme is broken apart into bird calls exchanged between flute and piano as the movement closes.

The second movement opens with an evening prayer, a chorale marked Adagio religioso (Slow and religious). The prayer grows more and more urgent, until it is interrupted by what sounds like white noise.

When I was first preparing this piece, I could never understand this effect. Luckily, a wedding brought me to the rainforest of Malaysia right before the performance. In the middle of the night I heard the amalgam of all these animal sounds, and when you walk at night, maybe a bat will fly right by your head. There is indeed an eeriness to it.

(I actually thought I heard the exact same birds chirping as in the Bartók. I was not even close… Bartók was living in the US when he wrote the piece, and various program notes say the bird call is “clearly identifiable” as towhee and thrushes.)

Bartók's juxtaposition of serenity and anxiety resonates deeply with my own experience of the nighttime. Whether this particular section contains more worry or optimism I'll leave to the listener. Finally the sun begins to come out and the uneasiness fades away, and we return to a more peaceful place.

And even though Bartók's night time unsettles us more than Chopin's, his music still benefits from that type of close listening. This helps us to hear not just a couple minutes of noise, but a cricket here and a bird call there.

Night music does often come with specific text and specific programs, too, like in Anna Clyne's tone poem, This Midnight Hour, which will wake you up rather than help you relax (“Music – / a naked woman / running mad through the pure night”).

But what if we flip the script, and instead of viewing abstract works through a programmatic lens, we begin to view more concrete “night time” works as a more general “Nocturne,” and apply the same time of listening?

The works of Claude Debussy, which live between the worlds of the nocturnes that we've seen so far, are perfect for this.

Debussy's Clair de lune (Moonlight) comes from a poem from Paul Verlaine. In that sense, it is both Nocturne and Tone Poem (or Tone Painting, you sometimes hear), and it is completely fair to interpret it as either.

Like the impressionist paintings of Claude Monet, Debussy's works blur the edges of what we think we're hearing. We can usually still identify the original subject matter, but piecing together what the original scene looked like “in real life” is not the purpose of portraying it this way.

Claude Monet, Water-Lilies, Reflection of a Weeping Willow

For those familiar with Clair de lune, you may use the performance selector to choose a different Debussy work about the moon and night time. These selections come from collections vaguely labeled Preludes or Images—a body of work not typically compared to Chopin's Nocturnes. They lack the operatic melodies that characterize Chopin's nocturnes, and their dissonant depictions of night outdoors sometimes share more with Bartók's nocturnal creatures. What they share in common with both is the vulnerability of night time, and the benefits of letting one's attention rest in the colors created by the sounds of the moment.

It must be said that Debussy actually resisted the label of “impressionist,” which he took to be concerned with the objective, aesthetic, surface-level impression of things. ^💬 He preferred instead to align himself with the Symbolists, like poets Baudelaire and Mallarmé, whose works captured subjective, internal worlds—the essence of moonlight and the experience of moonlight, not just the moonlight itself.

In today's non-academic usage, we've largely lost this distinction, and use the word impressionism to refer to this aesthetic style of blurred colors, like a Monet painting, as opposed to the more clearly defined structure and melody of pieces like the Chopin Nocturnes.

But I think that Debussy's desire to capture subjective experience actually aligns with the same type of listening as the Chopin Nocturnes. They all have a privacy and an allure that draws you in before opening up, and respond to the same kind of listening as Chopin's works.

Pianist Jeremy Denk, a teacher of mine, writes, "in French music, often, some part of the sensual clings to even the purest stuff. The explosion of a taste on the tongue, the skin-shiver elicited by a light touch, a rustle of fabric… To play French music without some of this frisson is appalling." (Debussy was certainly French, but was Chopin French or Polish? He lived in Poland until he was 20 and France until he died at 39; both nations claim him as their own.)

These composers invite you to inhabit the sound. And if you're not in a place to accept that invitation—or you just decide that it's time to turn off your brain and go to bed—the music might just put you to sleep instead.

Now at risk of putting everyone to sleep with just a little more night music, I'd like to finish this section by coming back to the lullaby—music that was actually intended to put you to sleep.

Ironically, I discovered this piece in pianist David Kadouch's YouTube series, melodies that keep me up at night. Ilse Weber's Wiegala is a lullaby with a beautiful melody that a child could easily fall asleep to if played in the background. But I find that even this music, if engaged with and truly listened to (its haunting context aside), carries enough musical stimulation to move you.

I wonder if Wiegala would make it onto a commercial album of lullabies. Those collections do often feature music that, if actively listened to, would not actually put you to sleep. Many of them feature just the slow movements from larger works—if listened to in context, the fast movements would provide enough stimulation to keep you engaged to the slow movements. When they are removed (as in this chapter, ironically), it requires a more deliberate decision on behalf of the listener to engage.

Schumann's “Träumerei” (“Dreaming”) from his Scenes from Childhood is not a lullaby, although it often features on commercial albums of lullabies. It's quite understandable how it gets there—but when a musician invites a listener into their innermost dreams, it is a privilege. Hopefully the night music in this chapter has primed you to listen like you're listening to your best friend. But if you're not currently in the right mindset, there is no shame in skipping this video and coming back when you are ready.

Here is Vladimir Horowitz in his return to Moscow in 1986, 61 years after leaving to go West (more history here). Träumerei, a humble, understated “scene from childhood” is his encore. For us today it is easy to click a button and watch this online, but it was an emotional and special occasion for the pianist and the audience—this is not “just” a studio recording. Horowitz is making this vulnerable personal statement and opening his heart to the world, and I feel a bit of a responsibility to listen with the intent of really hearing everything he has to say.

Ballades

With the Ballade, we finally arrive at a truly abstract title with no textual indication from the composer of any underlying content. The duty to answer the question, “What is this piece about?” has now squarely passed to the listener.

What does “Ballade” mean? It's an interesting title—an allusion to the old poetic ballades—but for the Romantic piano works of Chopin and Liszt, it feels like little more than a nudge that the piece is a story. But what's the point of that? As we've been seeing in this section, practically every piece of music can be interpreted—almost by default—as a story.

To me, the point is not that the piece is a story, but more about what the piece isn't. And what it isn't is a specific story. They do not tell the story of Ondine, or the story of Night Transfigured. By calling the piece “Ballade,” the composer is explicitly saying, “I could have given you a name, or I could have included a quote of the story, and I chose not to.” ^💬

For the last several chapters, we've been trying to show how a piece can be interpreted as a specific story. Now we'll take a look at the other side—how a piece can resist that interpretation.

Pianist Claudio Arrau (a grand-pupil of Liszt) claims that Liszt's 2nd Ballade is based on the Greek myth of Hero and Leander. Pianist Antonio Pompa-Baldi contends that it's based on Orpheus and Eurydice. Program notes from Hyperion and the BBC assert that it is “generally accepted” and “long been known” to come from the influential Gothic ballad Lenore, but choose not to say by whom.

The fact is—Liszt provided specific titles for his Mephisto Waltzes, Dante Sonata, Faust Symphony, a dozen different tone poems, etc. etc. I think if he wanted us to know, he would have told us. He even changed the ending between the first and second versions of the piece, so at some point he was unsure about how to end his story.

So, the next question is, why would he have chosen not to tell us this time? It's possible he just didn't have one in mind when he started, but that's never stopped composers from adding one after the fact.

But if you look closer, all the proposed stories, though different, essentially share a common theme and common arc. They are all tragic love stories where the lovers are separated, and one is led on an epic journey crossing from one world to the other. The endings, too, are tragic.

When I started performing this, I would ask listeners to bring their own story that fit these elements—good and evil, love and death—maybe a relationship from Star Wars or Harry Potter or Mistborn. I would choose the story of Lanre (yes, quite similar to Lenore) from Patrick Rothfuss's Name of the Wind. ^💬

But when I talked to audience members after a performance, very few of them would say that they actually tried to follow along with a story because they were just following the music instead. To me, that's the power of an unnamed, musical ballade—to get caught up in watching the events unfold and hear a universal story told just by its abstract components.

We start at the second statement of the introduction. Like in the last chapter, I've included commentary for the various events in the piece. But rather than annotating the clip below with a specific story, like the previous chapter, this one will be more abstract, and will make some references to previous chapters but mostly take the perspective of what an honest first listen of abstract music could look like.

Liszt's storytelling, which takes just the same few themes and transforms them into a full narrative, reaches its peak with his B Minor Sonata, written the same year as the Ballade.

Compared to the B Minor Ballade we just heard, the Sonata is roughly twice as long, three times as difficult (I love playing the Ballade because it sounds impressive but basically plays itself), and has four times as many different interpretations (Arrau says it's based on Faust, etc. etc…. pianists don't even agree on how long to play the first note).

“Sonata,” from the word for “sound,” is even more abstract than “Ballade”—pure music, not even a reference to literature. By removing that specific programmatic reference, the piece can become even greater than the original story—the abstraction doesn't limit it but instead liberates it to connect with listeners in ways that transcend any single narrative. In many ways, it takes the promise of the Ballade to its logical conclusion.

As such, compared to the B Minor Ballade, the Sonata is a work that can reward dozens of listens. Deep analyses of the piece's structure can be found on YouTube and in PhD theses, snapped up by piano students looking for a shortcut to a “correct” interpretation.

But what most musicologists miss is that it also works on a first listen, both despite its formal complexity and because of its structural innovation which holds it together for the unknowing listener. For just one sample, here is the fugue—a compositional form we haven't looked at yet, but which has an emotional underpinning that is still accessible—which takes its theme and tosses it around the instrument, gathering in madness as it goes until it can go no further.

Next thing we know, those threatening repeated notes are a melody we can bask in —but I'll leave you to discover the rest of the work on your own, in as many different interpretations as you wish. ^💬

Chopin

But for all the ink spilled about Liszt by musicologists and critics (and now, me), it is Chopin who has become synonymous with the word “Ballade.”

Chopin's first ballade is a favorite from prodigious grade-school students through conservatory-level students, at college auditions and professional competitions, and by superstars on the biggest stages. It's featured in The Pianist, Your Lie in April, and its fair share of r/piano Reddit posts. It is so popular among amateur pianists that I know of multiple piano meetup groups that had to limit its performances because it was being played at every meeting. Journalist and amateur pianist Alan Rusbridger even wrote a book about his journey to learn it, Play It Again, An Amateur Against The Impossible, which resonated with amateurs around the world on similar pursuits.

Those of us who grew up listening to the piece typically have a specific recording that they would listen to (for me, it was my teacher, Natalie's). But it is a piece you can approach from just about any angle. It is featured in masterclasses, films, ballets, and allegedly has a literary basis. So I think now is the time to show what it is like to go beyond the “first listen” of a piece, and accelerate that process of considering different interpretations.

Why do pianists love it so much? Probably not its “story,” the Mickiewicz poem that it is based on. I'm guessing the vast majority of the piece's fans fell in love without even knowing it was inspired by a poem (Mickiewicz's name is mentioned only once in Rusbridger's book). But unlike what most concert hall program notes would like you to believe, it is nearly impossible to give a play-by-play of the piece without discussing a specific interpretation.

Below, we'll see a few excerpts from a video by music lesson company Tonebase, in which pianists Tony Yike Yang and Aurelia Shimkus react to the performances of Vladimir Horowitz alongside other great pianists, whose names they have to guess. It shows a purely musical way of relating to the piece as well as different opportunities for interpretation from both pianist and listener. I've put some of their commentary in my notes below the video.

Here's the introduction. As usual, use the performance drop down to compare the different pianists.

Just in the introduction and two of the great historical Romantic pianists, Horowitz and Rubinstein, we see different approaches. Horowitz gives us an entire range of expression in just a few notes, fully embodying the music. Rubinstein is more emotionally distant; a third person narrator just setting up the story to come, not giving it all away just yet.

I love this concept of first person vs third person playing—are you the narrator telling the story, or are you actually going through it live yourself? Pianist György Sebők explores this in a masterclass about a courtly 18th century Haydn sonata, encouraging more distance. But in these more dramatic, Romantic era works, I often find I personally lean towards a more immersed, first person perspective.

Now to the second theme:

The way Horowitz manipulates time is also utterly unique—making you wait just long enough for the next note, and then when it comes it still subverts your expectations, being bolder or more gentler than you thought it would be.

But how could a piece like this be played by a fourteen year old kid? It turns out, completely differently—with an uncomplicated serenity, that somehow also works with the same music.

Now to the development—the middle section where, like a book or a movie, stuff starts to go down (that's the technical terminology).

Horowitz's ability to change character on the spot is amazing for a performer—but more amazing to find the idea in the music and commit to it in the extreme. Michelangeli, a brilliant musician himself, opts not to break up the passage with a character change, giving us what we'd call a longer line.

This is an interesting way where a listener and a performer can interact. Can a listener like two opposite things? The performer can do their best to point out a character change, and it could surprise the listener in a delightful or an off-putting way.

On the other hand, if the listener wants to hear a character change that the performer ignores, they can be disappointed. The listener sets themselves up for success by being open-minded to whatever the performer will offer.

Finally, here is the fire and brimstone coda that concludes the piece, the passage that simultaneously attracts and repels all the pianists that look at the score.

The coda is a place where the technical virtuosity required can't be untangled from the excitement. It is a roller coaster ride, and if the pianist isn't on the edge of their seat, then neither will the audience be. In the Horowitz and Argerich recordings you see two of many approaches to generating that excitement. Horowitz risks it all, letting us hear every note—which also helps it sound fast—and fully committing to a giant conclusion. Argerich makes everyone else sound slow by comparison, which would also be terrifying if we didn't trust that she could do it.

Through hearing these different interpretations, we've gotten a bit of a shorthand to what classical music looks like beyond the first listen.

Personally, I think pianists keep wanting to play this piece because for all the hundreds of versions that exist, a new pianist can still hear the music in a way that speaks to them individually.

Do audiences like it as much as pianists do? I'm not sure. It doesn't feature on many classical radio station top 100 lists. The interpretive freedom really lies with the pianist. And once a listener finds their favorite recording, often they will listen to it over and over to the point where any other recording just sounds wrong.

It also, for all its built-in excitement, still requires work for the listener. I find that Denk's writing about Chopin's Polonaise-Fantasie applies equally well to this Ballade (emphasis mine).

One of the great and strange elements of the Polonaise-Fantasie, one of its “themes,” is that the act of listening is woven into its fabric. Chopin wants you to listen–carefully! thoughtfully!–to certain sounds, certain pitches, certain moments; the structure of the story he is telling is utterly dependent upon this listening. But he knows that listening is an inherently lazy activity, often thoughtless, often lulling itself into complacency. Just look around the boxes of Carnegie some night if you don't believe me on this. [Sometimes I look out into the crowd while I'm playing and I will see some rapt individual beaming ecstasy, and I will tell myself not to look anymore, but then I can't help it, I look around later and there is some guy searching the back of the program for classified ads and clearly desperate to get out of my concert and straight to the liquor store and then home to ESPN.] Anyway. So Chopin writes “enforced” listening moments into the piece–strangely arresting moments…

In the Ballade, the end of the introduction is just one such moment, but the whole piece has a sense of wondering where it will go next, asking you to listen. If you'd like to listen to it in full, now with some specific moments in your ear, here is a modern performance from Chopin Competition winner Seong-Jin Cho.

Personally, I can't imagine being a judge of the Chopin Competition, hearing the same pieces over and over again and pretending to be objective about which interpretations were convincing (“Competitions are for horses, not artists,” said Bartók).

(For a sense of what you're “judging,” here are a few other modern performances of the first ballade from pianists I've found doing the major competitions: George Li, Aimi Kobayashi, Martín Garcia Garcia, Clair Huangci, and Nobuyuki Tsujii.)

When Tony and Aurelia were asked at the end which of the classic recordings was their favorite, they said, “it might change 5 hours from now!” The most honest response to that question I've ever heard.

On critics

My piano teacher taught me from an early age, after my first ever competition, never to read my reviews. Don't trust them if they're good, don't trust them if they're bad. This hasn't turned out to be much of a problem, as not many critics have been interested in reviewing my playing in the first place.

Composers generally agree. Said Sibelius, “Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic.” Satie wrote a satirical eulogy for the critic: “Yes… They are not only the creators of the Art of criticism, that Master of all the arts, they are the leading thinkers of the world, the free thinkers of the social scene.” And Wagner said straight up, “The immoral profession of musical criticism must be abolished.”

In 21st century internet culture, where the greatest provocateur reaches the most eyeballs, music criticism is losing whatever sense of subjectivity and nuance it had left. ^💬 This is not just limited to classical music, but is particularly distressing in a field that should be defined by subjectivity and personal preference.

Critic Dave Hurwitz puts it well in his book, Beethoven or Bust,

“You may respond to Sibelius and dislike Beethoven. That's perfectly all right, so long as you permit yourself to grow into the works you might not enjoy at first. I've never understood why we so often feel the need to despise ten things for every one that we accept… You should take with a grain of salt any reviewers who… Reject the entire interpretive approach as illegitimate.”

(I think sometimes we can all use some more nuance. In response to Hurwitz's review of a 31-year-old Seong-Jin Cho as “way way way too young” to play the Ravel G Major concerto, one commenter wrote that they happened to like the performance. The critic replied, “The fact that you enjoyed it doesn't make it good.” But maybe there is no such thing as “good” full-stop, for all people at all times. The fact that one person enjoyed it makes it good for them. That is all there can be.)

So how should we use critics? There are still a number of reasons we need them. We want to hear a piece for the first time but aren't sure what recording to start with. We're debating whether it's worth spending money to go to a concert. We want a dialogue with smart people who are thinking about the same music we are and new insights from different perspectives.

The problem comes when music critics don't understand that they themselves are one-third of the interpretation chain: composer—performer—listener. When they presume to review the first two links objectively, they ignore this most basic rule. To once again quote Marcel Duchamp, “A work of Art is completed by the Viewer.”

So it's fine to use critics—just make sure that you control for that last variable—the listener—because they often won't. (And when you take to social media to become a critic yourself, remember this.)

I'll get down off my soapbox now, but before we get to the rabbit hole where I play critic and give my own recommendations, I want to celebrate reaching the end of the journey from concrete to absolute music.

There are plenty of other pieces ambiguous titles—pieces with names like Preludes, Intermezzos, or Moments Musicaux—most of which are just shorter pieces or collections of absolute music. I don't believe they require special treatment beyond the way we would approach a Nocturne or a Ballade.

Also, a quick word about pieces that were given nicknames, since all the talk about night time will inevitably bring up Beethoven's so-called "Moonlight Sonata." Take them or leave them, there's no right answer—just keep an open mind as you're listening that the name may or may not be an idea that works for you. For a piece like this Beethoven sonata, musicians and listeners love to argue about this kind of thing (personally, I find Debussy's moonlight more moonlight-y). Fortunately, you get to make up your own mind.

The next section of the book will switch gears to another way to approach classical music—the stimulating, intellectual way in, where we focus on fully abstract pieces that are named after their structure: variations, waltz, sonata, symphony, fantasy, fugue, and the like!

The Rabbit Hole

Let's start with the Nocturnes. One could spend years getting to know Chopin's 21 Nocturnes, and their gorgeous melodies have inspired many other instruments to take them up (some more successfully than others), but there are other gems in Irish composer John Field's which actually originated the style, and French composer Gabriel Faure's, who developed it further, in the sixth nocturne even expanding the scope to approach a ballade, like Liszt's Harmonies du soir (evening harmonies). The Gymonepedies and Gnosiennes of French composer Erik Satie follow along the lines of Debussy's intimate night music.

But alongside the French, there is also the entire world of Spanish and Latin night music that inspired some of the Debussy works that we saw. Enrique Granados's Maiden and the Nightingale is one that belongs to the same atmosphere. Manuel de Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain for piano and orchestra is very clearly night music—but while the opening feels like Debussy's impressionism, it becomes clear as it becomes more active that de Falla's has a unique, Spanish voice.

In the classical guitar repertoire, Tárrega's nostalgic Recuerdos de la Alhambra has been used in numerous films to evoke a warm summer evening. And Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, the only classical guitar concerto regularly played by major orchestras, features a middle movement, that (as in the Chopin piano concertos) could easily stand alone as a Nocturne.

In one masterclass, Benjamin Zander relates a story from playing Gaspar Cassadó's Requiebros for the composer. Cassadó explained that it is about flirtatious compliments between lovers. Zander asks, “Isn't it a little wild?” And Cassadó responds, “Not for Spaniards!” This is a more overt seduction (as Zander points out, not just of women, but a way of “winning people over”) than what we saw in the French night music. Flirtation is not unique to nighttime, but I find that if I imagine a setting for these works, it is invariably nighttime. For instance, here is the History of Tango of the Argentinian Astor Piazzolla, played here on harmonica and guitar:

From North America, Paul Schoenfield's 1987 piece Cafe Music, gives us dinner music with wild Jazz-inspired outer movements surrounding a slippery nocturnal slow movement. On the other hand, the opening of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (“a little night music”) remains arguably more recognizable than any other “night music” tune, though it never really jumped out at me as night music.

Hungarian Béla Bartók's night music, in its more literal depiction of the nature of nighttime finds an outlet in his explicit Out of Doors suite, as well as in movements of the Sonata for 2 pianos and percussion and Concerto for Orchestra, among others. He is joined by several composers who use birdsong in particular to represent a specific place and time outdoors. Most notably, Messiaen transcribed bird calls (maybe something like this), and used them extensively in his music. ^💬 Respighi (first) and Rautavaara (later) used recordings of birds directly in dialogue with the orchestra. But before I get carried away talking about birds and nature, back to the Nocturne.

If you're willing to broaden the category of music that feels like it belongs to the nighttime (which I am), I think you'll find that much of the Classical canon fits the bill. It's fitting that we perform most of our concerts at nighttime, because it helps with the atmosphere. French composer César Franck's Violin Sonata is like the Chopin 1st ballade in that everyone wants to play it, including cellists, flutists, and a dozen other instruments you would never expect. There is no “nighttime” program to it, but to me, its first and third movements especially work when approached as night music.

And finally, returning to the land of dreamy lullabies, here is Faure's Après un rêve (After a dream). ^💬 There are reveries and lullabies from Debussy, Chopin, Brahms, and Strauss. Brahms' Intermezzos Op. 117 is not titled a lullaby, but the first is epigraphed with a line from a Scottish Ballad: “Baloo, my babe, lie still and sleep; / It grieves me sore to see thee weep.” All three Op. 117 pieces can be interpreted as lullabies, but contain an underlying sorrow. And with a similar complexity, the last lullaby I'll recommend is a Gershwin song from Porgy and Bess: "Summertime", in which an impoverished Black mother sings about wealth and an easy life.

As far as ballades go, I would still listen to Chopin's before any others. Then I might turn to Eugène Ysaÿe's third sonata for solo violin, “Ballade,” a piece that like Chopin's first, with its fiery coda, has become a bit of a rite of passage for violinists.

Other worthy ballades include those of Brahms, Fauré, Grieg, Clara Schumann, Barber, Beach, Tailleferre, Saariaho, and Medtner, but the scope opens up when you consider the Ballade-adjacent pieces with different titles. Some of these have vague narrative-hinting titles similar to “Ballade”—the Chausson Poème or the Medtner Fairy Tales, for instance. Others have titles that describe their form, but really feel like a balladic story being told, like the Schubert or Schumann Fantasy or a Chopin Scherzo. We'll go into these in more depth in the chapters to come.