It was into this prodigious milieu Chopin entered to impart himself like no other:
"We remember the first time he appeared in the Pleyel salons, where the most enthusiastic applause, again and again renewed, scarcely sufficed to express our enchantment by the genius which had brought out new phases of poetic feeling, and made such bold and yet such happy innovations in the form of musical art." (Franz Liszt)
Two chords, which must have sounded rebellious and brassy in the extreme to his contemporaries - avante garde, vengeful - unmask the beginnings of the Scherzo in B minor Op. 20. Frederick Niecks heard them as "a shriek of despair - bewildered efforts of a soul shut in by a wall of circumstances through which it strives in vein to break."
Dischords and curiously searching harmonies follow, perhaps a representative of some explication of the helter-skelter to which Chopin had possibly succumbed.
Two distinct and highly dissimilar ideas make up the physicality of this Scherzo, although both are assailed by the same sense of elan and desperation. The first, an ascending scurry of quaver notes - not unlike the filigree motif of the Fantasie Impromptu - and the second, a soothing wide-stretched theme based on an old Polish Christmas carol, Lulajze Jezuniu.
In his NOTES ON CHOPIN, Andre Gide draws parallels between the middle section of the Scherzo in B minor and the accompanying left hand figure of the Nocturne in Db Op. 27 :
"Are you thinking of stressing (but have you noticed?) the weak repeated beats of the third at the top of the accompaniment in the Nocturne in Db op. 27? Have you noticed that they fall exactly on the same off-beats as the double beats of the dominant in the slow part (in the major), likewise so extraordinarily nocturnal and so ecstatically beautiful, of the Scherzo in B minor? Make it be like that crystal drop which the tree-frog (or perhaps the toad) drops into the heart of the purest summer nights. Was Chopin himself aware of this?...in any case, Paderewski was when he played the combination. In this crystalline note, both detached from all the rest and melting into it, is suspended the whole landscape, and in both works, in similar fashion, as if stirred ecstatically, it finally rises up (in the Nocturne by a half-tone, in the Scherzo by a whole-tone), to fall soon afterward, swooning with excess of joy."
PHILLIP WILCHER
